I swear — I SWEAR! — I’m getting upset at the people in our cafe. Not the employees in the cafe, no, the stupid fucking customers, who ignore the three — THREE! — announcements we make as we lead up to closing time, and who say, as I come up to them after we’ve been closed for several minutes, “Okay, give me a minute, and I’ll shut my computer down.”
Asshole: we’re closed. We want to go home. We’re tired. Our feet hurt. We’re getting up bright and early tomorrow morning because, for a lot of us, this is a second job, and my alarm at least goes off at 5:30am. We’re here to serve you, and smile at you being an idiotical fucking idiot when the store is open, because, of course, that’s what we’re being paid for.
And, let me be fair: for a lot of customers, it’s a pure joy to help you. You’re friendly, you’re nice, you don’t scream at me because we don’t have any copies of what-the-fuck-ever that you were looking for that’s been out of print since the Carter Administration. You say “please” and “thank you.”
Some of you know enough about what you’re looking for to give us a nice detective chase, and some of you are just so painfully clueless it’s physically painful. Seriously – you’re looking for a book with a red cover? Here you go. But you said you didn’t know the author or the title, but!, look!, it’s got a red cover!
But when we’re closed, and we’ve got all the books on the shelf, we want to go home. We’ve been busting our humps all night so that we can be walking out the door five minutes after closing, because we’ve got trains to catch, and images of our beds are floating in our minds, and you’re telling us, essentially, that if we’re lucky, you’ll be out the door in five minutes because you didn’t listen (?!?!?!) when, at a quarter of, we said, “We’ll be closing in fifteen minutes.” And you didn’t listen at five of when we said, “We’ll be closing in five minutes. Please gather your belongings and start thinking about getting the fuck out of here.” Apparently you weren’t listening at closing, when we did, in fact, say, “You must now get the fuck out!”
“Just a couple of more minutes!”
No.
Nuh-uh.
Not motherfucking happening.
At nine-oh-motherfuckin’ clock, you need to either be in the queue waiting for someone to call “NEXT!” so that you can make your last-minute purchase, or you need to be, at the bare minimum, on your way out the fucking doors.
And, I swear, the point is going to come — I’m thinking mid-December — when someone tells me he’s going to start shutting down his laptop, and we’ll already be closed by that time, and I’m going to tell him just to close the goddamn lid or I plan on seeing how far across the street I can punt the fucking thing.
