Women Are Evil…Apparently

I was on the receiving end of a very angry man’s rant about how much he hates women.

What did I do to deserve this rant you may ask?

Nothing except ignored his initial rant about how he doesn’t follow the rules because he hates the government but if other people want to be stooges to the government, then that’s on them.

What prompted his rant about not being a government stooge?

The fact that our cigarette price board writing is too small to read from the other side of the service desk.

I’m not arguing with the fact that it’s too small. The writing is well and truly too small to be read from a distance. This is something that we brought up as an issue when the format changed but we were told that that’s the new standard that we get from the higher ups that decide these things.

So, after we established that the price board was too small and that it wasn’t something that we decided ourselves, this guy started his rant on the government, something that in all honesty I wasn’t in the mood to go into.

By this point of the day my back is so sore that I feel sick and every ligament in my abdomen is giving me issues at once.

I had no cares left to give about whether or not this guy was or was not a government stooge.

Also, this isn’t the first time I’ve been on the receiving end of some guy’s need to let everyone know that he’s better than everyone else…In the last four days.

Honestly, these guys are worse than the so called “pick-me” girls. They’re the ones who “aren’t like other girls” because they don’t do some random thing that millions of other girls also don’t do. No one actually cares that they don’t do this random thing because the attention seeking behaviour just negates whatever annoying trait they don’t have.

These men are the “pick me” men.

So anyways. Back on track.

After I told him to have a nice day and turned away to get some water, he started muttering something about me going home to my boyfriend and telling him…something.

I went back and asked him if there was a problem. He says to me that there’s no problem. He just hates all women.

….

Yeah alright.

Sure, thing boss.

Sure thing.

He continued his ranting about how women are vile, and he thinks they’re the evilest creatures on Earth.

It took every ounce of strength I had left in me to not sarcastically ask him who hurt him. Not because I care, but because I want to buy them a drink.

It took every single bit of self-control to not tell him that maybe he’s the problem. To tell him that on behalf of all women we hate him too.

Literally all of my self-control went into not telling this guy where to shove his issues with women and the government.

Why did I hold back?

Because I’ve already told one angry guy to bite me in the past week and that’s all I’m allowed.

In my defense, I had a really good reason.

Imagine it, the three-day lockdown has just been announced a few hours ago. Everyone and their mother in Perth have decided to come to the shops just in case they run out of toilet paper.

We’ve all spent the last four hours run off our feet, dealing with people complaining about the queues, despite every register being open and then complaining that team members are going home after being there well and truly past their finish time. Customers complaining about how busy it is as though they aren’t part of the problem.

Then this self-entitled asshole decides he’s going to just skip the queue and go straight to the service desk and demand to be served.

When I told him that I would not be serving him as he has skipped the queue of people who were before him and would instead be serving the lovely lady who has been waiting patiently…well he wasn’t happy about that.

He got served when it was his turn by someone that was not me. Did he leave after he was finished being served? Of course not, because who would do that?

No, he waited for me.

He kept standing there as I served the slew of customers that just kept coming and then he had the audacity to interrupt me serving my current customer, violating all of the social distancing rules, and tell me that I need to pull my head in because that’s not how you treat your customers.

I did not wake up that day and choose violence.

I had violence thrust upon me.

When I told him again that he doesn’t get to just cut the line and get served instantly, he actually has to wait, he decided to tell me that he’s trying to teach me a lesson in customer service because he pays my wages.

You can see where this is going can’t you?

I felt the rage of a million retail workers flow through me in that moment. 5 months of pregnancy hormones that have not yet been unleashed upon unsuspecting customers (that alone earns me a damn cookie).

I made it very clear that he doesn’t pay me shit and he can bite me.

I have since been informed by many that I was far too polite. I have also been judged heavily by some for putting some prick with an inflated sense of importance in his place.

Something that some people seem to forget is that not only do we not get paid enough to have to put up with abuse from customers, we also should be stopping bad behaviour in its tracks. You do not reward bad behaviour because then they just keep doing it. Child rearing 101.

At some point in these guy’s lives someone somewhere let them get away with too much crap. Someone let them believe that they are more important than everyone else, that their time is more valuable than everyone else’s.

To set the record straight, what this guy paid for his two bottles of milk doesn’t pay for even fifteen minutes of my time. Now if he’d bought three bottles then we could talk. I’d still tell him to shove it up his ass but I’d do it with a smile and a ‘have a good day.’

Eventually, people like this will die out on their own…or with the helping hand from someone else. Either way, I earnt my “I didn’t stab anyone today!” award badge. Barely…but I refrained.

Before I go there is a notable mention for the women. This one may have been related to the man who decided he’s going to single handedly bankroll me. She told myself and my colleague that we don’t matter because we just work there after I served someone who was before her and she started verbally harassing my customer.

Oh!

And the angry old woman who spat at my service manager and threw a catalogue at me because we didn’t have any Humpty Dumpty Easter Eggs left two days before the long weekend.

Each gender is two for two at the moment, as well as the middle-aged bracket and the oldies bracket.

We won’t even go into the eight-year old’s that were threatening to fight staff from another store out in the car park. Mostly because unless I’ve personally told an eight-year-old that’s threatening to stab me that I could knee them in the teeth without actually lifting my leg, it just doesn’t feel like it should get points.

On the bright side of having to wear a mask for the rest of my work week, it’s harder for assholes to hear me swear at them under my breath. Also it makes my murder eyes look more threatening. They know the murder smile is there, under the mask but they just can’t see it.

Maybe all women are evil.

Maybe people should stop giving us reasons.