My job has a certain amount of "dead" time. I have to wait for one part to finish before I can do anything else. It gets a little boring. Sometimes I go lean in the doorway and watch people in the alley behind the shopping center. I call them Alley Rats.

Some folks refer to them as the homeless. I don't know that. Maybe hanging around the alley is what they like to do. Some call them the disadvantaged. How would I know? So, I call them Alley Rats. I find them very entertaining.

When it rains here it really rains here. The alley gets flooded. I don't know where the Rats go then. Maybe they stand under a bridge or crawl inside a dumpster. They don't want to get wet and , by chance, wash off any of the dirt.

One guy I think of as Rat Rider comes wheeling down the alley as if someone was chasing him. In his own mind that may have been true. All I know is he hit that flooded spot going full blast. The bike stopped dead in the water but he kept right on going.

He did a triple flip with a twist. He landed on his feet still peddling the bike although he was no longer on the bike. He stomped the water a bit before realizing he wasn't riding. It was sort of doing a little jig. I've seen this a dozen times and he never learns and I never cease being amused.

Another one I call Dumpster Rat roots through the Goodwill dumpster. That part's OK, I do that myself. What he does is climb in it when it's full. He really roots. No halfway measures for this guy.

One time he decided to root through the opposite side. He could have climbed down, went around, climbed back up and then in. That would have used up most of his daily energy ration. He decided to just walk across the top.

What he didn't know was that they had filled the one side with all their loose paper. He took one step, just one step, and sank. It was like watching someone sink in quicksand. All I heard was a squeaky "help!".

I called the cops and they called the fire department and they called the Hazmat team. No one wanted to go in after this one. Finally one of the Hazmat guys said,

"Oh, OK, I'll go in. Heck, I'm suicidal anyways."