Pssst!!!…. Your Balls Are Showing.

It was a Saturday and as is typical for a Saturday, it was very busy in the shop. I don’t usually work on Saturdays as the store owner was always in on those days and instead, I ran Sundays, but this particular day they were short a couple of guys so they asked me to come in. I obliged because I actually really liked the Saturday shift and I loved how busy and hectic the store got on those days. Especially because I was a manager and didn’t have to clean up dog shit anymore and there were no orders to be done on weekends and so I got to spend the day with the customers.

People might be surprised to hear that very strange things happen in pet stores a lot and I have witnessed my fair share of disturbing events. To be honest, I have also been directly involved in my fair share of disturbing events such as the time I got bit by a fish and screamed and ran causing pandemonium to break out in the aquarium section.

But it was on this particular Saturday that I participated in something so strange that it has been forever embedded in my memory. I truly must be a magnet for bizarre occurrences because there is no shortage of them logged away in my brain.

On the day in question, two 20-something men came into the store at what was the busiest it had gotten that day. The employees snickered the minute they saw them as they were regular customers and came in a couple of times a week to buy hamster supplies.

And, yes…. they were gay lovers.

I wish I were making this up as it seems so stereotypical, but I’m not, and I love gay guys so much that I adored these men and usually bitched at the staff for laughing at them. In fairness, they didn’t ever laugh because the men were gay lovers. They laughed because they always came into the store wearing short shorts and purchasing hamster supplies which automatically made everyone assume that they were sticking these animals up their buttholes.

Saturday, they came in sporting the short shorts and tank tops and made a beeline for the hamster section to purchase some tunnels and snacks for their pets and they were crouched down talking to one another, minding their own business and not really interacting with anyone. I don’t know if you all know what I mean when I say that they wore “short-shorts” but I figure it’s pretty self explanatory. Imagine Officer Dangle on Reno 911:

Yeeeeaaaah…… THOSE kind of short shorts.

So there they are poking around looking at the hamster supplies and minding their own business when I noticed that their business was not minding us.

Pretty soon after I noticed this, the owner of the store noticed this and so did just about everyone else in the place. I’m not really sure what kind of person people think I am or why I tend to be the one delegated to handle these sorts of issues, but I was. The owner pulled me aside and told me to go and say something to the gentleman and to alert him that the bat was out of the cave, so to speak.

I looked at the owner as if he were crazy and he sort of nodded and pushed me towards the men and so I walked up to them, crouched down next to them and said,

“Hey, buddy. This is a family place and you’re having a bit of an issue there. Here’s the key to the bathroom… why-ncha go on and fix yourself up.”

He looked at me and I looked at him.

“I’m not following.”, he said.

Okaaaaay. Let’s try this another way.

“The bat is out of the cave, man.”

Nothing. It simply did not register.

“Uh… the animals have escaped from the zoo.” I told him.

Blank.

I did this for maybe five minutes or so and no matter what polite analogy I tried, the guys just looked at me. I could tell that they were beginning to think I had lost my ever loving mind and so I decided that the best way to get the job done was to just spit it out.

“Dude…. Your balls are showing. They’re, like, hanging right out the bottom of your shorts. And not just a little bit, like… totally hanging out the bottom of your shorts. Someone could step on them.”

And this is one of the many reason I love gay people so much because the heterosexual person would have been mortified and probably would have hauled ass, never to show their face there again. But not this guy. He stood up, laughed, and said, “Well, why didn’t you just say so, honey!” as he, right there in the middle of the store, proceeded to tuck his balls back into the shorts and adjust himself.

This took some maneuvering as they were not small balls, exactly. In fact, he obviously took time to wax them and he’s quite lucky that no one tried to purchase them thinking they were hairless cats.

Yes. Cats. Them was some big ol‘ balls.

Once the situation was dealt with, the owner walked up to me and asked me what the hell I said to them. I told him that I tried to be discreet and that it didn’t work and so I just flat out told him that his big, honkin‘ balls were hanging out.

This, my friends, is when I discovered that it’s not always best to be tactful and that people often times truly appreciate a more blunt approach.

And on this sunny, Saturday afternoon, the108 was born.