Celebrities and Retirement Acres

Dear readers, I have not always worked for a utility. In my youth, with my freshly minted degree from RAU, I worked at an airport. Yes. I was a counter girl.

I used to work at the private terminal of the Retirement Acres International Airport (1A0) . It’s the part of the airport where people with their own planes go; not the part that most people go to with all the security and gates and luggage claims and odd assortment of chain restaurants or vending machines with a frankly weird selection of expensive makeup. We do not have a gift shop. Our clients were a smaller crowd of people who did not believe in paying airport rates to park, and didn’t hold with the notion of loading and unloading their own baggage (generally. Some of our clients owned small planes. And some of our clients didn’t own planes at all, but had the ability to charter one.).

I digress.

At the time (and while I encourage you to use IMDB, I do not encourage you to do the math. I was then and am now 36.), Robert Redford was filming The Last Castle in Nashville, so we knew he was flying in on a pretty regular basis. Our sleuthing among those who worked at the main terminal proved he was not flying commercial. There was another private terminal on the field. Being as interested in meeting Robert Redford as we were, we had all agreed that if one of us observed him deplaning at our terminal, we would immediately make up an excuse for someone from the rival terminal to come bask in our reflected glory.

We had this arrangement with a number of celebrity names.

Being a more than amateur star gazer, every time someone went to get lunch or dinner or catering or whatever, I’d say “bring me back Robert Redford!” Nobody ever did, and after a while, it began to feel personal.

So one extremely hectic and busy morning where my coworker had again failed to show up for their shift, I was doing appropriately 15 things at once when this guy walked up to the counter. He was fairly nondescript, , which will not stop me from describing him here. He was not very tall, had a serious case of bed head with a lot of gray hair, and was wearing a t-shirt, a gray sweatshirt, and gray sweatpants. If you had passed him in the grocery store, your gaze would have slid right past him to the display of tomatoes that looked perfect for sandwiches.

“May I have this paper?” he asked. Which set him apart from the clients we usually had, every one of whom would have picked it up, said nothing, and left me with the fallout.

We often had customers request newspapers other than the Retirement Acres Daily Picayune. Even more often, we had customers think that if they were seen picking up these more exotic papers and scuttling off to their plane with them, we would charge them money. (We would not have.). Many was the morning I had to claw back the one copy of the New York Times we received so the client who demanded but did not offer to pay for it would have it when they arrived three hours late to the flight they said must be wheels up by 6 am. Whoa betide the counter girl who accidentally gave it away, which was a thing we all did because the supervisor was very big on “I gave away their paper once and suffered the awful circumstances that left me fearing for my minimum wage job, but rather than tell anyone else that, you should suffer the same wrath as I,”

(This was in a far less supportive time.)

“Sure,” I said, as I answered the phone and filled out a rental car agreement for a very angry client who had not budgeted this time into their day. (“Hertz has all my information on file, I will not be delayed a moment longer by you!” Sir, you will, because this isn’t a Hertz counter so if you want a car, I need your license—not that of someone who will not be driving—and a credit card or so help me I will give this sedan away.) “Enjoy.”

One of my line crew ran in the door. In general, the guy who manages the gas tanker trucks running is a sign that you should also either run or quickly make your peace with the deity of your choosing.

It was so busy that morning, I resigned my fate to the deity.

“WELL?!” He said expectantly.

“I do not have time for ‘well’ right now, David,” I said, my teeth clenched firmly around the cap of the ink pen I was using to write the contract. (Speaking without moving your mouth is like speaking a second language but much more threatening.) “Speak your mind or I will disembowel you with this pen then finish writing the rest of this contract with it.”

The customer who had been arguing that the world of rental cars revolved around his whims and particulars and who kept arguing that he should be allowed to take any car he so pleased without having to deal with counter girl peasantry such as I immediately stopped shouting and even took two steps back out of my personal space. I mean, it was a pen that had been used by a legion of people that day alone, and he had not realized that many counter girls were practitioners in the art of disembowelment. His pilot, who had been trying to make him see reason and just hand over the necessary documents, crossed himself.

“THAT WAS ROBERT REDFORD!!” David shouted, which brought silence to the lobby.

In my defense: He was way shorter and also way older than I expected.

May your days be full of ripe tomatoes and recognizable movie stars, my friends. And be nice to your local counter girls; you never know when one has suffered the crushing disappointment of not recognizing her celebrity crush and is looking to wear someone’s entrails as a scarf.