D-bag of the Day

At work, one of the things that my coworkers and I have invented to deal with the stresses and frustrations of working in retail is invent an award for the one person who has seemingly gone out of their way to make us have a crappy day. Whether that person is a customer, fellow employee, doner, or some schmuck on the radio, if they turn a good day into a bad day or a bad day into a worse day, they are considered a serious candidate for this award. This unique individual, if chosen, is cemented forever in history as that day's douchebag of the day.

It's the guy who comes in the store 5 minutes before close and buys a set of sofas and a large desk to go along with it. It's the person who takes a slam in the toilet and throws in too much toilet paper, thus clogging it for one of us to fix. It's the couple who brings a trailer load of pure and utter junk that has been rained on to us as a reasonable donation and then puts $1,000 on their tax receipt. I could go on and on.

But today, the d-bag of the day award goes to a person who went especially out of his way to earn this honor, and his name is: Guy-Who-Stole-My-Dog.

Ok, so I don't know his real name. But his name doesn't really matter. Guy-Who-Stole-My-Dog essentially waited until night time to pick up one of our family dogs, Bilco, and apparently take him away to his own house just a few miles down the road. In other words, he stole him. Now, the dog may have wandered off, but he never goes far, and he doesn't resemble a stray at all. He even has a collar. So, GWSMD took Bilco to his own house, put him in his fence, and removed his collar (because of course without his collar we wouldn't able to identify him). At this point, I suppose the man assumed that Bilco was his dog.

But it gets worse. My dad actually had a friend who noticed our dog at this other guy's house, and when he ran into my dad at a gas station, brought it up. They went over to GWSMD's trailer and found Bilco laying on the front porch. It was obvious by the poor dog's looks that he wasn't being fed. His ribs were sticking out more than normal, and his fur didn't look quite as healthy. No one actually came to the door when they knocked, probably because they knew they deserved a beatdown, and so my dad and his friend took Bilco and brought him home.

I guess the moral of the story is, don't mess with a person's dog. I don't know what would make any sane individual see a healthy dog with a collar out somewhere and immediately think he had a right to take it for his own and then not even go as far as to feed it, but it happened. And it makes me mad, because we've had the dog since he was a puppy. I mean, that's the dog that sits beside me every day when I go in out in the front yard to read a book. That's the dog that Stephanie and I ran through a freaking lightning storm to rescue from our dad's shop. It's the same dog that gets scared to death every year when we shoot fireworks on the 4th. And it's the same dog that wouldn't stop jumping on me once, and so I tossed him into our pond. And you're just going to steal him? Douchebag...

But I am glad that Bilco is back. Even if he is a stupid dog, he is our stupid dog. Last night when I was going to bed, I really hoped that I hadn't seen him for the last time. You can imagine how relieved I was when I pulled into the driveway and heard his familiar bark (the same one that wakes me up in the middle of the night because he is barking at a leaf or something).