Just Another Day at the Office

I had a rather exciting thing happen to me at work the other day. For those of you who don't know, I work at a staffing agency. There are a lot of administrative tasks to the job (payroll, billing for drug screens, etc.), as well as your basic answering the phone type of stuff. The main purpose of my job, however, is to provide employees for companies in need. If someone calls and says, "Hey I need 10 people to do factory work starting next week," I find 10 people to start work for them next week. Mostly I work with light industrial and secretarial employees, but we got all sorts of jobs. I also help individuals to find work this way. That's the best part of my job. I love when I tell someone that they can start working somewhere, and they are just so grateful. It's awesome to be able to help people almost every day.

There are some not so fun things about this job, as there are with any other. Sometimes, people get really mad if we don't have any job openings at the time they come in to the office. I've been yelled at on the phone and in person, which is never fun. I also get all sorts of interesting people walking in to the office. I'd like to relate something that happened last Friday.

I'm at work and it's about 10 in the morning. I am the only employee in my office. There are other businesses located in the building, so I'm not the only one in the building, just in my office. A man comes up to the door and peeks in the blinds (which are open) and looks around the whole office. This is weird, but I've met some pretty unusual people here. He then comes in and asks me to see if I can pull up his file so he can update his address. I cannot find him in the system anywhere and am wondering if he has ever worked for us before. He's trying to talk to me about something else, but I can't understand him. It wasn't making sense and he was just mumbling something about Unemployment or something. Anyway, he finally just tells me that he wanted to change his address from 123 Easy Street (that's obviously not the address he gave... I changed it). He no longer lives there because he is a "street walker". So I say, " Okay, Thanks for letting us know!" or something like that and he leaves.

We have an "Open/Closed" sign door that hangs on the outside of the door. It just the basic one that you can flip to Closed. Right after the guy walks out, he starts playing with that. He takes it off of its hook and is turning it back and forth. I was trying not to pay too much attention, but at the same time, was keeping my eye on him. He then puts the sign back on the door, opens the door just enough to poke his head in, and then says "By the way, I'm a dangerous, wanted criminal" and leaves. I am not one to scare easily. I feel pretty safe here, but this was scary. It felt like a direct threat to me. I locked the door right after he left and called Kris, who told me he thought I should call the police. So, I did. Which was weird because I've never done it before. They sent an officer over who got the guy's description and looked around to see if he was still in the area.

What a day! Kris came over and stayed in the office with me for the rest of the day. He didn't have class, so he just worked on his homework in one of the extra rooms in the office here. It made me feel safer after that guy had come in that morning. I haven't seen the guy since then, thankfully.