Not a good day

I hate sales on so many levels. I hate that my income is dependent on other people. I hate knocking on peoples' doors and dealing with their barking, growling, jumping dogs. I hate putting megamiles on my truck (which just went over 36K miles and is now officially out of warranty). And I hate assholes. Today I met the meanest person yet in all my nine months of working for Air Photo.

Yesterday I went to a house. Nice enough house. Nothing spectacular. The usual McMansion. The wife answered the door. Real nice lady. Thought the picture cost too much but liked it. Wouldn't make a decision without her husband seeing it. So she told me that I could catch him home when I see the horse trailer in the driveway.

So today I drive past and there's the horse trailer in the driveway just like she said. So I go up to the door....ring the bell....no answer....knock.....no answer. So I give up. I go back to the car and just as I'm about to leave a man pulls into the driveway. I step out of my truck (which is parked in the street) and ask him if he is the homeowner. No, he says, but he's sure that someone is home. So he tells me to follow him to the door and he doesn't get anyone either. Nice enough guy. We chitchat. He admires the picture. He makes a quick phone call and a minute later the man's son comes around the side of the house. I show him the picture and both men agree that it's very nice.

So far so good.

The son takes the picture to the back door of the house to show it to his dad (the real homeowner) and I wait outside next to the garage.

After about a minute or two I hear a THWACK and I turn around to see a man striding toward me with a very menacing look on his face. As I start to walk toward him, he starts yelling at me telling me to get out, take my picture with me and never come back. He accuses me of trying to rip him off because he can get the same thing off Google Earth (--not even close--) and he wanted to know why I was there when his wife told me to leave (--a lie--). I started to tell him that his wife had told me to come back but he wouldn't let me finish. He kept telling me to get the hell away from his house so I told him as nicely as I could that I couldn't leave without the picture. He gestured to my truck and that's when I figured out that the thwack that I'd heard was him slamming the picture on the roof of my truck. As I walked back to my truck, he kept telling me to get the hell out and to never come back again (--like it was my mission in life--).

Amazingly enough, the curtain rods were still holding the picture together. As hard as he'd slammed it on the roof, I'm surprised they didn't come flying out letting the whole thing fall apart. The frame didn't appear to be damaged so that was good. It didn't seem to have hurt my truck either since he'd slammed it onto the glass of the moon roof.

Well, that was pretty frightening and it shook me up pretty badly. But I managed to maintain my composure and calmly sat in front of his house until I was done with my paperwork and done framing up the next picture. THEN I drove off.

This man beats the one in Texas (who cursed me out at his door) in the hostility department.

Alan said I should go online and put this man's address on every thing that will generate junk mail so his mailbox gets stuffed with it every day. David took it one step further and said I should go to a porn site and sign him up to receive gay sex video catalogs.

That cheered me up a little.