donut.nu

Okay, I understand people find the holiday season stressful. I also understand that people find the prospect of being snowed in stressful.

However, this does not mean you can throw a shopping basket at me when I tell you that the Transformers DVD that is on sale today (or, rather, Saturday when this happened) will not be on sale tomorrow, even if you put it on hold at guest services.

Yes, I’m serious. A “guest” threw a shopping basket at me because he was supposedly freaking out whilst trying to find provisions, but apparently had enough time to pick out a Transformers DVD set.

Everybody is freaking out because they think they’re going to lose power. Everybody is foraging for food. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.

After I told him he wouldn’t get the sales price, he started going off and spewing a bunch of nonsensical bullshit:

1. “I’ve been living here for 30 years and…” (So what? My store hasn’t even been there for 35 years.)
2. “I’m ex-military and…” (Is that a threat?)
3. “I’ve been to three stores trying to get provisions and I don’t need this right now!” (Dude, you’re buying ping pong balls. How is that helping your search?)

Then he threw the basket at me. I backed up into the corner of my little register section and he began yelling at me to not freak out on him because he “doesn’t need this right now.”

I informed him he couldn’t attack me and that pissed him off. He said he wasn’t attacking me, to get better customer service skills, and that his generation had to deal with “it” and so I have to as well.

Excuse me? Your generation wasn’t typically known for throwing things at shop girls.

After I give him his receipt and run away, I get sort of freaked out. When someone’s in my face, I don’t really back down. I finally found my manager, who I normally hate, and she went over with security and kicked him out of the store.

This is where it got interesting: He started rambling about being ex-military and war and some incident in Germany and whatnot.

Here’s the thing: he was only about 35, max. There is no way he was ever in a war in Germany. And again I say, so what? What does Germany have to do with throwing a basket at me?

Bastard.

Yes, I’ve been busy and sick since my last post, but mostly I’ve been lazy. And busy. But also lazy. This is my problem. I lack long-term focus and am easily side-tracked. I was diagnosed with ADD ages ago, but I hate taking medication unless I absolutely need it to, say, keep me living or from ripping my own skull off.

Anyway, I’ve been trying to condense the multitude of reasons I hate MySpace so much (and yet use it anyway) and managed to limit it to four. This is amazing since I generally lack the ability to condense anything into under a 200 item list.

1. The shit that people do to their pages. If you think hot pink text on a sparkling green background is readable, you should be sent to aesthetics hell.

2. A lot of my offline friends are idiots on the internet. My friends can’t type, don’t understand about spam, and are emo on the internet. It’s embarrassing to be associated with these people.

Why do you care if you’re not in my Top 4?

Oh, yes. I do not have a Top 8. I don’t like my friends enough when they’re online to keep most of them on there. In fact, I have Barack Obama and Dexter Morgan in my Top 4 because MySpace wouldn’t allow me to have a Top 2.

3. MySpace is now a verb. The first time a friend said “I’ll MySpace you later”, I nearly wept. It sounds dirty, but not in a happy way. :(

4. Now I use MySpace as a verb with certain friends who need to contact me. It’s terrible, really.

And yet I have a MySpace purely to keep up with people I might not have otherwise. I’ve found people I’ve not talked to for five to twelve years. I’ve found a girl I went to high school with only to find out he’s not a girl anymore which was handy to know up front the next time I saw him.

Months ago I had a dream about a girl I knew in primary school. She was a cool kid so I figured she may have grown up to be awesome. And, as a sidenote, I was sure she was gay.

Oh, how gaydar and cool-kid-detector failed me.

I decided to look her up on MySpace only to find out she’s now stupid, skanky, greasy, blonde¹, alcoholic, and the kind of straight girl that makes out with other girls just so she can post pictures on the internet.

What are other problems with MySpace? And are any other social networking sites necessarily better? Or are there other aspects that make them just as annoying?

1. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. ;) ↩

One of the things I’ve learnt in my pursuit of a BA in Spanish and French is that people tend to say stupid things in regards to my educational plans. Because, you know, a degree in anything besides IT or medicine or whatever is a waste of time. Clearly.

Below are examples of idiotic things said to me on a weekly basis as well as either the response I give or the response I wish I could give depending on who is doing the commenting.

“Oh. A useless degree.”

First of all, kindly fuck off.

Is there such thing as a useless degree, honestly? I don’t believe so. Least of all a degree in languages. Many people in English-speaking countries are monolingual; being multilingual is a sought-after skill in today’s job market. There are tons of things you can do with a BA in Spanish and French. Many people are unwilling to learn a second language. For some reason, this seems to be more rampant in countries where the predominant language is English.

Mostly, I’m getting a BA because I love languages and I like to learn, not because of the job I’m seeking.

“Nobody speaks French.”

I think the people of the 29 countries of which French is an official language would disagree with you. About 300 million people on the planet speak French. There is a French speaking country on every continent aside from Antarctica–as far as I know, emperor penguins don’t speak French. Or at least they didn’t in March of the Penguins which is clearly a vital source of penguin language information. It’s also an official language of both the United Nations and the European Union.

“French is useless.”

See above.

“Can you get a job with that? What are you going to do with that degree?”

I’m not getting a BA in Spanish and French to get a job; I’m getting a BA to learn more about something I love. I love to learn. I’ve always been that girl who’s constantly reading up about random things. When I was a kid, sometimes it was animals or dinosaurs or space or Sweden. Sometimes it’s still animals or dinosaurs or space or Sweden. I’m filled with tons of random bits of information about everything.

And, as I said earlier, multilingualism is a sought after skill even in non-interpretation or translation fields.