Five. FIVE, Goddamn it! I got a bag of
Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans, and for some reason there had to be FIVE flavored
SARDINE. Why me, God?
In addition to that, I must add that I steadfastly ate the entire bag, without spitting any of them out, though I also acquired one black pepper, two horseradish, and one grass. Not to mention those five fucking SARDINES. As far as I could tell I did not end up sampling the booger flavor. Lucky me. (Can't say I'm looking forward to the day when the packs begin to include dirt flavor, mustard flavor, and vomit flavor.)
I just found out that on Wednesday a customer at my bookstore complained about me. Well, complained about me and my co-worker Angie, actually. She didn't complain TO either of us; she went right to the manager. Our offense? Rudeness? No. Inability to properly help? No. Ahh, you see, our horrid offense was dressing like witches. On Halloween.
My manager Mary said that if she had been the one to take the complaint, she would have told the customer we really were witches. (I'm a plain old Pagan, and I do practice witchcraft, while Angie is Wiccan.) If only the customer hadn't complained to Matthew. ::sigh::
So, this bothers me. More than it should. It bothers me because this customer is so offended at the thought of us pretending to be witches that she probably even further abhors the thought of people who don't consider "witch" an insult or a term of evil. And I hate it when I come into contact with reminders that there really are people who at the mention of my religion immediately associate it with Satan and evil. I shouldn't be surprised, I'm really not surprised honestly, but sometimes I just get a little too comfortable with myself and I forget for a while that because of my beliefs I definitely am a minority, one with a stigma attached to it that won't detach for a very long time.
So, people are jerks. I know this, and I live with it every day. But it still shocks me, because so much of the inconsideration and rudeness I deal with every day are along lines that I would never think about crossing. Take for instance the woman whom I helped in the kids' section for upwards of five minutes. I pointed out several books that would fit her needs, and she rewarded me by removing these books from their places, reading them, messing up one of their covers, and throwing all of them horizontally on top of a nicely-organized vertical arrangement of books. Also take for instance the woman who asked me to put on a movie for her child so she could study without having to be "bothered" keeping her out of mischief; the strategy didn't work, and the kid screwed up a large display of Clifford merchandise. (The mother left the mess without attempting to get her daughter to clean it up, and as a bonus she left her coffee cup and lipstick-smeared napkin on the table, along with the books she'd taken from other sections to use to aid her studies as if we were running a library.) These rude people are the types that don't buy anything anyway, so I wonder why they think they're entitled to acting the way they do? I've come to the conclusion that they don't think they're entitled. They don't think at all. I wonder when people stopped caring--in some old Mom & Pop store, the customers and the store owners knew each other, so neither would make trouble for each other. Now, since the customers don't personally know the person that is going to clean up their messes, they seem to feel justified in leaving them. Even before I worked in retail, I was a damn considerate customer. Grr.
Rant ends.