It is ALWAYS your fault.

Some people are wonderful around the holidays. They are cheerful, nice to others, and generally act like decent human beings.

Others are not.

Two Saturdays ago was a particularly fun time at Borders. It was an incredibly busy time of the day and I was the only one working. There were about five people in line, and I was trying to check people out as well as help someone on the phone.

The woman on the phone was pissed because she was trying to order things on borders.com and was having issues. The issues were caused by some updates that corporate was doing on the website (don't ask me what; I am a lowly peon). The problem was that she had an online coupon for 33% off that expired the next day and she wanted to use it NOW. She had called the customer service hotline and they had told her that they weren't sure when the website would be functional again.

So she called a very small temporary store to complain.

Does this seem insane to anyone else?

After I had checked out the second-to-last person I tried to finish up with the angry woman on the phone only to be interrupted by the last woman in line. Since the first words out of her mouth were, "Isn't anyone going to help me?" I could tell that this was going to be really fun.

I will spare you the gory details and sum up what her problem was. She had ordered some books "a month ago" (a week in reality; I checked the date) and was angry that they weren't in yet. Unfortunately she had placed her order when corporate was once again screwing with the website so it didn't complete and the order was never officially placed. Over the course of trying to help her, said angry customer called me a "stupid kid," told me that she didn't have time to wait because she had Huntington's and did I know what Huntington's is (I said "yes" which probably didn't help matters anyway but I was getting annoyed myself), and accused me of ruining her and her family's Thanksgiving/Christmas/holidays/existence in general.

I finally called the guy who was on break to come in and help me with her. She calmed down, and we promised to order the books for her when the website was back up; we would call her and get her credit card information over the phone, and everything would be settled.

Wrong.

So the phone number she gave us was wrong; when dialed, all you get is an "out of service" message. She didn't provide an email address, and was having the books shipped to the store so we can't send her a letter (which is ridiculous anyway). I do not want to be in the store when she comes back in. And if I am, I'm calling security because I was a little afraid that she was going to hit me last time.

Other fun situations are people blaming me for an order getting lost, a book not being in stock or being sold out, and an order not getting delivered in time for Christmas, all of which are things that are completely beyond my control and most certainly not my fault.

After the fact, I've come up with some replies to the above situations:

"Actually, I have that book in the back, but it's part of my personal stock. Maybe if you had been a bit more pleasant, but nooooooo. I'm certainly not going to do you any favors now."

"You mean that was your package? Well, dang. I paid the delivery guy to toss it out the window on the highway because I was pretty sure that a mob dummy company had sent it. They have a hit out on me, you know." (To be said while looking around furtively)

"You're ordering a book now and want it in time for Christmas? Not a problem. Let me just assemble my magical flying warthogs with this conch shell and they'll have it to you in a jiffy."

"We had it in stock, but I deliberately sold the last one a few minutes ago because I knew that you were coming in for it and really wanted to shit all over your day."

And my personal favorite:

"Order the damn books at home, bitch."

Moral of the story: be nice to cashiers and people working in stores lest you get a snarky blog post written about you.