Okay. You may recall I've touched on this before. But, it's tough to be a female farmer.
I've actually had several gender-related farming issues lately that have left me downright angry. When the maddening stuff happens, I want to launch into some diatribe about how I am a multi-faceted person who ought not be judged merely by my manicured fingernails. I've, after all, used these hands to reach elbow-deep into my birthing goat when she was in distress, and just yesterday used these lovely nails to scrape the lungs out of the inside of the chicken I slaughtered all on my own in the backyard (those lungs are really boogers to get out). And so on. You get the picture.
But, this little incident wasn't maddening; it just made me smile, and I thought I would share.
Because John works full-time out of the house, it makes a lot of sense for me to be the one to run our farm-related errands during the day. This week, that meant a trip to our favorite feed store in Missouri. Now, I've experienced my fair share of poor treatment in places like this, so I decided to "dress for success" this time. (Maybe it's hard to fault the hard-core farmer guy behind the counter for pre-judging me when I saunter up to the counter in my TOMS and ask him to load my little-'ole feed bag into the back of my minivan.) So, this time, I was going to look the part. I donned my work jeans and boots, drove the farm truck, and even tucked my leather work gloves into my back pocket for good measure before I headed into the store.
I bellied up to the counter and asked what today's price was on a bag of non-medicated laying pellets. I knew I'd succeeded in looking the part of the farmer when the salesperson asked me what account to put it on. Ha! We don't even have an account there.
I got my loading ticket from her and headed into the warehouse. This is where the story gets good! There were apparently two warehouse workers on duty. One was a young kid, lounging and snacking on a KitKat. The other seemed to be busily working behind him. I walked in to the warehouse alongside another customer. This other customer was an older guy in muddy boots and a Carhartt jacket. With two customers coming in at once, it seemed both workers were going to have to attend to us, so Mr. KitKat jumped up quickly, cutting off his co-worker, and headed my direction. Inwardly, I was cracking up. I can only imagine what he was thinking: I'll load up this lady's bag of dog food real quick and get right back to my snack. Seriously, you should have seen the look on his face when he looked down at my loading ticket and saw he was about to have to load a half-ton of feed! He did a terrible job of hiding his shock when he looked back up at me. I just smiled. Inwardly, though, I was pulling a Girl 1 and saying "Bam!" complete with the hand-motions.
So, this particular interaction was downright entertaining. I much prefer it to the ones that leave me fuming. ;)