Tag: dumbass

Inside is Closed.

We just closed, and I’m waiting for two customers to finish up and leave before I start cleaning the dining room, so I sneak out for a quick cigarette. A few puffs in, I look up from my phone and see an old guy walking towards the building from the sidewalk. I’ve seen him once before. He was nice enough. He talks to himself, though, and either has a speech impediment or he’s drunk all the time. Both, for all I know.

So that he doesn’t waste time and energy coming any closer, I yell out to him, “Sorry, man, just drive thru.”

He dismissively waves his hand with an, “eh,” as if he didn’t believe me, or was pissed off about us being closed. I shrug it off and look back down at my phone. When I look up again, he’s still approaching.

I give him the benefit of the doubt. I mean, sometimes people develop a speech impediment due to poor hearing, so maybe he legitimately didn’t hear me despite the fact that I had yelled it to him, so I say it again. “Sorry, man, inside’s closed.”

“I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”

Arby’s is right across the street, inside still open. Just saying.

I shrug and shake my head sympathetically. “The inside is closed.”

“What do you mean the inside’s closed? I come here all the time.”

As I struggle to see the relevance, he adds, pointing through the windows, “They’re in there.”

“They ordered their food before we closed.”

Then he steps forward and gets in my face, chest out and arms back, all ape-like. I do not back up. I don’t size him up. I’m not going to escalate. I refuse to give this childish twat what he wants, just like assholes who ride my ass on the road: I refuse to go faster. If the mood strikes me, I may let my foot up off the gas, go slower.

No, he cannot affect me. My inside is closed.

And I’m certainly not going to throw the first punch, either.

Having said that, Please.

I’ve never been in a real fight and I’ll probably walk away physically damaged if it happens, but I’ll fight tooth and nail, right on down to the ground. And hell, maybe I need it. There’s nearly four-and-a-half decades of pure rage bottled up in here, just itching for a justified outlet. Hungry for a reason. Oh-so patient for the right opportunity to discharge.

In my head, I hear Tyler Durden from Fight Club: “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.”

“I’m sorry, man,” is what I actually say, tone not changing in the slightest, not entirely ignorant of the fact that revealing he’s not getting a rise out if me will probably enrage him further. “I can’t let you in.”

“Well,” he says, “I’m going in anyway.”

Here we go.

“No,” I calmly tell him. “You’re not.”

So then he tries to pass by me and go towards the door, which I have propped open. I step in front of him and the door, and he steps back immedeately.

Huh. Interesting.

In my efforts to get inside the door quickly, I drop what was propping the door open — a roll of trash bags — so I bend down slowly to pick it up. I could’ve kicked it inside, but I decided not to. I knew he could’ve kneed me right in the face as I bent down. Somehow, I felt he wouldn’t. And he didn’t.

I stand up, flick my cigarette to the ground, and say, with a smile, “Have a nice day, sir.”

After shutting the door as he’s still scream-mumbling bullshit my way through the window, I go take a piss with my adrenaline-shaky hands, laughing to myself.

Have I mentioned how much I hate this town?

Dude, Where’s My Mind?

As has been happening a lot lately, I got the opportunity to leave work half an hour early tonight. 10:30. Logically, I suppose I should elect to stay and make a bit more money, but as usual all my shit was done, I’d helped everyone else about as much as I could, and was going insane with boredom. This is pretty much a nightly affair.

So of course, I said, yes. Hell yes. Sweet release. Long-awaited liberation from the confines of my dreaded fast food place of employment.

I had to stop by the Circle K on my way home to get gas, though, and as I pulled in, I see that there’s perhaps four other cars getting gas.

This was suboptimal.

Being a rather anxious fellow, I decide to fill myself up at the gas pump at the far end, which was clearly a vacant area. As I’m driving towards it, though, I see that the slightly closer one — one that had been formerly obscured by the other cars — was actually vacant as well, so on impulse I pull in there instead.

Anything to save time. I just want to get this over with so I can go home.

So I park, step out, lock the door for when I go inside, slide my bank card into the pump machine, press the buttons I need to press and, tada, I’m ready. I have my hand on the gas gun, ready to draw quicker than Eastwood in a duel at dawn in a dust-caked Old West town, when I look back at my car.

I parked the wrong way. The gas cap is on the other side.

Sweet mother of fuck.

So I unlock my door, start it up, pull out, turn around, and pull back in. I unscrew the cap, grab the gun, slide it into the hole like a dispassinate, overworked, disillusioned porn star aching to get it in and out and in and out and non-fucking over with when the gas pump monitor reads something like:

TRANSACTION CANCELLED.
TIMED OUT.
YOUR FAULT, DUMBASS.
GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER.
START OVER.

Frustrated even more, I go through the process again.

Even when shit goes relatively smoothly, like when I park the right way the first time and stuff, I still loathe the thought and actual activity of stopping to get gas, particularly because I can’t just lock the gas-gun in the gas-hole and wait in the car.

No, I have to hold it the entire time, because for some reason with this car when the gun’s on any available setting it clicks off in a few moments because it reads as full. So as a consequence I have to lean against my car, squeezing the trigger, but not too tightly, as I watch the digital readout. As I watch as my gas tank slowly becomes full as my bank account simultaneously, yet far more quickly, becomes depleted.

Its as irritating as it is depressing.

Once its finally full, I go into the gas station to check my bank account on the ATM to ensure my check finally went through at the bank.

It did. Yay. Good news.

On my way to the cooler to get two 24s of Labatt Ice I see that my favorite cashier is working tonight. She’s a big girl and has something akin to what is popularly referred to as Resting Bitch Face, but rather than “certain bitch” it could also be interpreted as depression, extreme sleep deprivation, or an entire lack of passion for life at all.

As I don’t judge books by their covers and I always like receiving reinforcement that this tendency isn’t niave, I was quite pleased to eventually find that she’s actually an interesting, funny and reasonably intelligent individual. Our relatively brief exchanges tend to lift my spirits, particularly after a shitty day at work.

When we have them at work at the end of the night and I remember, I’ll often steal her some pies, which always seems to elevate her mood.

So I get to the counter with my beers and, like usual, see that the last person that came to the counter failed to take the second of time it required to look at the customer-facing monitor, see the rate-your-cashier questionnaire, and give credit where credit is due.

Before she rings up my beer, I press the “EXCELLENT” option.

Though I can’t for the life of me remember exactly what she said, it was essentially her act of reading my face and humorously referencing how I clearly had a bad day.

I respond with: “You know how long I’ve had my car?”

“I’d imagine a long time,” she says. “I always see you driving and wave like a creepy old lady.”

“You’re not creepy for waving,” I say dismissively. “I’m just ignorant and don’t see you. But did you happen to see me at the gas pump just now, parked on the wrong side, like a moron?”

She laughs, telling me no, she hadn’t.

As we go on talking, I slide my card to pay for the beers and I’m confused about something the card reader says — and express that confusion out loud. And I soon realize I shouldn’t be so confused, I shouldn’t be confused at all, as its saying the same thing it says every time I use it, its just that I’m so pissed off at myself at this point my brain is frazzled as fuckity-fuck, moving too fast and drifting too far away from my external environment for me to maintain focus on what I’m actually doing in the Here and Now or access relevant information.

As I finally press the button I need to on the damn thing, I confess that I hadn’t even intended to use my card, as I’ve got sufficient cash in my wallet.

“The gas thing really fucked you up,” she says, laughing harder.

“Birth fucked me up,” I clarify as I press “EXCELLENT” on the rate-your-cashier questionnaire on the monitor again, bid her adu through the laughter of her and the unseen guy behind me, pass through the doors, get in my car, and get the bloody fucking hell home.