Ranny was still fuming from the incident with the horse trailer at the front gate when he went into the office to clock in and get his work assignment. He almost spat in disgust when he saw his name listed with the group who had responsibility for the horse show barn today. He could tell from the style of rig that the blond broad who had cut him off this morning was one of the horse show people - the cowboys drove trucks which looked like they were actually used for work, and they usually had a cow dog in the back, one of those strange-looking little Queensland Heelers with blue eyes and speckled gray or brown coat. Their trailers also looked well-used, and usually came in the white or rust-brown color they'd been painted at the factory, not some custom color painted to match the truck.
So he had to spend his day cleaning up crap around those people. He always found it hard to keep from sneering at them, dressed in their prissy riding clothes. In some of the classes, the men actually rode in black formal suits and little bowler hats, and the women always looked pretty butch to Ranny in their tailored riding jackets, pants with leather insets at the knee, and their tall boots.
He would have much preferred to spend the day down in the lower barns around the cowboys and cattlemen. They always seemed to be relaxed, laughing and joking around, not treating the competitions as matters of life and death the way the horse show people did. He had overheard conversations about $20,000 cutting horses and was in the auction barn when the bidding on a prize-winning range bull was up to $8,000, so he knew that at least some of these people had money, though they sure didn't flaunt it.
Ranny also much preferred the women in that area, too. Of course, he didn't do anything but look, and he had to do that on the sly, because the supervisor had spent an hour one day preaching to them about sexual harassment. It didn't just apply to the female office workers, or the women who were on the maintenance crew, but to the participants or spectators as well. The men were warned that if they were caught standing around staring at some well-built young lady in tight jeans and T-shirt as she stretched and bent doing her chores, they'd be in trouble. He also warned that if there was another incident like the one last spring at the Junior Grand National, involving a peephole in the wall of the women's shower room, they'd all be in trouble. Security hadn't been able to prove that it was one of them who had done it, but they had their suspicions. Not only did they need to ensure that they didn't do anything like that, but they each needed to watch for any incident which looked like it could be construed as sexual harassment and report it immediately. The management of the Cow Palace did not want to find itself involved in a lawsuit involving big money and bad publicity.