An incident

I said in my last post that I had to work mandatory OT last Saturday.  What I didn't mention is that I was bitten by a dog that day.

It turned out to not be a serious bite; my pants protected me from the worst of it so all I got was a really scary-looking bruise.  But it was a totally unprovoked bite.  I didn't even know the dog was there.  It must have come out of a yard across the street and it bit me from behind (lower right leg) without ever barking, growling, or anything.

The thing was, I completely lost it.  When I was a kid, people learned to be very wary of my rage.  I'm not boasting, in fact I'm kind of ashamed of it, but I had no control when I lost my temper.  On certain occasions, it actually saved me because I was a frequent target for bullies when I was a kid, and although I would try and try to just get away from being beaten up on, eventually I would snap.  After enough people saw what happened when this snap occurred, they stopped picking on me.  It was a lot like when Ralphie lost it in A Christmas Story, except that there was usually more bleeding involved.  It also saved me once when I was attacked by one of our sow hogs when I was a teenager.  That was a bad bite that ripped a big hole in my pants and took a hunk of skin with it.  I stopped the attack by braining the sow with a cedar fence post, which briefly knocked it senseless so I was able to get out of the pen.  That was a bad one, though.  After the adrenaline wore off and the pain kicked in, I discovered I had dislocated my shoulder from swinging the fence post.

And that's what happened with this dog, the only difference being that I wasn't able to catch it after it realized it had made a huge mistake.  Then the idiot customer came out and told me to calm down.  This made me about a thousand times madder, and I let fly a string of profanity that I am not proud of.

So I had to file a dog bite report and today I went and asked my supervisor if there had been a complaint about me from the customer.  He said, "Why, did you beat the sh*t out of it?"  "I tried," I said, "but I couldn't catch it."  Then I told him about the customer telling me to calm down and he gave me a look that seemed to say, "You gotta be sh*tt*n' me!"  I went on to tell him something like, "I cussed her out pretty hard."  "Her dog was loose in the street," he said, "I don't care what you told her."

So that makes me feel better.  From now on I guess I'll drive that one block instead of walking it.