The Pacer

He worked in the dairy department at my last job. He was tall, lanky and wacky. His name was Todd Hunter. I remember meeting him in the lunch room on my first shift while he was pacing up and down the floor like a madman. He muttered to himself. I didn't know what he was doing exactly but the other employees just seemed to block him out like he wasn't their.

​He would walk one direction, stop and then say, "Okay, okay." He would then turn around in the other direction and take a couple quick steps, stop and say, "Okay, Todd let's just keep it together. Come on." He would repeat the process for the duration of his break.

Every time he was in the breakroom he did the same thing which drove everyone crazy which it made it hard to relax and enjoy your food. The managers knew he was doing it and would say nothing to him. Either he had some type of medical condition that they knew about or they just didn't care. It was one of those situations where you just accepted one's behavior for what it was and didn't say anything.

One time I was working near him in the backroom and he dropped a pallet of milk  which flooded the floor in the white liquid. He started freaking out and damaging the rest of the unbroken cartons by throwing them against the wall and watching them explode. He started pounding his head with the palm of his fist and then began to hammer it against the wall until he split his forehead open. The whole time he screamed, "I'm so stupid, I'm so stupid."

The managers again said nothing to him as they watched from a distance. Then about a week later he was transferred out of the dairy onto the salesfloor. Apparently he had locked the door to the dairy cooler and had blacked out for some reason, possibly a seizure. When they found him he was on the floor passed out, white as a ghost with blood coming out of his ear. They took him away in an ambulance and ran tests on him at the hospital and they found nothing wrong with the physical structure of his brain. 

Out on the salesfloor at random times he would burst out into a screaming fit over a minor mistake he had made. He had also developed the strange habit of walking up to people and asking them if they were stressed and if he could help them with their emotional problems. I thought this to be rather strange. 

Management took him off the salesfloor and had him in the back room where he was caught with a felt pen drawing penises on the boxes. The manager told him to stop doing that immediately and he screamed into the face of the manager, "Why can't you just act normal?"