(To best enjoy this experience, I recommend listening to
“Without Me” by Eminem while you read this. Well, not the whole song. Mainly
just the first part. Over and over and over.)
In summation “20 million other white rappers bloggers
emerge/ but no matter how many fish in the sea/ it’d be so empty without me”
Yep. I’m back and better than ever.
Wait, did I say “better”? I meant “bitter.”
Since the last time we’ve talked (i.e. I talk; you listen
and learn), I’ve started a new job. The where is not important. All you need to
know is I get paid to eat delicious food (YAY!) and, more importantly, cheese
all day (DOUBLE YAY!), boss other people around (QUADRUPLE YAY!*), and deal
with rich customers (BOOOOO).
Me, yesterday
(* yes, I am aware I skipped from “double” to “quadruple.”
No, I don’t care. If you want to read something mathematically accurate, try
this … nerd)
*Pause for dramatic effect*
Yes, you read that right. I, Katherine Anne Buhler,aka Lady
Voldemort, am working somewhere that requires me to interact with people all.
day. long.
Don’t get me wrong, most of the customers fall somewhere on
the scale from “totally awesome/can’t wait to see again” to “100% forgettable/
if they were a color; they would be beige.” But I wouldn’t be the KB Thinks For
You that we all know and love if I didn’t look at the 5% of people who
absolutely suck and talk only about them.
So buckle in, grab a drink, and get ready for a much overdue
rant I’m going to title “You’re Rich and
You’re the Reason I Cry at Night*”
Me, Yesterday
* I haven’t cried in years; in fact, last year I had the
doctors remove my tear ducts to make more room for me to fill with rage
1.
People that need someone to buy them a wallet
Before I started working retail, I
naively thought that people carried their money around in some sort of
organized manner. Whether it be a wallet or a purse or even just a pocket with
some nicely folded bills in it; I figured most people had a rhyme and a reason
for money storage. Unfortunately, I’ve come to realize that a large portion of
the adult population stores their money like a toddler stores candy wrappers. I
can’t tell you the number of grown ass adults that
a)
carry 3,200 credit cards all bound together with
a single rubber band that they then have to dig through for 5 minutes to find
the card they want (potential identity thieves carrying around a bevy of stolen
cards?)
b)
take the nice, flat bills given back to them by
retail workers or the bank, crumple them up like I crumple up the dreams of
children and then shove them into their pockets. Then, when they go to pay,
they have a softball sized wad of bills that takes 5 minutes to find the right
amount of and then immediately fucks up any bit of feng shui I had going on the
cash drawers
c)
carry purses the size of small children* filled
to the brim with random bits of bull shit specifically calibrated to make me
lose my mind when they have to empty it out on the counter to find that last
nickel they desperately needed (side note: if you have prenatal vitamins, you
probably don’t also need tampons)
TBH, I'm more concerned with that old cell phone this person has been lugging around
* I never actually seen a small child in the wild but from what I’ve seen
on TV, the sizing is accurate
d)
special mention to the gentleman who wears a
coin purse around his neck and consistently plucks out chest hairs that he
leaves on the counter
2. People who are almost too rich to function*
* shout out to Mean
Girls
The place I
work tends to cater to a more affluent crowd than say… Walmart. I don’t have
anything against rich people (other than the fact that I’m not one of them) but
there are quite a few who clearly don’t live on the same planet as I do. At
least once a week I have people coming in buying two dollars worth of items
with a $100 bill. I also have people ringing up multi-hundred dollar orders and
paying for them with multiple crisp $100s. I’ve also had someone tell me (on
more than one occasion) “Sorry, I don’t have anything smaller than a hundred”
to which I respond “I know, I just saw you digging through about 3,000 dollars
worth of hundred dollar bills. Sorry about your struggles.”
Being from what, in the olden
days, would be referred to as the “peasant class” and is now more commonly
called “broke ass,” I have quite a few questions for these people: Where do you
get 100 bills? Every ATM I use only gives out $20’s. Are there special ATMs for
rich people only? Did you get them from the bank? If so, why didn’t you ask for
your money in smaller denominations that don’t scream “ROB ME PLZ!” every time
you open your wallet? Are you a drug dealer?
3.
People who expect perfection
A large part of my job involves
weighing and measuring things (which I actually really enjoy because I have been
weighing, measuring, and finding almost everyone I’ve met lacking for years).
However, some people expect absolute perfection on their weights, which isn’t
always possible; no matter how perfect you (meaning “I”) might be.
Typically, when I cut cheese (my
middle school self is judging your middle school self for giggling at that),
I’ll be within .1 of a pound on either end or anywhere from a couple cents to a
couple dollars at the most. Not a huge deal considering I’m trying to maneuver
a huge ass knife around a huge ass wedge of hard ass cheese, right? Wrong. Some
people will actually ask you to go back and get the quarter pound of cheese
they wanted or, at least, a little closer to it. That’s cool. I totally expect
humans to be able to perfectly eyeball weights and get upset with their
incompetence when they can’t do it. I can’t wait until we get machines that can
replace people at everything.
You brought this on yourself, America
Whew. Let’s all take a couple of deep breaths. I’ve laid a
lot on you right now and I could definitely keep going but I think, for all of
our sanities, I’ll leave you here tonight after a shared vision quest.
Close your eyes and imagine this scenario with me (don’t
actually close your eyes, idiot; you won’t be able to read this!).
You’re working at a popular deli/cheese shop on a Saturday,
a notoriously busy day in retail. You’re slaving away trying get people through
the line as quickly as possible even though the ever growing line looks like
the wait to get into a Bieber concert.
After helping a nice old lady who just wanted to get a half
pound of two year old cheddar (aka the most basic cheese alive
#gmasabasicbitch), a gentleman in a suit comes to the counter with a list the
size of Chris Brown’s felony charges. Instead of asking why he’s wearing a suit
on a weekend or, better yet, turning around when you see that his list is
probably going to take you 45 minutes to get through, you paste a smile on your
face so fake that the purse dealers on Canal St are cringing and say “what can
I help you with today?”
After taking him on a veritable tour of every single cheese
in the 250+ cheese case (complete with tastes of each), he says “and lastly,
can I get a pound of the Parmigiano Reggiano?” making Giada De Laurentiis roll
in her grave* with the mispronunciation.
HOW did you just pronounce that?
*apparently she’s not dead. Just her marriage (ba dum cha!)
You breathe a sigh of relief and grab the chunk of parm that
weighs just about as much as you (no joke, full wheels weigh 90lbs) and use
every last remaining amount of strength in your body to cut off a hunk. You
walk to the scale, glad to be done with this when *GASP* you cut him a 1.23 lb
chunk instead!
You timidly walk over and say “I’m a little bit over, is
that alright with you?”
The suit-clad gentleman silently seethes with rage for a
couple of seconds before removing his tie, fashioning it into a noose, and saying
in a voice as cold as ice “Actually, I’d like it a little closer to a pound
please.”
While you want to respond, “Yes of course, sir. No problem,
I’ll just glue this extra little bit back on with my blood, sweat, and tears,”
you simply choke back the scream, get it as close as you can, and hand the
cheese over to him along with a sizable chunk of your dignity.
All until he gets to the register, pulls out wadded up ball
of hundreds and you rage black out.
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