Anger Mismanagement

I got angry with a customer today. Very angry. More angry than I have been with anyone in a while. So angry that I was, at one point, literally shaking with rage.

It was not without cause. I'm not the kind of person to fly off the handle. The other day, I was making a left-hand turn to get out of a parking lot on to Pico, which can take a minute or two occasionally. The person behind me was screaming and honking their horn, generally carrying on as if I were kidnapping their youngest heir rather than keeping them from getting home in time for the opening credits of "CSI: Camden." That's not me.

I think I was, in fact, too courteous under these circumstances. In the future, I will aim to be more openly hostile to customers such as these, because accepting abuse from people, even in retail situations, only encourages this behavior.

Here's the situation...A guy comes in today, I won't name him...For the purposes of this post, we'll call him by a pseudonym...Buster McDermott. Okay, so Buster comes in with a copy of Star Wars: Episode I: The One With the Pod Race and wants to return it. He says it's defective. Why? Because, when removing the "security tape" that runs over the top of the box, he accidentally tore a small bit of the box's outer plastic covering.

My first reaction was to laugh at him. I mean, this is a small thing that happens all the time when you open DVD's. You rip the plastic a bit with your fingernail while you're prying off the tape. If you were to go through my DVD collection right now, I estimate 60% would have small rips in the outer plastic boxes.

So, for starters, you'd have to be a really anal-retentive, obsessive, uptight asshole to genuinely worry about a small fracture in the external covering of the box of a new DVD. Particularly a Star Wars DVD from six freaking years ago.

But this guy wasn't just upset over having ripped his own DVD...He was angry. He stated repeatedly that this was a defect in our product. In his own words, "the glue wouldn't come off, and I had to tear it."

My first reaction was to replace the box. We have a lot (and I mean a lot) of extra plastic DVD boxes at Laser Blazer. Rooms full of them. With the random DVD boxes sitting around that store, you could constrcut a full-sized replica of every spaceship featured in Star Wars: Episode I: Those Goofy Gunguns, with enough boxes left over to make a kickass fort.

But, no. Mr. McDermott needed a brand-new box, one that comes with a brand-new copy of the movies inside. I plainly refused. This was a nonsensical request. I'm not going to just give away a brand-new copy of the DVD in exchange for an open one, an open one with a damaged cover because this overzealous nitwit can't figure out how to use an Exacto knife or the edge of a pair of scissors.

He insisted that I reconsider. I offered to take down the man's phone number, ask the store's owner whenever he arrived about the situation and get back to him. He screeched that it was entirely inappropriate for me to suggest he should have to come back.

And this is where the man went completely out of his mind. I didn't catch all the nightmarish, self-serving, insane bullshit spewing from his mouth to my ears, but here are some snippets and highlights. Whenever possible, these are verbatim quotes, but some of the wording may be somewhat paraphrased. The content, though, is 100% accurate, I promise:

• I was making a big, big, horrible mistake that I would later regret
• It was outrageous that I was even giving this customer "a hard time"
• I needed to make "an executive decision"
• This man spent $200 the last time he was in the store
• The glue wouldn't come off the box, so he had no choice but to rip the plastic
• (This was my favorite part, because it's so clearly insane and off-topic. I'd like to remind you that I have witnesses, and this was all stuff the man actually said). The packaging counts as part of the product, because if they didn't care about the packaging, DVD's would be sold in plain brown envelopes. So because the packaging is ripped, the product is defective, and he should be able to return it
• I was refusing to listen
• I was being unreasonable
• He went out of his way to come to our store

During this long, intensely juvenile and loud tirade, I tried to interject a number of salient points. I noted that, if I replaced the box with another, perfect box specimen, he would get everything he wanted without our store having to throw away $20. I explained that, as a small, privately owned store, we can't really afford to take a bath on all these movies, and that we wouldn't get an automatic refund for the film as the man seemed to assume. I observed that the box rip was his own fault and that it was not our responsibility to repair or correct damage done to our products after they are sold. I requested repeatedly that the man stop shouting at me and making a scene.

It was all to no avail. So, after 10 minutes or so of this nonsense, I caved. I gave the man what he wanted so he'd go the hell away. I told him as much to his face. I added that he was being abusive, that he was taking unfair advantage of a small business, and that I personally found him to be a rather odious individual. On his way out, still in mid-tantrum, he said the following:

Now both of us are in a bad mood. I'm sorry about that.

Then he left.

What an odd thing to say. He's like The Lorax, leaving my life with a cryptic little message I have to spend the next several decades trying to decipher. (I'm aware that, in my analogy, Buster would be the "hero" and I would be the greedy capitalist, but fuck that...It's just a book/cartoon.)

Here's my interpretation: He was in a bad mood about the plastic rip-DVD situation, a surefire red flag for mental instability. If I had just done exactly as he asked in the first place, he would still be in a bad mood, but I would have been spared his fiery, but righteous, wrath. Unfortunately, I didn't do exactly as he wanted, so he had no choice but to put me in a bad mood.

This was, I'd like to repeat for the record, a grown man. I can't even think of the ways in which this violates the social code. You just don't, I repeat, you don't treat people in this manner, even if you are a customer somewhere and they are an employee. I have no idea why people think that manners and proper conduct don't have any hold in retail situations, but they do, and even if you feel someone is cheating you blindly out of a copy of Star Wars: Episode I: Why Not Just Skip to Episode III, you still don't have the right to yell at them and make a scene like a toddler.

So, I'm left with only one question...What to do about it? I'm relatively sure, without relying on the Laser Blazer database, whose security and safety from prying eyes is sacrosanct, I could find a phone number or address for Buster McDermott. I do, after all, know his full name (it's not really Buster McDermott, which is just my favorite all-purpose fictional name), even if I won't reveal such secrets to you good people on the Intar-Web.

Here's my first thought...Take a dump in a box and mail it to him. This was done on "Six Feet Under" two seasons ago by a disgruntled, abandoned son, and I have since wanted to try it for real. Imagine how beautiful a scene that would be...Your sworn enemy receives a nicely-wrapped gift box in the mail, opens it excitedly and discovers...a human turd. Beyond even the smell issue, there's always the issues of disposal. It's not exactly the kind of thing you just dump in the kitchen trash bag.

That plan does regrettably require that I take a dump in a box, and then wrap it, and activity that's nearly as unpleasant for me as it is for Buster. Also, I'd have to find some way to prevent the box from smelling too bad or getting too...um...okay this is gross. But I wouldn't want the poo bomb to be discovered prior to delivery. And it's not like I could just leave it on Buster's doorstep, ring the doorbell and run off, because he probably lives in a nice neighborhood and some neighborhood watch weirdo might see me.

And nothing in the world would be more embarrassing than being caught leaving a box full of your own feces on someone's front step. I mean, that's just strange.

So, okay, next plan. I could ring up a ton of porn under his name at the video store, and then mail all the receipts to his house and place of business. Concoct $1000, $2000 bills in overdue porn rentals and demand remittance every, oh, week or so for a few months. Sure, he could eventually prove to his loved ones and colleagues that he didn't really buy or rent all that porn, but I'd say the humiliation of the situation in the first place would pretty much make up for my anger and frustration this afternoon.

That would require me to break quite a number of video store regulations. In fact, this very article, by mere virtue of its existance, might be in violation of some video store regulations. Let me state for the record that this post is satirical, and that I really wouldn't use the Laser Blazer computer system to exact revenge on an individual over some petty argument.

So I guess it's back to poop in a box. Maybe dry ice could help preserve the unpleasantness while surpressing the smell for transport...