‘I’ll have a coke please mate’. Here we go, my first customer has to be a Brummie. ‘Ice & lemon?’ I politely ask, knowing full well this manner will not be reciprocated, and already asking myself why the fuck did I bother? Because your job is to be treated like a cunt?
‘What?’ I told you.
‘Ice & lemon?’ I repeat.
‘Yeah, go on then’ He smiled but his vacant eyes tell me he’s probably wondering where the fuck his shitty little kids are, so his words ooze lazily from face-hole, and barely resemble perfunctory.
‘Anything else?’ I ask, hoping this transaction, this inter-locution, this space and time, this epoch will rapidly dissolve into the particles of history.
‘What?’ This is what I could gather he meant; you see, I am spicing up his vocabulary, for you. Otherwise it will simply be ‘ooo’s and ‘ahh’s and ‘mmmth’s; I want you to understand this human being, is an adult. Can you tell I’m bitter?
‘Anything else, mate?’ I linger on mate, just enough so he senses my agitation.
‘Yeah, another coke please mate’. No common-fucking-sense, plus, he has repeated mate, not because he has returned the loathing, but by sheer ignorance of his own mouth!
‘Is that everything?’ My eye begins to twitch, and the monster inside me imagines driving two cocktail sticks into his frontal lobe, but instead I calmly wait.
‘Ummm yeah I think so…oh wait wait wait, my wife hasn’t ordered yet, la, Love….Deirdre….Deirdre, you’re holding up the barman, what would you like?’ He exhorts from across the bar to his fat wife, who is currently trying to tame one of her screaming children, whilst licking her thumb and smearing it across the face of another; she bellows back…‘I’ll have a gin & tonic Pete’
Pete, then turns back to me, and yet again, I have to ask, ‘ice & lemon with that one sir?’ This question will truly be the death of me, I will hang myself from the very curve in its mark.
‘Deirdre…ice & lemon?’ While trying to get her attention, Pete, has turned around a couple of times to see a blank extremely pissed off face.
‘What?’ she hisses.
I see he now understands how irritating it can be to ask the same questions over and over again. But what annoys me is how he will blame on it his wife. I can never work out why people do this. Are they are just ignorant to the world and have no self-awareness? Or do they know how fucking irritating they are, but would rather blame it on their wives than admit it?
‘Ice…& lemon?’ These are his first fully enunciated words, which he slows for her benefit.
She smiles, probably happy that she has managed to piss her husband off, or maybe she is so used to being patronised in such a way, and decides to rise above it. Calmly she replies, ‘Yeah, go on then, ta.’
‘Sorry mate’ he chucks a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of Deirdre and continues, ‘Women eh? Who’d av’em? Oh, sorry mate, I said no ice for the kids… Oh, and I didn’t order mine’ he finished jovially. I didn’t physically say anything, but inside I was screaming, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOOOOUUU, as he winced and asked his final question, ‘do you have Guinness?’
Brainexcreations 