Return of the Uncredited.

Damn I love the days where someone is not only self-righteously in the wrong, but they have to vomit forth crude imprecations for not getting their way.

To whit, two young paragons of trailer park Americana came in the other night. After smirking their way through asking the most vague questions known to man (I swear the whole “slacker” motif is just an attempt to justify an intelligence rivaled by yogurt and verbal acuity on par with a microwaved Furby.®), the leader of the slack tossed a credit card up on the counter.

Automatically, I was asking for ID to back up the card even as I reached out to collect the card. I was not in the least surprised when he replied that he did not have such ID. The name was very feminine. There was also the picture of a moderately attractive woman in the upper left corner. Obviously, it wasn’t him.

Consequently, I told him I wasn’t going to run the card.

Mars on a meat-loaf, it’s like they hand the same gods-forsaken script to every knuckle-dragging mouth-breather who wants to use a card that isn’t theirs. “It’s my girlfriend’s.”

It isn’t you. I can’t run it.

“It’s my money.”

Bull-shit. It’s her money. There is nothing here to show you have ANY claim to those funds. It’s not your card. It’s not your account. That’s not your signature on the card. You can’t use it here.

To which he decided to take it all from the top one more time because everyone knows that you can bypass any logic or argument by simply repeating yourself enough times. For everyone has to take your word as truth if you’re staunch enough in your sincerity.

I was especially annoyed by his announcement that “the bank” didn’t give him any trouble using the card. Wanna bet? Credit card fraud is a felony and one that costs banks millions. Like fucking hell are they going to let him use someone else’s card to access an account.

But it’s not my problem if they do. This is my bloody store, my bloody livelihood, and my bloody integrity. This store is not going to accept your card.

Right on schedule they shifted to the verbal taunt portion of their defeat. The venerable yet tooth-less assertion that I had lost a sale/money. The de rigueur verbal attack upon my person/parentage/proclivities/personality. The ineptly delivered threat that they’ll tell all their friends never to shop here because the “clerk’s a dick.”(Oh the horror. Five people looking to spend a pittance on their way to buy some crank and Barbeque Pork Rinds shan’t patronize this establishment. Oh however shall we survive?)

Pettiness rarely becomes one, unless one fronts a band called “the Heartbreakers”, but I was sorely tempted to feign relenting just enough to get my hands upon the card for the sole purpose of locking that bastard away in the safe and calling it in as suspected stolen. Oh how it would delight me to drop a metric ton of inconvenience upon their heads.

Oh well. I have more productive things to do.