With the near constant rain we’ve had this year the lawn grew really fast and I couldn’t keep up. After a particularlly long stretch of rain I had to trim to height with a trimmer prior to moweing. I was exhausted after doing this for 3 hours and all I had left was the long easement between the sidewalk and the street. I was approached by an African guy with a mower offering to finish the job for $4 so he could get gas to refill his mower. I paid up front and he left his mower in my driveway and returned an hour later. He fiddled with it for an hour unable to get it to start then he pulled my manual mower out and attempted to use it. He then came to the door offered me his drivers license and told me he would be back tomorrow to finish it. I took done his info and said ok.

MIDNIGHT I wake to a mower. I look out the window and shake my head at his stupidity and think he’ll be done soon.

TWO and half HOURS LATER he is still mowing! He did the whole yard? I just mowed it that afternoon! (I now use a gas mower. It only takes me 40 minutes. I still don’t know what took him so long)

The next morning I see he mowed my vegtable and butterfly gardens.
Steaming mad I rehearse in my head all day the rant I plan to give him when he shows up that evening inevitably asking for more money. It went something along the lines of… I should have called the police for the disturbance last night and he should pay me for the damages to my gardens and I would magnamiously offer to pay for a 2nd gallon of gas to send him on his way.

HE did come back, begging for $30 or his friend who he borrowed the mower from would kill him. I gave him the rehearsed rant as I walked him to the property line, handed him the $4 and walked back into the house and locked the door. whew!

I’ve been wanting to tell that story for weeks.

I found out later that they lived down the street, and had started a ‘frog-farm’ in their bedroom without telling their mum. They were under orders to dispose of their entire stock within a day or it would be flushed.

My final exam for was today, and i was finished early. I left the school by myself, and as i was crossing the parking lot, this lady came up to me with a camera and a notebook. She said she was with the local small town newspaper, and wanted to ask me what i was going to do this somewhere. So i (in probably my only moment i have ever had where i just had to say it) told her i was going to hire myself out as a male prostitute in the city. I told her i had the best corner already marked out. She asked me why, and i told her that i needed a summer job and my friend had done it last summer, and that when school started, could could shove a pop bottle in his… behind. Here is where she got kinda nervous, and asked if i was going to hire myself out to males or females. I told her that i wasn’t sure, but their are alot of rich males who like a change every once in awhile…

One guy had the balls to do this at 9 in the morning though. My parents are at work and little sibling at school and I’m only 4 hours into sleeping. I was far from happy, especially because he had the audacity to ring the doorbell until someone answered. The dogs were still groggy, therefore not as terrifying as usual. I threw on some clothes real quick and I believe the look on my face was enough to scare him away.

late one night, i was woken by my dog barking. i could then hear a light knocking. i went to the front door – nothing. but the knocking (and the barking) continued. turns out the knocking was coming from the door that led to the rest of the house. i walk over and said “yes”. it was the boarder and he wanted to come in and ask me something. i told him it was the middle of the night and i was not letting him in. he insisted he really needed to ask me something. i told him to just ask through the door. finally he said, and i quote word for cheesy word “do you want to make love to me”?

after i recovered from the shock and the inner laughter i said “are you f*#$en kidding me?”. he said no, and that he really wanted to “make love to me”. after some begging, he got the hint and whispered “please don’t tell barb (the owner of the house”. of course i told her. she was a single woman living with this creep. she tried to evict him, but he wouldn’t go. finally she had to call the police to have him removed!

I asked him if he and the company he represented thought I was so incredibly stupid that I didn’t know who I was paying each quarter for my electricity, and kept yelling til he figured it’d be easier to just leave.

Another tale from the Mormon side of things.. one morning, about 9am, one of the bastards knocked on my door, waking me up. I opened the door and just stared at him while he went through his pitch, then kept staring for about three minutes while he trailed off and asked me if I could hear him, assuming I might have been deaf. All of a sudden, I snarled and leapt at my solid iron grate door like a crazy man, making him leap out of his skin and high-tail it away.

The second time I had a Mormon knock, I spent five minutes asking him where he got my details, who asked him to come here and saying things like “I’m sorry – you’ve got the wrong house. Are you sure you’re not looking for number 19? THey might have ordered what you’re selling. But I don’t recall ordering any religion.. I called for pizza last night, but never asked for any cults.” I’d then pretend to call someone on my mobile phone and ask ‘friends’ “Hey, James.. did you order any Mormons? Yeah, there’s one here now. You don’t sign up for any? Look, mate, I’m sorry but no one here signed up to join your cult” while the poor guy got flustered trying to explain that it was unsolicited.

One memorable occasion, I was about eleven, and I answered the door one night. There was a woman there who was absolutely SLOSHED. She could barely stand up and her speech was horribly slurred. She asked for someone who either lived somewhere else or hadn’t lived in that house in seven years, since we’d bought it seven years before.

But my favorite story involves the Mormon missionaries when I was about ten. For those of you unfamiliar with them, they are always quite nicely dressed, in a suit and tie, and with a briefcase of tracts. However, my parents had been studying Mormonism for several years at this point. My dad had even begun working on a book about the flaws in Mormonism. So, both my parents were extremely capable in rebutting their arguments and asking them about things their religion believed that even they were fairly clueless about (like the view, as held by the LDS church until a couple decades ago, that black people were the children of Satan). My mom was the one talking to them, and at one point, she turned her back for just a second, and they both turned and ran. Quite literally, ran. The ties flew back over their shoulders and flapped as they ran down our driveway. Funniest sight I’d ever seen in my life; they were there all of three minutes. Needless to say, my sisters and I were very excited whenever we saw the Mormon missionaries in our neighborhood, because we wanted to see it happen again, but apparently they had us down as a hostile house, because they never came back. Shame…

They first sent a rep out walking door-to-door through the neighborhood pitching their bundling service (phone, DSL, cable TV).

I sent the guy away and he returned a couple of days later.

I sent him away again, and he returned – this time with a second guy – this time asking for my wife (apparently the lady of the house is an easier sell?)

We closed the door on them in mid-pitch, and then cancelled our AT&T long-distance service.

For being in the communication business, they sure seem to have a hard time hearing.