By mid-June, I had been home from Champaign for weeks, and my mother’s gentle prodding to find a job (“Jon, let’s get moving on this …”) had gradually progressed to threats on my life.

So I scheduled an interview with the local humane society, where I figured I could one-up the competition with my ability to form coherent sentences.

I was right.

“You’re actually one of the first people to fully complete the application,” the manager explained after letting me know. I had been hired. The assistant manager offered some additional insight to guide me through the challenging months ahead:

“I’m so f—ing hung over.”

Clearly, I thought to myself, this was going to be no ordinary job.

At a place this unique, however, you can bet that I learned some important lessons. Here are just a few that I picked up during my encounters with the notorious freak shows of my hometown:

Scenario One: It was only my second day at work, and I was being forced to stay an hour past closing time. A wealthy, middle-aged woman had come in to pick up her two German shepherds. The moron had let her dogs run around her neighborhood all day, which resulted in one of our employees having to go out on call to bring them back to our holding kennels.

“I want my dogs!” she barked, making her way to the kennels.

We tried to explain to this ranting diva that in order to leave with her dogs, we would have to give them both a microchip injection. A microchip is administered to a dog through a harmless shot. Should that dog ever end up at our facility again, an employee could scan the dog and immediately identify its owner.

“No! You’re not going to implant my dogs with your cyber technology!”

“It’s state law, ma’am,” one of our employees patiently replied.

“I don’t care,” she shot back. “These are my dogs, and they told me they don’t want a shot.”

Lesson learned: Uppity members of the bourgeoisie may be more akin to Dr. Doolittle than previously thought.

Scenario Two: When people want to adopt an animal from our shelter, we have them fill out a standard application. One day I was going through an application with an enormous bald man. I almost was finished answering his questions when he peered down at me and asked, “Can you make sure no one else adopts this dog?”

Unfortunately, there were already a few applications on this particular dog and if everything went well with one of the previous applicants, this guy would be out of luck.

“I’ll add your application right away,” I replied, dancing around the question.

So imagine my surprise when the aforementioned ogre returns the next day with a leash, demanding that we give him the dog. He told the employee at the counter that I said he was the only applicant. When he learned that the dog was probably going to be adopted by someone else, he left in a fit of rage.

A few days later, I returned to work to find out that this man was going to “kick my —.” He called the manager to inform her that she had one of two options: either fire me immediately or he’d “take care of me” personally. What?! What did I do? All I knew was that he was coming by that day – and he had the ability to break my face into pieces with a single backhand.

That was all I needed to know. The entire day, I planned for his arrival. What was my best plan of escape? I could stun him with a quick blow to the head – my pooper scooper had the potential to inflict serious harm – or maybe a swift kick to the testicles would do the trick. Perhaps it was time to put my high school cross country skills to use; I could run and scream all the way back to my house.

Thankfully, he never showed up. But he did call back to inform us that we broke his 9-year-old son’s heart.

Lessons learned: Six dollars per hour to deal with scary white trash just isn’t adequate. Oh, and 9-year-old children suck.

Jon Monteith is a sophomore in LAS. His column appears Tuesdays. He can be reached at [email protected]