Thursday, May 19, 2011

the crappy American

Some customers are truly childish enough to interrupt and get fussy when they should know to wait their turn.  I was ringing up a woman today in my normal brisk yet unrushed pace when another customer went to another register and started talking to me even though I was already talking to the first customer.  I told the interrupter that I would be with her in a moment.  Then I looked at the customer I was helping, hoping to make an unspoken connection.  "This is crazy right?  I actually have to tell her to wait her turn.  Some people!"  But there was nothing.  I'll be nice and assume she was being polite.


After I rang up Interrupting Cow*, she bumped into one of her friends and they spoke for about 20 about IC's travels, both past and upcoming.  Friend asked IC if she could pick her up a souvenir in Norway.  IC then spent several minutes describing all of her travel trinkets and how she has them displayed in her home.  Now, of course I would like to travel more than I do and so my next few sentences might sound like jealous clerkspeak, but I promise you it's not.  IC was so unpleasant.  The idea that she is traveling the world, telling everyone where she is from, being horrible to foreign clerks pissed me off.  Dear world, this crappy American doesn't represent me or many of my compatriots. 

*Every time a customer interrupts, my mind plays through that knockknock joke:
Knock Knock Who's There?
Interrupting Cow
Interrupting Cow wh... Moo!!!!

1 comment:

  1. I was living in China and visited a Starbucks for a coffee. While I was there, another American A-hole comes in. He proceeds to start his order when he notices that the barista's English name-tag matched his daughter's name.

    He looks at the poor girl and says (in English of course) that he wants to buy it. She politely refuses, probably thinking "The coffee is for sale, not my name tag you jackass". He opens his wallet, which is full of 100RMB notes saying how much money he had (100 RMB then = $14). She still refused and the guy backed down about 10 seconds before I would have walked up to him and told him to back off.

    I've never been so embarrassed to be an American as that moment.

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