The whistling stopped. Well, it had to; my breath was literally taken away for a second. My throat constricted. My pupils dilated. The tissue paper ripped in my hands. Then, slowly, I looked up and stared at him in what can only be described as abject and utter disgust. I was horrified. I felt sullied. How dare this man, with his weird grey-black mullet and his big jowly face, how dare he just walk into MY SHOP and call ME by the name that I use when I’m not at work? He might as well have pissed on my children. It was an offensive blasphemy. I threw his wine bottle into his bag, snatched and swiped his credit card, then thrust it in his face with a look that plainly said ‘Get the hell out, your kind is not welcome here’. I swear if he’d spent more than two point five seconds picking up his bags and shuffling off, I would probably have put my halberd through his head. As it was, he was fairly rapid on his feet.
I know, I know, I have a name badge that says ‘Tom’. Not important. I think that people who buy alcohol from me sometimes misread our relationship. They seem to think that they have some level of power over me. Authority. They think that I exist to serve THEM. They think that it gives me pleasure to do what they say. I think that sometimes they think that they’re in charge. And that somehow gives them a right to call me by my first name, to violate MY personal nominal space without any emotional obligation on their parts. I mean, if the guy had said, “Hey, my name’s Norman, mind if I call you by your first name?” that would probably have been cool. Of course I wouldn’t have let him. In fact probably I would have seized up a bottle of Cointreau ® and a Clipper Lighter ® and sprayed a ‘unique spirit combined with the subtle harmony of bitter and sweet oranges’ over his stupid plaid shirt and then set him alight, and then put out the fire by pummelling him with the broken end of the broom that we have in the backroom. But at least that would have shown the level of respect that I’m pretty sure I deserve.
What’s that, anonymous internet complainer?
“But Thomas, you’re doing a job of selling people things, surely you have to be polite and treat them with some respect! That’s what you are paid to do! HURRR.”
Ok. Hmm. Two points.
1: Shut the fuck up you virgin, you have stupid blonde hair and a dumb shirt. Nobody wears three fucking shades of blue. Every heard of layering? Jesus. Die in a fire.
2: I AM polite and I DO show the mouthbreathing neckbeard alcoholics who come to the shop plenty of respect. However I only show respect when it’s due. And most of the time, people get it. I’ve said before that I love the majority of people who come into the shop. They are usually Dear Old People who want some wine and are very polite about it, and when I say ‘Do you know if you buy another bottle of wine then you get a third one free? Go get another two. Now,” they are too nice and English to say ‘Nah, I’ll leave it’ but instead say ‘Oh really? Lovely’ even though they’ve been to the shop day in day out for the past three months. They understand that at the time of our conversation, there is nobody else on the entire planet in a position to give them the three bottles of Fiordaliso Pinot Grigio and the packet of Malborough Reds, and as such they need me more than I need them, and as such they should shut the hell up and do what they’re told. They play the game. And that’s all I ask. In a way, I’m like the whores in Sin City: play by my rules and I’ll make all of your dreams come true, but mess with me and you’re a corpse. I’m a sexy murder whore. And the customers are my customers.
Most people are good. But there always the people who mess with me. The utter unrelenting wankers who think that I’m there for their own personal amusement, the drivelling scumbags who assume that because my name is on a name-badge, they have a right to use it, and because it says ‘Sales Assistant’, I am there to assist them with their sales. NEWSFLASH, PEOPLE: I know nothing about wine. I have no idea where the merlot is. I don’t even know what merlot is. Just because I stand behind the counter doesn’t mean that I’m going to be able to help you in your equiries. ‘Sales Assistant’ is doublespeak for ‘They pay us because we understand how the till system works’ (no mean feat). Nothing else. So stop talking to me. And don’t a: expect me to be able to make decisions on wine, or b: know where anything is.
Perfect example. This woman came into the shop the other day with her boyfriend (I assume it was a boyfriend, either that or she was a skinhead lesbian with stubble and an Adams apple). The woman was fairly young, with a head shaped sort of like a pair, smart looking glasses on and a trouser suit. She had this gaping expression and a frown on and the moment I saw her I thought to myself ‘Shrew’. I think that Chaucer wrote one of his pilgrims tales on her, the Merchant’s Tale, the one that begins with the immortal lines “I have a wyf, the wurst that maye bee,” (there we are, a literary reference which goes to show that my education has NOT been wasted) and I immediately knew that she was going to be a bitch. As it was, she asked ‘Do you have any Cambo Maria?’ (I made up the name of the wine because I can’t remember what it was, frankly I forgot a second and a half after she said it). So I did what I usually do which is to leave the till and go and pretend to look for it, then say “I don’t know, let me check the system… how do you spell chardonnay?” The system said that there was none left, so I was like sorry, and she was like ‘well what am I supposed to do then? When are you getting more in?’
I stared at her. Seriously what am I meant to say to that. What a prick. As it was, I grimaced and then waved vaguely at the shelf and fell into a sullen silence, which she enthusiastically picked up. This lasted for ten seconds until a guy came up and cut in front of her and asked to buy ‘Nordsk Vodka’. I assumed that it was some kind of speciality vodka that we kept on the upper shelf and so I climbed up and then the guy was like “no… no… left a bit… LEFT…. Down one, there you go no you went too far… right… there you go well done!”… turned out he wanted Smirnoff Blue. Who the fuck calls Smirnoff Blue Nordsk? What especially rankled was the fact that I had to apologise for HIS mistake, right after having to apologise for the fact that someone else had bought all of the wine that the pear-faced woman wanted. The amount of completely insincere aplogising I have to do at that shop is mind numbing. I have lied to more people in two months at the Wine Shop than I had in the previous 18 years of my life. Frankly I was so annoyed I refused to serve either of them and closed the shop early (Not really, I just apologised lots while mentally imagining kebabbing the both of them).
Some people. Fuck’s sake. In fact while I’m at it, and I’m on a soapbox, here’s just a list of ways in which you people, as potential customers of my shop, have annoyed me:
Man loads of people who buy alcohol from my shop are retards. I’m far too middle-class and well educated for this shit. I should work for a library or something. Except then I can’t listen to Interpol so loud that I can’t hear what anybody’s asking me. ‘What? You want a bottle of Fameusgrosse? Do we sell that? What? No I can’t turn down the music wait til the song finishes… there. Oh, Famous Grouse. The big one or the little one? I can’t hear you.”
Pfft. Humanity sucks. Anyway MERRY XMAS GUYS!!1! Here’s my cake for this year:
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