Working in retail can be frustrating

I like my job at O2. I have to wear a suit and act like Windows Mobile is anything but a joke, but for the most part it’s a good job.

I do object, however, to having to deal with stupid customers.

Sometimes you get a customer that you just want to grab by the hair and slam their head against a table of cell phones, again and again and again. Of course, you’d have to resituate your grip every few blows, as their hair would be coming out in clumps. But you’d keep slamming, which gets easier as it goes on, because after the fifth blow or so (I presume), they go limp.

But you still can’t get over that they asked where the 0 key was on their cell phone. So you press ever onward, reveling in the burn of lactic acid in your arm. After about a minute, the bone around the temple softens, and things get messy. The display phones are covered in hair and brains, the counter now an altar to intolerance.

But the offering must be complete. You adjust your footing so as not to slip on the gore, now flowing off the table onto the floor. Customers who have yet to be addressed wait patiently in line.

After the splashing decreases to but a spurt every few hits, and the physical feedback becomes less satisfying, as what’s left of the head makes only a soft slap on the table, you situate the body on its knees. In that reverent posture, it is ready to be totemized. You smash the protective casing around a cell phone, any cell phone, and pick away any stray shards of plastic, so as not to taint the ritual.

Then, reaching carefully in through where the ear used to be, you place the phone in the throat of the corpse, while chanting the UMTS creed.

You wipe the the blood off the metal surface of your nametag, and turn to the next customer, addressing them politely in the honorific.

Seriously. He asked where the goddamn 0 zero was. When I showed him—without violence—he argued that it should come before the 1.