Queen of Rambles

For the most part living in a large town isn’t totally awful. If you’re an introvert, you have a certain anonymity that frees you from useless small talk and making nicey-nicey with people you’d rather ignore. There are services and products that small town dwellers can only dream of. In our case, public services such as schools, roads and random city hall events are much better funded. There’s a lot of free family-friendly entertainment that fosters a false sense of community.

Of course, life on the fringes of a major metropolis has it’s downsides too. Traffic, housing prices, pollution–they spring to mind immediately.

Then there’s the customer service.

I never thought of good customer service as being a particular quirk of small town life, but after just one week back in this hoppin’ little suburb I’m ready to move back to Oregon.

I guess there are several reasons for the difference, but I still don’t like it. There shouldn’t be a feeling of surprise when the lady behind the counter wishes me a good day with a smile on her face. Oh, I get wished a good day here every time I complete a transaction, but it’s never with a smile. It’s always a monotone good day, rife with feelings of “eat shit and die.”

Here, no one knows anyone, so your grandma isn’t going to chew you out for being rude to her neighbor’s cousin’s ex-boyfriend. It’s less likely your boss is going to care about the customers because there are always more more more more more. You’re unlikely to offend the minister’s wife, and if you do no one will give two figs.

In a small town making minimum wage sucks, but at least the cost of living is a lot cheaper so you might actually be able to pay your rent and eat, if you budget carefully. Here, there’s simply no way a person could work a minimum wage job 40 hours a week and come anywhere near making rent without a whole lot of government assistance.

I know these things intellectually, but I still get really tired of rude service people. I want to smack them with Mike’s duck head umbrella and tell them to find a different job. Go to college! Get a better job! It seems simple to me, but maybe that’s because I’m tenacious and figure out how to do things on my own. No one ever handed me anything.

Today Erik and I had to go to Jo-Ann’s to pick up a special order. They had decorator fabric on mega-sale a couple of weeks before I went to Oregon, so I’m going to recover my dining room chairs.

The woman working the front register is a freak. I don’t know if she hates kids and thinks it’s funny to pretend to like them/tease them when she really hates them or if she really likes kids and is trying to tease them but she’s so socially awkward it comes off as hatred. I just can’t tell.

Erik, being the two year old that he is, likes to walk by himself and wander. He is not a perfect child by any means, nor am I a perfect mother, but I do have an unholy terror of people thinking I’m a bad mom with a bratty kid, so I bust my ass to keep him in check. I noticed they were having a 50% all Halloween stuff sale, so before picking up my special order, I wanted to pick up a few things. Have I mentioned I love Halloween? Erik was being just fine, wandering around looking at stuff, not even touching anything, and this woman was kind of freaking out, telling me he was going to touch something. Ummmmm. . .how is his touching a costume going to hurt? I can see keeping a tight rein on him if we’re in a China shop, but when we’re going down an aisle of unbreakable stuff? Not so much.

I gathered quite a selection and was having a hard time carrying it all and keeping up the boyo. He found himself a felt bag that he was happily packing around and I let him since the alternative would split everyone’s ears. This woman started having a cow, trying to get him to put it away, telling him that his mommy didn’t want to buy it so he couldn’t have it.

Then she found some god-awful turkey puppet that squawked and lit up.

Let’s just let that sentence digest in your brain for a minute.

The woman started chasing Erik with a giant squawking, lit up turkey. Erik started screaming. I wanted to crawl under a bolt of fabric and disappear into another dimension. I just did not have the patience to deal with this crazed woman or an upset toddler. It wasn’t that the situation itself was all that awful, but everyone was on my last nerve today.

After about ten million years and lots of screaming and squirming, Erik and I were able to get out of there with all our loot, but it was not pleasant. I am imagining this lady going home and logging onto one of those vile childfree websites, posting all about this horrible child who came into her store, took products (the felt bag) off the shelf, and ran around the store while the mother did nothing about it. I got the feeling she thought I should have had him in a cage or on a leash, and that I was one of those self-absorbed, stupid mothers who just let her kids run free with no regard to anyone or anything around us. It’s that part that bothers me–the part where she makes me feel like crap instead of making a joke or being even moderately friendly.

Maybe I’m just overly sensitive.

Anyway. . . about Halloween. . .

I think I’m going to dress as Rosie the Riveter since I only need to get a bandanna and my outfit will be complete. I really want to dress Erik up as something cute, but he is uncooperative so I don’t think he would be willing to carry around accessories that would make the outfit more realistic. I have a duck costume, but I’m not really feeling the love. Any cheap ideas out there in blog land?

We’re going to the moms group party and need to take something. I tried making Witches Warts with raisins, green food coloring and white chocolate last year. Disaster! Won’t ever try that again. This year I am willing to forgo the idea of semi-healthy, but still want something easy. In that spirit, I picked up candy molds, candy melts and candy coloring at Jo-Ann’s today because it would be oh-so-easy to hand paint 40 little chocolate scarecrows. As soon as I got in the car I wanted to smack myself. What the hell was I thinking? Obviously I’m not going to be doing that, even though I bought the supplies. I swear my brain leaves the building when I’m standing in a crafts store.

I think I better go to bed. I’ve been crabby all day from lack of sleep so it’s pretty stupid to stay up late again.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.