22 September 2022
“How do you remain so cheerful,” ask many a customer at the QuikkStopp®, “with all these jerks giving you a hard time?”
“It’s because I know that life is harsh, people are stupid, work sucks, and that making things worse doesn’t make them any better.”
Like many of my quick quips on the job, that usually elicits a laugh.
Humor is truth.
One of the things that make my job bearable is the opportunity to interact with customers and to get them to laugh at important truths (and to get them to stop blaming US for constantly rising prices.) When customers are ready to settle up, and they haul out their bank cards I will often advise them to: “Check in with our cybernetic overlords and give them a chance to gossip about your credit,” or “Report to our robot rulers and entreat their mercies,” or “Deliver your number up unto the Beast and let Leviathan look you over.” Most will then slide or insert their card, tickle the keypad, and otherwise not overtly react to my riff. Others will laugh, and many will comment something on the order of “Isn’t that the fuckin’ truth,” or “You got that right!”
Like Tom Joad, the Angry Fan can appear anywhere and anytime. Whenever individualist rhetoric, proper English, precise speech, colorful metaphors, or accurate descriptions are employed, he is there to piss on your picnic.
It was near the end of my shift a couple of months back, and a customer finished perusing our aisles and brought his purchase to my till. I added it all up and bagged it, then quoted our price. He whipped out his card and I reflexively went into my routine. I don’t remember specifically which schtick I used, but his reaction was odd.
“Do you always talk like that?” he asked, though maybe not in so many words. I wasn’t taking notes.
“Speaking English and telling the truth? I hope so.”
Again, paraphrasing from imperfect memory, “I don’t need to hear about any goddam machine masters (or robot rulers?). I saw my buddies killed in combat, and for you to just sit there…” And he trailed off. There were other details that I forget, but that was his apparent gist. As he seemed to channel Sean Hannity or Keith Olberman or some other sage pontificator in his vigorous denunciation, he stopped. Perhaps he realized that he would actually have had no opportunity to see me sitting. I get very little sit-down time on this job and have zero guaranteed uninterrupted breaks. Maybe he was embarrassed, which I doubt; entitled children are rarely embarrassed by their misbehavior, they just don’t like getting caught. And it sounded like he’d caught himself, so he wandered off leaving me to puzzle over what had set him off, or what made him think that citing his combat experience would sway such a rigid peacenik as I. Eventually, like most other ephemeral nuisances, I put him out of my head.
Last night he returned. I guess. I didn’t recognize him from our previous encounter, but I’m retarded, so I don’t remember people’s faces, voices, names, or proclivities until after I’ve dealt with them three or four times. Or it may have been an equally cranky ex-GI with similar issues. At any rate, not being forewarned to tiptoe around his delicate little feelings, I simply continued the same routine I’d been practicing all night. So I added up his stuff, quoted the price, and upon seeing his card, encouraged him to “Go ahead and slide it, plug it in, or tap it, whatever it takes to activate your account, and give the computers a moment to discuss your credit with their electric friends.”
“Stop that!” he said.
“I would so love to,” I answered.
“I served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I know they’re always watching us! I don’t need you to remind me! What’s your problem?”
I love questions more than statements at times like these, because questions (if taken one at a time rather than multiply as a rhetorical assault) at least offer some direction. I attempted to answer him by way of listing my problems. I started: “Caries and presbyopia…” and before I could get to pointing out that former arch nemeses (aka ex-wives), among others, also thought I had Asperger’s, he interrupted. Loudly.
“Fuhfuh fuhfuhfuhfuhfuh!” he said. (If that’s how he heard “caries and presbyopia” then perhaps he also misheard “report to our robot rulers” as “I will fuck your mother until she’s dead and then I’ll murder your children.” Or something. I don’t understand elective anger.
But he wasn’t finished with me yet, or so he thought. He began to escalate when the assistant manager of the shop, with whom I was working last night, suddenly appeared at my shoulder and said, “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave the store.” As AssMan led him out he continued loudly spewing his anger and distress to the world and I attended to the next customer in line, quivering and shaking inside from the encounter, but not affecting my customary good humor externally. AssMan returned to the shop and asked me if I was okeh, and I assured him that I was. “I can’t tell what set him off,” said AssMan. “Maybe PTSD.”
“You’re very generous,” I said. “GIs tend to be less sympathetic than civilians are about such things. We’re supposed to be trained better.”
“Roger that!” said a customer who’d witnessed the ugly episode. “In fact,” she continued, “I’m just the person you wanted on the scene in case that asshole went sideways on us. I was an MP in Iraq, and I had to deal with a lot of jerks like that.”
AssMan nodded, and said, “Yeah, well, we just can’t have that kind of noise in the shop. I’m sorry if you feel I interrupted.”
“Nah, I get it,” I answered. “I think maybe I’ve got a higher tolerance for noise than you have. I’ve raised three children, and sometimes you just have to let baby cry it out. But thanks anyway. He was a putz.”
“You need to take a break or something?”
“Uh… yeah. It’s about time I took a stab at lunch anyway.” I closed up my till and fetched my poke out of the cooler. After managing to get a few bites down I gave up on the attempt and returned to my station. “I’m not always as calm as I appear on the outside,” I told AssMan. “My guts are still too clenched up for me to eat anything right now, so I might as well get back to work.” After a while, and several customers later, I said, “You know, not everybody who uses a crutch is a pathetic loser. But if that crutch is ‘I’m a vet’ and is being brandished as a license to be a jerk, he almost certainly is.”
update 221019: AssMan reports that the Angry Fan returned to our shop a few days ago and apologized, describing his own behavior as buffoonish. As AssMan was only one of several of us exposed to that passionate tirade, he thought that the one apology was insufficient. I pointed out that it was a good start and a wholesome sign. I like to be optimistic about people, and I am particularly pleased when such hopes are vindicated, even if only in part.
thoughts on 230312: It’s possible that none of this is true. It could just be some deep subconscious allegory for the smoldering resentment one feels for other angry fans. While “the Angry Fan” may have been intended as a generic construct to embody a variety of irrational and over-wrought emotional responses to innocuous “offenses” (kneeling for the anthem, spitting on the sidewalk, disrespecting the troops, not being as a-scared of the latest popular terror as we should) I’m beginning lately to discern the talents of the eagerly aggrieved and their understanding that it is at all times always about them.
230611 — Are Angry Fans still “feelin’ (bomp bomp) [mad] all over (bomp bomp) [mad] all over, now that [I’m gah-ah-ah, ah-ahne]?”