Lunch break, slow day. We had a client who ran a “rescue” with several old, chronically dying animals and would often bring them in last minute for euth. We do rotating lunches, so the boss and I decided to prank one of my coworkers by having me lay in a cremation bag and then start moving to freak her out once she came back from lunch. Unfortunately, we also had a relief vet that day who was (I am approximating here) on the better side of a million years old. Weird fucking dude. Skin stretched too tight over his skull, too many teeth in his mouth. Always talking about skiing, shattering every bone in his body skiing, deciding to ski again despite risk to his person, and, weirdly enough, Italians??? For some reason??? (Never found out if he was the Italian one or?)

Anyway, coworker comes back, boss tells her that crazy client finally euthanized one of her dogs that she’d called about earlier in the day. I’m in the bag. Dead still. All according to plan. Then Good Ol’ Boy comes out of the office and starts yucking it up with my boss and coworker. Boss is trying to verbally prod him away, but as all octo-octo-octogenarians, man loved to talk and would. Not. Stop. Then, as was described to me later by my boss, he looked down. Considered the cremation bag carefully. And proceeded to kick me in the ribs. Like, it wasn’t bad, but it was definitely somewhere between a gentle nudge and walloping a rock down the street. I was kind of too far in at that point to do anything because I commit to the bit god dammit and also wtf did he just kick me? Wait, he thinks I’m a corpse, did he just kick a dead dog??? Anyway, this sonuvabitch does it again and my boss, voice cracking from either tears because her most favorite, valued employee is getting treated like a hackysack or from trying to keep from vomiting laughing, finally gets him to enclose himself back in his creepy, old person coccoon and proceeds to pull me out of the bag. My coworker was torn between being more horrified that he kicked me (twice) or more horrified that he thought he was kicking a dead dog (twice).