If You Can’t Lick ‘Em, Clean ‘Em!

Working in the deli, you inevitably run into children. There are the cutesy ones who beg to be the one to place the order and then forget halfway into the second item, the shy ones you can coax a smile out of with a free sample, the ones learning about animals in school who’ll make all sorts of barnyard sounds with you while gleefully pointing out different meats in the case, and then there are the Glass Bandits.

Glass Bandits are the little buggers who paw the glass with sticky fingers, fog it up to draw on (personally, I liked some of those ones), wipe boogers on the glass and, more often than you might think, lick the glass.

I both despised and delighted in Glass Bandits. The ones whose parents were too far up their own backsides to care were the worst; their kids would often be emboldened and muss up the glass far more. After they finally left, most of these encounters would require a thorough cleaning of the entire front display windows. And this is where I took delight.

Sometimes, these bold variants of Glass Bandits came back to back. And rarer an occasion still, sometimes there would be time to clean before the next arrived. During those times, I got to enjoy watching the second offender go nuts. Then, when they hit overdrive and went in for the lick, they had two options to choose from:

1. Admit they had just done something stupid and now required water and a paper towel to remove glass cleaner and sanitiser from their mouth.
2. Pull a thoroughly disgusted face but power on so as to not show weakness, licking as much glass and chemicals as they could before calling it a victory.

The latter are my favourites; I respect the determination. I don’t envy the inevitable fart bubbles later, though.

Disclaimer: the cleaning chemicals used were food grade and 100% safe — just extremely ill-advised — to consume in tiny amounts. No children were harmed in this story, nor in any other instances of this occurring… that I know of.