over the past 4 years i have developed an extreme pleasure in catching people off guard and surprising them. i guess this may have come about out of competition with bill pruitt, our pastor, who loves to scare people also, or it could have developed because of repressed fears of being seen in public with my dad wearing his “unjax: the toilet paper people” t-shirt – this deserves a blog entry in and of itself. for whatever reason, this pleasure has grown from a mere smile at the thought of scaring people to full blown laughter at publicly terrorizing entire stores.
unfortunately, this desire to induce fear backfired on me saturday. yesterday, i was at best buy looking for a firewire cable to hook up to my computer the new sony dcr-hc40 camcorder i got for the youth ministry. while, i was in there it began to pour. i mean really pour. i had to hang out in best buy a little longer just waiting for the rain to calm down. while, i was waiting i looked across the store and saw lauren joyner, one of the former youth interns at parkview.
i went over to greet her but suddenly realized she couldn’t see me. i decided to have some fun. i could see the top of her head from behind a dvd rack as she walked parallel on the other side of the rack. i waited for her to reach the end and then i jumped out and screamed “argh!”. bang! i surprise her good. dvd’s went flying everywhere and she screamed. unfortunately, it turned out that this wasn’t actually lauren joyner. in fact, it wasn’t anybody that i actually knew. i had just scared a complete stranger. so i responded in the only manner that i knew to … i screamed.
i began pleading with this stranger saying, “i’m sorry, i thought you were someone else. i wasn’t trying to scare you. i thought you were lauren.” since, she didn’t know who lauren was this statement didn’t calm her down as much as i had hoped it would. the whole time i was explaining the situation to this terrified young lady two best buy workers were walking towards us. thankfully, i explained the everything to her before the employees completely freaked out – actually i not sure they would have known what to do if there had been a “real” situation, all they did was ask “is everything okay?”
i would like to say that i’ve learned my lesson but i have to confess that i felt some pride at scaring a completely random person and i now feel like i owe lauren a good scare for not being at best buy in the first place.