As some of you know, I have a day job. I am, in essence, the photo lab at the Eckerd Pharmacy down the street from my place of residence. Eckerd, I need to stress, is a thoroughly incompetent institution. It has, as you may have heard (or may not, I don't know, what the fuck am I, psychic?) recently been purchased by Rite Aid. Rite Aid, people. A company run by a terrifying woman whose face does not move when she talks, and whose soulless eyes induce catatonia in bystanders. We're not talking a Walgreens here, people. Rite Aid dominates Rhode Island, its own employees, and that's about it. Oh, and Eckerd, I suppose.

Anyway, Eckerd is incompetent. It's a company run by morons, serviced by vendors so inept that I begin to suspect most of it is actually just criminal negligence MASQUERADING as stupidity, and its stores are managed by zombified inbreds who would be laughed out of a McDonalds interview. The result is our store tends to be, oh, short-staffed, let's say. This results in me usually running both the front register and the photo lab at the same time. Which means I have to deal with customers.

I often say my job would be nearly divine if I didn't have to deal with customers. This is only half true- I would also have to be able to avoid my employers and my co-workers. But customers are a big source of fury. Mostly because most of them are immeasureably thick. I sometimes suspect their obstinate incomptence is a deliberate thing, a strategic plot to shatter what order and form remains to my psyche and tear from me the last vestiges of my sanity. I am willing, however, to blame that on my daily Red Bull binges, much as I am willing to discount my recent fit of the verbosities to my current Bushmills binge.

No, most customers are, simply put, imbeciles. I will speak of two specific items that most customers get wrong. The first, and lesser, offense would be debit cards.

Debit cards, in and of themselves, are not a problem. They are a fast and easy method of paying for goods and services. A proficient user of the medium would be able to pay for their purchases faster than the equivelent expert in the others we offer, excluding the rare person paying with exact change, or whose total (again, paid for in cash) is an even number. While I am fumbling for dimes to give the more typical cash payer change with my sausage-like fingers (I have Hobbit hands), the credit card payer is waiting on his charge slip to print from my Paleolithic vintage register so he can sign it, and the check user is being the biggest douchebag in history (more on checks later in this rant), the (probably mythical) SKILLED debit carder has swiped their card, punched their pin, selected cash back if applicable, and headed away whistling a merry tune.

This creature is, as I noted, probably in the same scientific family as the chimaera, the dragon, and the pleasant-natured Swede. That is to say, it is as real as a Romanian's personal hygiene.

The most infuriating about customers is their inability to notice and then respond to simple visual cues. On the off-chance they even notice the card reader six inches from them, rarely do they think to use it. Rather, they hand me the card directly. This is enough right off the bat to anger me, as I am generally busy trying to get my lab running and am not interested in their purchase of Doritos, Ducolax, and Diet Pepsi. I am more interested in getting my tech support rep into my bedroom where I can take my time removing his teeth with a dinner fork. However, that is a rant for another day. The useless face-fucking inexperienced fucking mental INCOMPETENT.

Back to debit users, though.

They hand me the card, and I hand it back to them. Failing to interpret visual cues again, they invariably slide their card backward. This would be forgiveable if there weren't an illustration of the how card should be slid a QUARTER OF AN INCH AWAY FROM THE SLOT. One FOURTH of an inch. For those of you keeping score at home but using the communist metric system, a quarter of an inch is the distance I am from sucker punching the moron flailing away with his bit of plastic on the other end of the counter at this point. That's how small a space a quarter of an inch is.

Sometimes- and this is actually sad enough that it amuses me rather than angers me- they try to slide the card through the groove of the card reader's door rather than the card reader itself. The door is a very narrow slot, posistioned extremely awkwardly, forcing the fool to lurch way over the counter to even be able to reach it- it is located on my side of the card reader, not theirs. Sometimes I wonder how they even know it's there, as they can't see it from their side of the counter. The display is pathetic, not annoying, and I gently correct them as one would aid any other form of mentally disabled individual encountering difficulties- kindly, patiently, and cautious of them soiling themselves abruptly and thus preparing to increase my distance from them considerably.

If, however, anyone says at this point "What is my PIN, again?" their life shall be forfiet.

At this point I am able to instruct my register that the fool is trying to pay via EPS (Electronic Payment Service- credit or debit). Sometimes they inform me of what bank issued the card. I really don't care. Do these people truly believe that your typical cashier is expected to handle each card differently based on its bank? That we have a MasterCard button, an American Express button, a Visa Card, and so on? Don't you see the size of our registers? Don't you realize the typical cashier has a brain no larger than a standard walnut? What is WRONG with you? Telling me it's debit is nice- I could have seperate debit and credit buttons. While I don't, how would you know this? But the BANK?

Perhaps a minute later I realize the customer has ignored the PLEASE SELECT CASHBACK message on the card reader, or else is trying to enter their own custom number via the PIN pad ($47, for example) rather than pushing one of the clearly labeled cashback buttons (Cashback $5, Cashback $10, Cashback $20, and Cashback $50, respectively). I aid them here.

Then they say, in a flustered tone, "Every one of them is different!"

INSTRUCTIONS, you moron. READ THE GOD DAMN VISUAL CUES! My Nortisu 3011 is spewing colour developer up through the working tank crossover and raining down in a hellish carcinogen geyser to mix with the bleach working tank and short out my computer, and I have to stop to help brainless cretins too lazy or inept to handle simple, often illustrated instructions? FUCK YOU!

Worse, however, is the check user.

Let's just say you take perhaps a minute and a half to fill each out and record the transaction in your book. Behind you, customers line up. But you don't care, because the customer is always right. Right?

Right!

I'm also assuming the customer's identifying information, always available on the check, is also always right. And I gleefully share that with the dozen people who had to wait for your inconsiderate ass. One of them is likely to be a serial killer, some day.

If not, I am.