Sunday, April 27, 2008

Pet Shop Angst

Several years later during my sophomore to junior high school summer I worked for about six weeks in the pet shop of my cousins husband.There was a walkway behind the many fish tanks and one afternoon I was told to clean the tanks from the customer side.I was just starting on the Electric Eel tank and I was really afraid of the eel.There was a group of girl scouts in the store standing nearby while I carefully ran the brush against the glass.Unknown to me one of the older guys who worked there had wandered down the back alley of the tanks and as I was cleaning reached out and grabbed my hand.I dropped the brush and the string of curse words at what I thought was the eel grabbing my arm was heard loud and clear by all the girl scouts and as it happened my father who had entered the store at that moment to pick me up.I think I went in for about a week after that and then just quit showing up.I still feel so guilty about it my nieces and friends daughters in fact just random girl scouts have made a windfall off me buying cookies over the years to make up for that eel.

1 comment:

Susan said...

HA! A friend of ours works at New England Aquarium. They noticed that fish were disappearing from the tanks at night and put a video camera in. They discovered the octopus was getting out of its tank, visiting other tanks, eating fish, putting itself back into its own tank and securing the top.