I Hate you Dummy!

I do not like mannequins or anything that is like a mannequin. I don’t even like those puppets with the clanking wooden mouths and I go out of my way to avoid them. I feel like they follow me with their glassy eyes and it’s even worse when a store has these fake humans sitting in a wheel chair. I understand diversity but I get even more creeped out when they begin to take on life issues. Why am I confessing this? Because I recently had a run-in with one and figured the best way to get over this experience was to write about it. Writing is good for the soul, right? We shall see.

My run-in began as a simple task at work. My boss, (for non-existent legal purposes shall now be called Lucy) asked me to gather some items from her office closet. As I open the closet door to reach in, I quickly pulled back and slam the door. There was someone’s head in the closet! She looked at me like I had two heads. Technically I should have been looking at her this way. Why is she hiding a mannequin head in her closet? Where was its body? What is it used for at the college? Now don’t judge because I only glanced at the head. With its wild horse hair and open eyes with boxes blocking where a body should be, it seemed so real, so ‘dead person in the closet’ real. I then proceed to tell her about the head, just in case she didn’t know it was there. I tell Lucy my confession and now we joke about it and have even named her Headless Hattie.

I also confessed to Lucy that this was not my first run-in. When I got hired at the school, one of the first things they told me was that the women’s bathroom was on the second floor. My office is on third. One thing you should know is that the second floor is the nursing school. That was all I was told. Since it was August and school wasn’t in session, my very first trip to the bathroom on the second floor was through a dark hallway. As I’m walking by the classrooms, I notice a large one is set up to look just like hospital rooms sectioned off by thin curtains. They have the beds, machines-it looks like the real deal. I thought it was cool so I walked in a bit then realized there were people under the bed covers! They happen to be the practice mannequins. I back slowly out before one of them decides to pop up and scare me to where I make the floor my bathroom.

All this said, it is now a known fact around work that I do not like these lifeless, glass eyed, strangely posed (often headless and/or disabled) things. I don’t care if they get a laugh from it because I laugh too. You have to laugh at these things, but one day when these plastics follow them with their eyes or walk up out of that wheel chair, I will be laughing the hardest because I warned them.