…and I swear to Buddha, Jehova or whomever else you want to swear to that I have a sign on my forehead that reads, “Only whack jobs come to my cash register line, puhleeeeeeze.” Today I’m ringing away and some guy comes up while on his cell phone.

“Okay, now I’m going to do something strange,” he says to me. And he hands me the phone.

Me, of course, being the happy-go-lucky little employee that I am says, “Hello?”

“Who is this?”

“Oh, I work at [Name]. Apparently your husband wants you to order your coffees from me.” And I’m guessing this is the case because he’s a fucking moron. As it turns out, I was not far from the truth. What I was soon to realize was that I was dealing with not one, but two, morons.

She proceeded to describe these two drinks. Her first description around totally confused me. And I’m not the fucking moron in this equation. So she says, “Okay, let me try this again because I know I can do this better.”

My response? “Okay.”

But here’s what I really wanted to say:

“Okay, you fucking idiot. What are you talking about. I’m on a cell phone at the register and the people in line behind your husband are ready to mutiny and shoot me in the bleeding head. Can you please just get this done already?”

All the while this is going on, the person who actually has to make these two drinks and the supervisor are there laughing at me because, although I’m being sweet and charming on the phone, my body language and facial expressions are belying my true feelings…the ones that are telling my brain to “kill the idiot in front of you and move the line along.”

The order turned out to be two of the largest cold drinks we offer, with a combination of hot and cold items and — between the two drinks — exactly 28 pumps of syrup. Are you fucking kidding me? Twenty-eight pumps of syrup. Oh, and then, I forgot to mention that at the end of the order she says, “Can you do me a favor?”

By now, I’m in such a state that I say, “Oh, sure.”

Here’s what I really wanted to say:

“Okay, sister, haven’t I done you enough favors already today? I’m on your husband’s cell phone taking your drink order in the middle of a one-hundred-degree-day afternoon rush. Are you kidding me?”

But I didn’t say that. So, then, she says, “Can you ask him to bring me home seven packages of Equal?”

I mean, why bother at that point? Twenty-eight pumps of syrup isn’t enough? Why go to Equal now? Just order thirty-five fucking pumps of syrup instead. WTF?

The only thing we can hope for is that these two go into a diabetic coma before they order this crap from us again. But I’m never that lucky.

I am far from done with Millipore party stories, but I simply have to interject something here. This is once again from the annals of what I say to customers versus what I really want to say. Again, I’m not going to reveal my employer’s trade name. No siree. Not today anyway, but I have to tell you that there are a lot of irritating customers who frequent my store (as well as a lot of extremely wonderful customers, I might add). Here’s what pisses me off.

One from column A

A lot of these people come off like they are so much better than anyone else. I’m sure this is proportionally related to the amount of gold jewelry they wear…at least in their minds. If they are so educated, rich and smart, why can’t they say a simple word like ARTISAN. Nope. They can’t. To many of these people, it’s ARTESIAN bread. Like what? Does the bread come from a fucking well? Maybe there is indeed a bread that is baked in an underground oven and comes flying up out of the ground under pressure. Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe it’s because the people from snootyville get to add a syllable and sound even smarter than others. Or maybe it’s because they don’t understand phonics. You know, PHONICS. Read the fucking label. Sound the word out. So, let’s go through this again:

ARTESIAN: Refers to a well in which water is under pressure and comes to the surface naturally.

ARTISAN: A worker who practices a trade or handicraft OR a product made by a craftsman in small quantities.

NOT EVEN FUCKING CLOSE, FOLKS. It isn’t Artesian Bread. It’s Artisan Bread. ARTISAN. There. Done with that rant.

And now, a word from the land of cluelessness

There are also people who come through the store who are simply clueless, in a fucking fog, out of touch, and disinterested in knowing what the hell they are talking about. Let’s take the issue of TRANSGENDERED vs. TRANSVESTITE. Yes, we have a transgendered person in the store. SHE is a wonderful person. One of our customers, however, refers to her as a transvestite. Okay, let’s understand the difference here:

TRANSVESTITE: A person, and especially a male, who adopts the dress and often the behavior typical of the opposite sex especially for purposes of emotional or sexual gratification.

TRANSGENDERED: A person who expresses or identifies with a gender that differs from the one which corresponds to the person’s sex at birth. These people aren’t necessarily transvestites, folks. Generally speaking, they are going through some medical process to change their gender identity.

Okay, now we have established that differentiation. The subject of his question was even more disturbing, since we have also hired a female employee of Middle Eastern origin who happens to wear the traditional head garb. He wanted to know how the “Muslim person” was getting along with the “transvestite.” You know, like we had some juicy stuff to report. Like we would? He asked me while I was at the register. I just looked at him stupefied, completely taken aback however momentarily. Then, I broke my silence and said, “You know, [NAME], we don’t have those problems in this store. We all get along and watch each other’s backs. We don’t need those problems coming in from the outside.” Later on, our manager spoke to him and straightened him out. ‘Oh, but he’s just irritant number one on this topic. There’s a woman who’s even worse.

Okay, so, she’s pregnant. But her rudeness goes beyond simple hormonal explanations. She’s just a rude bitch, plain and simple. I swear to whomever is up there that she’s going to give birth to the spawn of Satan. No question about it. The thing is going to be born with little horns and a nasty little attitude. This wonderment of nature comes in one day, walks up to the register to order, and says, “Okay, so there was a guy there on the bar yesterday with make-up on. Was he kidding?”

Employee A responded, “Oh, you mean (NAME)? No, actually she’s not kidding.”

Now, this woman is not very old. So, she doesn’t have that excuse either. She must have spent the majority of her existence under a fucking rock if she doesn’t get it. Either way, she was just out of line. Her attitude was despicable. That said, I thought Employee A was very polite to her. This is what I would have wanted to say had she come up to my cash register:

“Get a fucking clue, honey. What makes you think you deserve an explanation to begin with? Just order your freakin’ coffee and get the hell out of our store. The only thing we owe you is coffee. We don’t owe you a peep show into our fucking personal lives. End of story. Oh, and by the way, I hope your baby is a hermaphrodite. Have a nice day, you Godforsaken douce bag!”

And since I’m sure she wouldn’t have a clue what a hermaphrodite is:

HERMAPHRODITE: An animal or person having both male and female reproductive organs.

Now that I think of it, that’s a pretty harsh thing to wish on the unsuspecting spawn. Just the fact that he or she will have to grow up with the mother from hell is probably curse enough. I’m trying to envision her in say, oh, thirty years when she’s in menopause. Hide the handguns and the nukes.

A few weeks later, she’s back at my register again. We have a floater as a routine who helps move the line along with the second person ringing (that would be me). She’s a confused bitch on top of everything else. Some really nice customer places his order and she turns to him and says, “I don’t know what you are doing, but you just ordered before me.” I held my tongue and proceeded to serve her highness, but here’s what I wanted to say:

“No dickwad. He’s just fine. You simply don’t “get” the line movement. The physics are waaaay too far advanced for your tiny little pea brain. And by the way, have I told you what a fucking caustic personality you have today and every day you waltz into this store to bring a little ray of sunshine to us all?”

Okay. I’m pretty much done with this rant. I feel much better. Goodnight.

Nothing is safe (or sacred) anymore. Two days ago, the blueberry scone became a weapon. I work at Starbucks and, to be sure, we have some great customers. But this is retail, and assholes abound. This week’s asshole was special.

I was working the bar and talking to a customer when this old bat came up to the register. She ordered a couple of drinks, and somehow indicated that she wanted to use a personal check. The shift supervisor calmly and completely explained that Starbucks no longer takes personal checks. Well, it really set this very unpleasantly entitled witch off. I was watching her body language out of the corner of my eye.

She was shaking her head through the entire transaction. She stamped her feet! Now, I can handle kids doing that shit. But this lady was no kid. She was just a mental midget. And she was not done yet!

Afterwards, she got a table and sat down. A few minutes later, she decided to take this thing to another level. She walked up to the shift supervisor and told him that the cashier had not charged her for the blueberry scone, and she had  no intention of paying for it. Did she think he cared? He was great. He looked her in the eye and just said, “Ok.” As the Brits say, that really got her dander up.  She couldn’t get to him, but he clearly got to her. That’s when the funniest part of the incident happened.

I didn’t see the whole of this, but I saw enough of it and was filled in by others. The shift supervisor went back to work and was engrossed helping someone out when this lady walked up to the bar and whipped a bag at him. Inside was a half-eaten scone. Had she stuck around long enough to see that he was completely oblivious to the whole event and that we were all laughing, she’d probably have blown the place up.

You’ve got to love the priviledged. It’s all about them. Isn’t it?

The other night we had a friend from my old corporate servitude days over for dinner. I’ve already confessed to having a Facebook account and I just randomly began typing names in one day. Bella’s name popped up and I was equally as excited to find that she lives one town over in Newburyport. To put it mildly, we had a blast. We shared stories about where we worked together that neither of us told each other about in the past.

The other aspect that was great is that our career paths since our corporate days aren’t that different. I was almost embarrassed to tell her I’ve been shucking coffee to the entitled masses for the last four years until I found out she was a cashier at Whole Foods for six years. Life is great, isn’t it? Where else but in America can you be the absolute best at what you do and end up kissing retail butt? It’s the new American dream…sort of like a reverse mortgage in drag.  Today she’s designing  jewelry and taking her stuff on the road to shows, and I’m trying to make money writing.

Anyway, we had a person in common when we worked together that I can best call certifiable. In the corporate battle of the wills between Bella and someone I’ll call Mr. Anal, Bella got the short end of the stick.  He was the problem. Not her. However, even I didn’t know how whacked he was until I had gotten fired and started using him as a freelance designer for my business.

To call this guy anal retentive would be mild. We’d miss every freakin’ deadline because he would bounce around between ideas for so long. Then, when you got the material from him, there were the inherent errors. Typos. Bad line breaks. Missing punctuation. You name it. Things that should never have happened. Sloppy. He was just plain sloppy and it drove me fucking crazy because it invariably created more delays in delivering the product. It was then that I began to realize what Bella had been up against.

The long and short of it is that this guy was obsessed with colonics and his internal piping. He was (and I hear he still is) a whack job. His wife, however, Mrs. Shrew, really wore the pants in his family. She pushed this guy around like he was a pile of trash and she was a broom. Since my Beth always calls me Freud, let me exercise my pathetically appointed psychological knowledge: Mr. Anal was obsessed with his internal piping because he felt like a pile of shit most of the time. I mean, you could almost feel like he was the worst person on the planet…until you spent more than an hour with he and Mrs. Shrew together. There would be no taming of this shrew.

Anyway, it came to the point where my business was falling apart and, believe me, I owed a lot of money. He was one of the people I owed. I mean, when I say I lost everything, I’m talking a homeless type of everything. I’m not ready to talk about that today, so don’t hold your breath. The long and short of it is, in spite of this fact, he dogged me to the point where he paid to have me arrested. You know, aside from torturing someone who did something unintentionally, there was no purpose to that. But then again, I annoyed the crazy person.

Standard coward’s disclaimer: With the exception of Beth (my wife) and myself, none of the names here are real. I’m not going to do that unless people feel comfortable enough to be named. And, as you will be able to deduce, some given names mean something while others do not. There’s no real reason for using the name Bella. It was just top of mind. There is, however, a reason for using Mr. Anal and Mrs. Shrew.