While most of the time, I would admit it to be singularly arrogant of me to dismiss 99.99% of the population as being idiotic, self-indulgent, ignorant and rapidly becoming a waste of my time, oxygen and my already loose grasp on that abstract little entity the lucky few have come to know as patience, the day's events have confirmed this judgment to me.

I have a particuarly shit job while I loaf around waiting to get back into a decent academic community. I serve the feckless, the penniless, the jobless and the lonely with beer at my local supermarket, all the while praying for an earthquake to rattle one of the loosely-attached light fixtures just hard enough to fall onto either my head, or the idiot with the fistful of coins lookin down on me on my little chair, and end it, please god end it.

Normally, this status quo continues on quite (in)tolerably, with occasional interludes of violent language or behavior from those too young, too poor or too damn drunk to equip themselves with beer to drown out the sensations that pass for their feeble existence. I tell them the total amount they need to pay, or tell them to get out, and they do so, that's the way of it, I know it, and I can live with it.

However, after correcting some wizened old crone, complete with full foxtrot fashion which I believe has been lost (Don't lose it, you might find it again, every item of clothing from that era should be burnt) since the fifties, on her assumption that we shooed her from our refund till just for our own amusement, as well as her unflattering description of a friend and colleague, one would think the precrocious octogenarian would hasten her departure before she further embarassed herself by defecating on the floor, or perhaps opening her mouth and letting even more of her indigestible verbal bile spill out.

This arrogant so-and-so had the nerve to return into the alcohol section of the store, pick up a pack of lager, and make her way to my till, where (thankfully delayed for a few precious seconds of my sanity by some officious pen-work on my duty card) she then proceeded to use the purchase of said lager to facilitate the most fucking ridiculous, pretentious, rude, ignorant and generally draining lecture on the importance of manners to "the customer" I have ever heard.

I was left with three choices, either...

a)Shrug and allow to purchase the alcohol, and pray that she shuts up eventually.
b)Match her own foul verbal bile with my own, reducing her to a quivering wreck and laughing her out of the store.
c)Pick up a handy foot-step-stool thing in the corner of my till, and proceed to bash her over the head with it until her face was no longer recognisable as evidence of Homo Sapiens Sapiens let alone as a reminder that this woman ever existed.

To my fault, I chose option a), but the idiocy did not end there, she returned to the main section of the store and straight to the general manager in an attempt to get me sacked, needless to say I didn't, but the life-draining counselling session with my manager left me thinking that I should have chosen option c), why didn't I choose option c)?

The simple fact is, there are far too many stupid people out there, and where once the population of idiots was self-regulating, idiots being prone to kill themselves in all manner of ways, more intelligent people are forced to suffer, smile and nod along as the idiots get their way, fuck, we're not only allowing the cattle of society to flourish, we're encouraging them by actually allowing them to believe their opinion mattered in the first place. Isn't now a good time to be asking why?

- The Angry Young Man