It's funny how bad memories can ambush you seemingly out of nowhere and ruin your mood. On the drive to work this morning, I was giving myself my usual pep talk, reminding myself that this job doesn't have nearly as much about which to hate as any of my previous jobs (I'm not sure about the structure of this sentence, but I'm leaving it anyway). For instance, I don't have to work with the public. Cranky co-workers and bosses are much easier to deal with than cranky customers, especially retail customers. Some retail store customers apparantly think that their sole purpose as a shopper is to make sales people feel as crummy as possible; still, a retail associate can get fired for telling such a customer to bite them. If you tell a coworker who is pissing you off to bite you, the worst that usually happens (at least on a first offense) is you get sent to watch a training video about how to maintain an emotionally healthy work environment. Er ... not that I know from experience.

Anyway.

So I was reminding myself how much worse my job could be, counting my blessings, as it were, when I remembered an incident that happened with a customer when I was a student at OU and supported myself by working as a cashier at the local Wal-Mart.

For some reason they liked to stick me out in the garden center at the outside register where I was all by myself, far away from my fellow cashiers. I can't imagine why. It wasn't all bad, because the Garden Center was adjacent to the toy department, which was Terrence's domain, and he would hang out back there with me when business was slow, and sneak me snacks and comic books and fun things to keep me from getting too bored and lonesome ... but I digress. The unfortunate thing about working the garden center register was that it took forever to get a manager when you needed one, there were no witnesses (I could have been killed and robbed and nobody would have known it until Terrence popped out there to chat), and nobody to come to my defense when confronted with one of the aforementioned scumba-- er, I mean, customers.

One such customer seemed pleasant enough at first. I rang him up, bagged his stuff, and took his money, all without incident. Then suddenly, and without warning, he threw a handful of pennies onto the counter and told me he wanted even bills back instead of coins. Without even giving me time to gather the pennies up and count them, he demanded to know where I went to school. I asked him why, and he said because he wanted to know "where they were producing such morons who didn't even know how to count change." I stood there, dumbfounded, and then much to my delight, the woman behind him in line piped up.

"Where did you go to school?" she asked him.

"I graduated Yale, class of (blah blah blah)," he said, smugly.

"Oh, that explains it," she said.

"What?" he asked, confused. "Why did you want to know?"

"I just wanted to know where they're producing such assholes as to go around putting down teenage kids for no good reason whatsoever," she said.

"Yeah!" I said (silently), and then added (also silently), "Fuck you, Yale bastard!"

He gathered up his pennies and took the change I was originally about to hand him and stormed off in a huff. I thanked the woman and rang her up while she railed about people who think they can treat salespeople and cashiers like dirt.

I remembered that incident this morning, and became so angry that I gripped the steering wheel so hard my knuckles turned white. I wasn't angry at the man. I was angry at my young scared self for just standing there and letting him abuse me, relying on another customer to come to my defense. Sure, I could have gotten in major trouble if I'd said to him the things that were going through my head at the time, but looking back, there are so many things I could have said in my defense, or in his offense, that would have slipped under the radar and gotten my point across without getting me into trouble. This incident happened years ago, and there I was, getting pissed off about it all over again this morning. I really had to fight to get myself back into a decent mood.

That happens a lot. I can be in a perfectly good mood, then I'll remember something that happened ages ago, something someone said or did to me, or that I failed to say or do in my defense, and it instantly kills my good humor. I've actually had people suggest I might be bi-polar because I appear to have these sudden, major mood swings, but usually, it's just that I remembered something that pissed me off. And I have a lot of memories that piss me off.

On the other hand, it doesn't take long until something distracts me and I forget what it was that I was pissed off about, and then I'm in a decent mood again.

No wonder people think I'm tweaked.