Jerks and Dickwads

"Well, animals are not like people, Mrs. Simpson. Some of them act badly because they've had a hard life, or have been mistreated...but, like people, some of them are just jerks."

Today, I was forced to serve a pompous jerk of a customer.

Firstly, let me just say this- I have a lot of respect for the elderly. Really, I do. And yes, calling an elderly person a pompous dickwad really does not sit right with me, but in this case I think I was somewhat justified.

So this man comes up to the counter, and wants to get a personal digital recorder. Fair enough (except I hate digital recorders with a passion. For some reason, that sale category just seems to attract morons and incompetent people who CANNOT READ INSTRUCTIONS. Even when the manual comes in seven different languages.)

Anyway, I try to open the cabinet- but the work cabinets often stick and they're difficult to get open. The old pompous guy stands behind me and says something like, "You shouldn't force it, you're young, you should know better."

Meantime, I'm pushing at the glass door thinking, "What the fuck is he on about?"

(Had this been spoken by my 3IC, it would have probably devolved into an extremely immature conversation about sticking things into slots.)

Then later on, as I'm asking him whether he wants the extended warranty, he says, "You've got to be kidding me about that stupid marketing bullshit."

I said, very politely, that I saw no problems with extended warranties and that I actually do take them out myself. Which is absolutely true- they're brilliant for iPods, and I bought one for my Xbox 360. They are a total waste of money on stuff like small radios and printers, and if you get one on a television that doesn't cover dead pixels you're practically throwing your money away...but they come in handy for other things. The XBox warranty was actually a tactical decision- I figured that if anything went wrong, the replacement might end up being an XBox Elite. Tee hee hee.

Anyway, the old guy's response was something along the lines of, "Well, then you're a gullible idiot for falling for that marketing crap."

This made me a little pissed off.

I take very, VERY badly to people insulting my intelligence. I also take very badly to people who address me in an extremely rude fashion. And I can make my own damn decisions, thank you very much. Especially when it comes to the electronics industry, which I have worked in for the past two years.

Except that I work in the retail part of this industry. And you have to be nice. So I pointed out, POLITELY, that I have a sharper marketing sense than that. What I wanted to say was something along the lines of I'M DOING A FUCKING LAW DEGREE YOU ASSHOLE, D'YOU RECKON I CAN FORM MY OWN BLOODY LINE OF REASONING?!

He also read my name badge and said, not in a particularly polite way, "You don't look like a Daphne."

Which coming from him, sounded fairly perjorative, with possibly racist undertones. In my old branch, I used to have to put up with moronic dialogue like:

"Daphne...is that your real name?"
"Yes."
"No, is it your REAL name?"
"YES." (Are you an idiot, woman?)
"No, but is it the name you were born with?"
"YES. IT'S ON MY BIRTH CERTIFICATE, I'D SAY IT'S MY NAME." (Politely.)
"Because sometimes Chinese people come over and take a different name..."

AAAARGGGGHHH.

Born. Here. In. Australia. Get. Over. It.

Do I SOUND like I'm fresh off the boat? Nooooooo.

Except I bit my tongue and said, "Well...that's the first time anyone's ever said that."

(YOU MORON.)

I don't care what race you are, how old you are, what religion you are...a jerk is still a jerk.

On the other hand, towards the end of my shift, six hours later, a Chinese man came in with his little three year old girl, clinging to his leg. When it was time to leave the counter, I waved down at her. She stopped, then smiled, and waved back. (My heart melted. Right then and there.) But she didn't stop there- after another moment of deliberation, she smiled shyly and blew me a kiss. I blew her a kiss back, in front of the entire waiting queue- because if a gorgeous little child like that can show such affection for a complete stranger, the dickwads and jerks of this world have a lot to learn.

And you know what? I don't have to even think about work for the next week. As of tomorrow, I'm on ANNUAL LEAVE.

No customers for an entire eleven days.

Off to sunny New South Wales, then four glorious days off for sleeping in, coffee-drinking and relaxing.

Current mood? Happy :)

In A Perfect World...

...all guys would have a ten-minute conversation disclosure on the existence of a +1.

(As in...I would not have even thought of jokingly flirting with you if I'd known you had a girlfriend.)

You could've, y'know, mentioned her at least once in the past three months.

That is all.

Ye of Little Faith

I officially finished exams yesterday morning (woot!) so in the afternoon, I hopped into my little car and drove off to visit a friend who lives about ten minutes away. It was the first time I'd ever been to his house, but I checked whereis.com.au before I went and the route didn't exactly look like rocket science.

Twenty minutes after I set out, I called my friend.

"Hello!" said I, brightly.

"You're lost," said he, matter-of-factly.

It wasn't a question. It was a STATEMENT. Somehow, he knew.

I honestly wish that I could have taken umbrage at this...unfortunately, he was absolutely correct.

(I did get slightly lost. But in my defence, I was only 1 1/2 streets away. Let's not even go into how I parked 2 feet from the curb. And couldn't reverse out of the driveway properly.)

I don't know what's wrong with my spatial skills. It's not like I can't read a map- I can do so when I'm stationary, sitting calmly at a table without a steering wheel in front of me, and carefully turning the Melway upside down at each turn.

But when I'm driving? Different story.

I like to blame the Asian-Female-Driver-Gene.

Otherwise, I just have to admit to my own basic incompetence....

SWOTVAC LIMERICKS!!!

AN ODE TO INANIMATE OBJECTS!!!

(It's 2:30 a.m...am feeling the panic starting to build...)


There once was a laptop computer,
Who wanted a fine-lookin' suitor-
And one day she fell
For a slim notebook Dell,
Who had to run Norton to root her.


There once was a hot water bottle,
Whose rubber was starting to mottle
So he found a car dealer
And bought a four-wheeler
And raced off while pumping the throttle.


There once was a pair of pyjamas
Who flew off straight to the Bahamas.
She met on the plane
A singlet from Spain
Who said to her, "Como te llamas?"


(In case you couldn't tell, I'm sitting at the computer hugging a hot water bottle in my pyjamas trying not to think about my Spanish exam.)

love to y'all.

xox

SWOTVAC HAIKU!

I think the multiple coffees I had at work have KICKED IN!!!

An ode to Victorian legislation everywhere!!!

Domestic stapler
Has met unstapleable foe-
Transfer of Land Act.

Forestry Rights Act!
Printing you destroys good trees
This is ironic.

The Sale of Land Act
Is irrelevant to me-
I'll live in a tent.

New laser printer
Sounds like a TARDIS humming
(No sexy doctor.)

The Mysterious Allure of André Rieu

A funny thing happened at work today.

An elderly man came in wanting to swap his faulty DVD player for a better one. "No worries," says I, "Try this LG one if you want to play DVD-R discs."

Elderly customer would like to test out his DVD-Rs (which he has conveniently brought into the store). The LG player was set up next to this massive 50" Samsung LCD in the front window. It's a beast of a screen...and he tested out a burned copy of André Rieu in concert.

Yes. André Rieu.

André Rieu is a concert violinist. I'm not sure how or why he is so popular, but every woman above 65 seems to think he is sex on legs...sex on legs with a fiddle. (I use the word 'fiddle' in the most literal sense.)

As soon as I popped in the disc of André Rieu, every elderly person in a 10m radius GRAVITATED towards the screen like moths to a flame. Flies to a honey pot. Me to a stocktake sale.

And they just stared.

Stared at André Rieu waving as he wandered his way up to the stage. Stared as he flashed his pearly whites and waved once more. Stared as he started to play.

It was really odd, watching all these elderly people standing transfixed in front of the screen.

Especially because André Rieu is just. not. attractive. (dodges barrage of flying handbags and walking canes)

Especially not when his image has been upscaled in a most unflattering way on a large television.

Strange. Very, very strange.

The Magic Pudding

My dad just exploded a pudding in our kitchen.

Literally, it looks like a pudding bomb has gone off in spectacular fashion- our entire stove is coated in brown debris and the roof is charred black above the stove where the pudding blew up.

(This, incidentally, is what happens when you leave a tinned pudding boiling in hot water on a stove at high heat, and you forget all about it and leave it there for two and a half hours.)

Unfortunately or fortunately, I was in the shower at the time of the explosion...in hindsight, maybe this was a good thing, as I didn't really fancy having to explain pudding-related burn lesions on my face at work tomorrow...

At any rate, downstairs now smells entirely like fragrant, albeit charred, brandy pudding. I just stood there and laughed, then finally offered to clean the walls .

(I also took some pictures of this momentous occasion...it's not every day you get an edible re-enactment of Pompeii in your humble household.)

I couldn't get a very good view unfortunately- I had to lean over the bench to snap some shots because the floor was covered in three millimetres of pudding crumbs...

It's all Spanish to me...

I slept in until 1 p.m this afternoon.

Most of this can be attributed to the fact that I've been sleeping at 3 a.m for the past few nights, thanks to that stupid essay. I finished writing it and realised that I'd just written a 1, 500 word babbling exegesis that made absolutely no sense and was completely non-cohesive, and furthermore, I'd just written 1, 500 on a fiction piece about a romance between a gay Russian and a gay Englishman that also MADE NO SENSE.

See what stress does to my brain?

Anyway...my studying habits are shocking. So far, in my second day off, it has been:

Sit at laptop. Type. Wander off for a snack. Sit back down. Stare at screen. Wander off to make instant coffee. Sit down. Type. Get up to check e-mail. Go on Facebook. Check other people's blogs. Get on Facebook chat. Get distracted. Get another snack. Look at the paper...ooh, it's already afternoon. Get back and type. Get on Blogger. Get another snack.

And the vicious cycle continues.

I was wandering through the house at 11:30 p.m the other night, wondering at how little television I watch these days. Which is actually a very good thing. I couldn't remember the last time I had sat down to watch something stupid and mindless without feeling guilt, so I flicked open the Green Guide to see if anything was on at 11:30 p.m besides Lateline.

And lo and behold, there was a random Spanish film called Buena Vida Delivery on SBS.

I figured that I might as well grab a beanbag and watch it, since my voluntary exposure to foreign language films has thus far consisted of Godzilla and Gamera marathons on SBS as a kid, and you really don't pick up much of the language at all when all you hear are terrified Japanese people screaming "GOD-ZILLA!" and "GA-ME-RA!" while running for their lives from a giant radioactive fire-breathing turtle.

So I sat down to watch this Spanish 'comedy', hoping that this would broaden my horizons.

It's not uncommon to automatically lump the term 'foreign language film' with 'arthouse'. They're not synonymous at all, but in this case, I had the same reaction to the end of the film as I would to an arthouse one:

"What the f**k was that?"

I just sat there as the credits rolled at 1 a.m in my little bunny pyjamas feeling rather un-cultured and wondering whether or not I had gotten the point of that film.

Most people would have viewed it as a black comedy cleverly satirising the state of the Argentinian economy in that particular period of history, but I saw it as a depressing exploitation of other people with not one blackly humourous moment in it.

I understood, on a purely objective level, what they were trying to say. I appreciated the cinematography, the cleverness of the repeated dialogue...but I just didn't connect with it. It was like when I read Chekhov for the first time, and I just sat there blankly wondering why it was left open and struggling with the lack of a finite conclusion.

(But then again, maybe some things are better left open-ended...like that awful epilogue from the seventh Harry Potter book which read like a snippet from a 15-year old girl's fanfiction.)

I got to read Chekhov again this year. In fact, I cannot actually escape him- I always end up studying The Lady With the Dog in some form. This was the third time I'd done it, and admittedly, it has grown on me the more I've read it. True to life, there are no definitive conclusions (except, as the old saying goes, death and taxes) and having grown up watching happy Disney films where everyone lived happily ever after, it was a bit of wake-up call.

(At this point, I must cite Pocahontas as breaking the trend. They had a slew of Disney movies on TV earlier this year, and I disconcerted my entire family by singing along somewhat loudly to Aladdin, so much so that when I left the room to do some work, my Dad called me on the intercom to tell me that they'd reached the flying carpet Whole New World part so I could flounce around the room doing my best Lea Salonga impression...anyway, the fact that Pocahontas gave up John Smith almost made me weep with frustration. Hot blonde English chappy who can sing like Mel Gibson? What is wrong with you, woman?!)

Back to whatever original point I was waffling on about...

Realism, and surrealism, are basically reflections of reality, although surrealism likes to pick out the more grotesque aspects or twist them in some way. Surrealism unsettles me, but it makes me think. Realist material is difficult, it's slow-going, but at the end it always reveals something to you...like chewing very slowly on a hard caramel.

(I felt this way while reading Love in the Time of Cholera and 100 Years of Solitude...but in the end, seeing the entire book as a whole, you realise what a beautiful, albeit pathetic, love story it is.)

As you can see from this fractured post, my brain is somewhat muddled at the moment. Expect a more cohesive post in the not-too-distant future, and stay away from foreign movies....

Rub It in, Why Dontcha?

There is always a little ad box on side of my Facebook page. They rotate the ads regularly, so I often I see ads for hair extension or Nandos or whatever they decide to throw on, but the most common one keeps trying to get me to join whatever dating site they have set up.
They are actually bluntly cruel about it- there's always a '20 AND STILL SINGLE?' and a picture of an extremely frightening male that I probably would happily stay single NOT to date. Like this one time there was this a picture of this guy with tattoos who looked kind of Chopper Read-ish.

Anyway, I was on Facebook just then and the stupid ad was there...

...but it had JENSEN ACKLES.

SERIOUSLY.

Don't believe me?

Here's a screenshot grab:



See, I thought they were just posting photos of random everyday people. But I guess they're just scrounging the net blindly collecting random male images.
If I could meet Jensen Ackles by joining SinglesNet....hell, I'm there.

Unfortunately, I doubt that the gorgeous picture of Jensen is actually representative of their true clientele. More's the pity.

Ah, well. I still carry him around in my handbag as the background for my phone.

Obsessive fangurl? Not moi!

No Milk Today

It's 11:52 p.m.

I have a 2, 500 word assignment due tomorrow that I am currently utterly f**ked for.

I have already established that I am going to be pulling an all-nighter, because unfortunately, exegeses do not write themselves. Thank you to the incredibly intelligent and considerate person who decided to make my 35% essay due in the week AFTER the final Week 13, and the other assessor who figured they'd make another one due IN THE MIDDLE OF THE EXAM PERIOD.

(Really. That was awfully considerate. Perhaps I can repay your kindness by gouging your eyes out with a spoon.)

Anyway, my laptop screen was playing up so I reset the entire computer and wandered off to the kitchen to get supplies for this horrendous essay-writing extravaganza. I wanted soup. So I went to the fridge...

...and there was no milk.

Normally, the lack of liquid lactose-based products in the fridge would not send me into a homicidal rage. However, it is now 11:58 p.m, my local Safeway obviously does not hire 24-hour-party-people so I cannot sneak out and get milk (at any rate, I'm wearing pyjamas and an oversized Oxford hoodie and that's just not a great look at any time of the day or night) and I have also just realised that THERE IS NO BREAD.

At least I have water.

But the urge to smash something is rising.

Unfortunately I was working all weekend, as is my wont, so I was unable to detect this LACK OF BARE BASICS until now.

I.

Want.

Milk.

NOW.

I'm beginning to see why everyone thinks we're the 'instant gratification' generation. But obviously these generational sociologists have never been trapped in the house without milk.

DAMN ESSAY. DAMN LACK OF MILK. DAMN LACK OF SOUP.

*sobs and pounds keyboard*

To make matters worse, I am also out of instant coffee sachets. Which means that if I want coffee, it will be, sadly, sans milk.

AAAAAAAAARGGGGGGHHHHHH.

I think that if a Scientologist approached me with an e-meter right now, my emotional levels would blow it up.

I promise that the amount of hysterical pre-exam posts will drop down after June 24th. Until then, I am going to be doing DAILY MILK CHECKS OF THE REFRIGERATOR to ensure that terrible incidents like this never happen again.