My cell phone’s camera has broken, so I call my cell phone provider to discuss getting a replacement since I have insurance on it. We are currently in month six of a certain health crisis, and a lot of call centers have their employees working from home, as am I, so I totally understand when I call them that there might be some background noise not heard in a regular office setting.

The first person I speak to is polite and helpful but has at least one dog in the background that barks every few minutes. This doesn’t fazse me at all; my coworkers also have rowdy dogs that speak up during online meetings. What does catch me off guard is the rooster who decides to chime in halfway through the call. He’s quite insistent, and at times, he’s louder than the nice lady I’m trying to have a conversation with, but she doesn’t acknowledge it, so neither do I, as long as we can understand each other and finish our discussion. 

She has to hand me off to another department and puts me on hold, and there’s a blissful minute or two of a popular song that has no animal accompaniment, before the other department’s representative picks up to help complete my transaction.

All goes well until another rooster starts chiming in from the second rep’s location. No dogs or any other animals this time — just the rooster. Again, this lady, clearly a different person, doesn’t acknowledge it, and we finish our part of the discussion.

The end result is that I have to exchange my phone at my local cell phone provider store. Hopefully, they’re not keeping any livestock in the background.

A new client is registering her cat. We have to ask basic details like breed, age, etc.

Me: “…and what colour is he?”

Client: “Ooh, I don’t know what colour you’d call it. He looks just like a lion!”

Me: “So shall I put ginger?”

Client: “No, no, he’s black and grey!”

The aquarium I volunteer at will occasionally bring live animals out on the floor for people to touch and learn about. This lovely bit of almost-dialogue happens while I am wearing/holding my favorite snake, a four-and-a-half-foot, almost forty-pound Dumeril’s Boa named Mav.

Dude: “Whoa! Snake! I love snakes!”

Me: “Want to pet him? He’s a D—”

Dude: “She’s a reticulated python, yeah?”

He begins petting the snake backward, against the grain of his scales. This tends to have the same effect as petting a cat backward.

Me: “No, he is a B—”

Dude: “Baby Burmese python, yeah. The blue eyes are cool. Really rare.”

He is still petting backward.

Me: “Um, no. They just look blue because he’s going to shed soon, and he’s actually an adult B—”

Dude: “Ball python, right! Right, ri—”

Me: “HE. IS. A. BOA.”

The dude just blinks.

Me: “He’s a Dumeril’s Boa. They live in Madagascar.”

Dude: “Wait, like, a boaconstrictor?”

He says, “Boa constrictor,” quickly, as one word.

Me: “It’s just ‘boa’. The ‘constrictor’ part is redundant. All boas, pythons, and most other non-venomous snakes are constri—”

Dude: *Yelling* “HEY, [FRIEND], COME CHECK OUT THIS BOACONSTRICTOR!”

If Mav had hands, even HE would have facepalmed.

Related:
This Situation Will Just Snake Along

There is this book and comic store I love to go to. They are pretty relaxed and have a good choice of fantasy books.

Once, I enter the store and I see a customer has brought a very big dog which looks like a husky-shepherd mix. It is a beautiful dog with the colors of a husky but the markings of a German shepherd.

I’m a bit wary of big dogs, but this one sits perfectly docile at the heel of its owner and doesn’t even look at anybody else, so I soon forget about the dog and go on browsing the books to find something new to read.

Soon, I find something that sounds interesting and start reading the first few pages. The book is extremely good, and soon, I’m completely absorbed in it when something gently touches my elbow.

Out of reflex — I’m a cat owner and my cat pushes me for attention whenever I read — I drop my hand from the book. I feel fur under my fingertips and start petting without stopping my lecture.

It takes me at least six pages to remember that I’m not home sitting on my bed reading and petting my cat, and that there is, in fact, no way I’m petting anything small right now, since I’m still standing, my arm is not stretched in any form, and my lower arm is resting on more fur.

It’s the dog. It has sneaked away from its owner, stretched its head forward, and is now enjoying the scratch from my nicely manicured nails with drooping ears and half-closed eyes. And now that it stands right next to me, I see that it’s huge! Its head easily reaches my elbow although it sits!

I twitch a little and lift my hand, since I’m absolutely not used to dogs, and I earn a chuckle from the employees who have watched the whole scene evolve. 

Their laughter activates the owner of the dog, who was just as immersed in his book as I was in mine. He calls his dog to heel, and with one more sad look, it leaves. The owner then apologises to me, which I accept.

Later, I chat with the employees. They tell me the dog and its owner are regulars. The dog is perfectly trained, but whenever its owner is distracted, it does everything it can to sneak itself some cuddles with unsuspecting customers too immersed in books and has become quite good at finding the most susceptible targets!

A coworker of mine is cleaning the reptile habitats in the store. He notices one of the chameleons is starting to get a little big for its habitat, but there’s not much we can do to make it more comfortable as it grows.

Instead, he decides to give it a chance to stretch its legs a little, taking it out of the terrarium and letting it climb around his shirt as he goes about his duties.

I’m on the register and don’t usually get to interact with the animals, so I ask if I can hold it for a while. He brings it over and I let it climb onto my hand.

As I’m letting it crawl along my arms and hands, a woman comes up to check out. I manage to get a hand free to ring her items up, and the chameleon starts climbing across my chest.

I make a comment to my coworker about how the chameleon’s enjoying being able to explore a little, and the woman laughs.

Customer: “He’s thinking, ‘Look at these mountains’!”

We all started laughing. I tried to keep from shaking too much, as the chameleon was, indeed, on my breasts.

The chameleon continued to crawl all over me, and at one point, I needed to transfer it from one hand to the other again, but this time it decides it was perfectly comfortable half on one hand, half on the other.

It had a pretty good grip on both hands, and I didn’t want to risk pulling away too hard, lest I injure it, so I wound up sitting for a minute with no hands, and we all started laughing again.

Eventually, it decided which hand it wanted to be on, and I passed it back to my coworker so I could finish ringing the woman up. Definitely one of the most memorable encounters I’ve had at this job.

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The Epic Saga Of Sir Reginald Von Rufflebuttum