My name is Stephanie and I'll be your Designated Jerk today...

Today is shaping up to be one of those days where I wish I could just retreat to a cave and not come out until the rest of the people here feel nicer.

I cleaned up the title of this blog because the actual term I would use is "Designated A-hole." That is from the movie "The Cutting Edge." There is a scene where the guy asks, "When did I become the designated a**hole around here?" And today that is how I am feeling.

I just took a phone call from a man looking for a very specific oven/microwave wall unit made by Frigidaire. He looked on their website and found that we are a Frigidaire dealer. This was news to me. I started looking through our catalog and trying to find anything that says Frigidaire on it anywhere. The man on the phone then starts giving me a model number, using a most bizarre mix of military style phonetic alphabet. I told him that I was unable to find that model number in our catalog. He started getting angry at me, and first clarified that he had called the right business. I told him that yes we were Pacific Building Center, but I had no idea why we were listed as a dealer.

He was getting crankier and crankier, and so I kept searching trying to find anything that might help. I struck out and was trying to apologize to him and he said, "Are you a Frigidaire dealer or not?" I said, "I don't think we are, and I don't know why we would be listed on their website." He snapped, "Well that doesn't really matter if you aren't a dealer!" And then he hung up on me.

As I was mentally shaking my head and trying to figure out where I went wrong on that call, a man walks in and (standing 10 feet away from me) yells, "HELLO??? IS ANYONE HERE?" So now in addition to being the designated jerk, I am apparently also invisible. I asked him what I could help him with and then took him to the aisle where he could find what he was looking for, and pointed to the two specific packages that would be what he wanted. I went back to the front counter, and waited on a customer. I rang up his plumbing fittings and asked if he would like a bag. He promptly responded, "No thanks, I married one."

Now that's just a joke that gets funnier and funnier each time I hear it. Seriously??? Why do men think that joke is funny? And why do they think that the woman ringing them out will think it is funny?

I'm starting to wish that we still had the little potato guns that we had last year at Christmas time. There have been a number of people today who would be very deserving of a potato pellet right to the forehead! Starting with the guy who kept pumping the empty coffee air pot, while staring at me and grinning. I told him that the pot behind it was full, but he just kept grinning at me and trying to get coffee from the empty pot.

Then my father was helping another customer in plumbing and asked if I had ordered in a certain fill valve. I checked and saw that I had not ordered any more.

I looked up at the customer I was helping and said, "Stephanie Munden, disappointing customers since 1996!"