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We have a regular smoke shop customer whom I call TBF -- this is short for 'Tubercular Baby Fart,' after a baffling and offensive statement he made about Hilary Clinton during the 2008 presidential primary election season. TBF is an older white man who buys a particular type of pipe tobacco and believes all clerks are dying to listen to him lecture about obscure topics on which he holds generally un-PC opinions.
(For an example, read this post from January 2009 in which he told a story about Rod Serling being a sexist jerk as if the story were a wonderful and completely unproblematic joke.)
Anyway. I have been trying to write up this post for a couple days now, but I am generally so drained when I get home from work that the last thing I want to do is work myself up again. But this new incident has been bugging the hell out of me, and I think it will continue to bug me until I drain the abscess by making it public. The dialogue is paraphrased because I don't have an eidetic memory, but it's true to the gist of the conversation.
On Monday afternoon, TBF came in and bought some tobacco. I was doing paperwork on one side of the counter and pretended to be too busy to deal with him, so ET waited on him. While he stood at the counter and fiddled with his tobacco tin, TBF asked ET if he kept up with current events.
"Not really," said ET. (ET's responses throughout this conversation were delivered in an 'I'm not really listening to you; I don't agree with you; please go away so I can stop humoring you' tone, which went right over TBF's head.)
"Well," said TBF, "I am not making this up -- it's in the Ithaca Journal, if you don't believe me -- but the head of Iran's air force is called General Salami."
"Oh?" said ET.
"And that's no bologna!" TBF added, grinning around his pipe.
"Oh," said ET.
"You might even say it's a turn for the wurst," said TBF, and then immediately killed any possible humor by adding, "spelled W-U-R-S-T. Like sausage." (Note, incidentally, that this is not a new joke. *sigh*)
"I see," said ET.
TBF proceeded to change the subject. "Speaking of names," he said, "do you know Secretary-Generals of the UN? Aside from Kurt Waldheim (who turned out to be a Nazi, which was great), not a single one has had a normal name."
(This is the point where I was unable to continue pretending that I was not listening to the conversation and began actively gritting my teeth to avoid yelling at him for ethnocentrism and/or racism. I don't know how people can miss the fact that Secretary-Generals come from all over the world -- it's called the United Nations, after all, not "America plus all those fake people who don't count" -- and that their names are perfectly normal in their own cultures... that, in fact, American/Anglo names sound just as strange and silly in other places as foreign names sound to us.)
TBF continued: "First you had Butt-rose Butt-rose Garlic. (Boutros Boutros-Ghali.) Then Coffee Anon. (Kofi Annan.) Did you know that in Elizabethan English, 'anon' meant 'soon'? So his name is Coffee Immediately." He laughed. "And now there's Spanky Moon."
At this point, I couldn't take it anymore. "No, Ban Ki-moon," I said. "He's Korean."
"Like I said, Spanky Moon," said TBF, completely ignoring me. "Which says more than I want to know about his childhood issues!" He laughed again.
MS walked up on the side of the counter opposite to where TBF was talking at ET and asked me what was going on. "He's being disgustingly ethnocentric," I told her. I wanted so badly to turn around again and chew him out for being a racist, sexist, misogynistic, ethnocentric waste of space, air, and brain matter, but it is bad form to yell at customers. It is very bad form. We try to just not respond and chivvy them out of the store via technically polite non-response.
I guess he'd finished his bad stand-up act, or ET's blatant lack of interest/enthusiasm/agreement finally became clear, because TBF left the store.
But oh god, I was seething. When I wrote up the incident for our store booklet of noteworthy incidents, I was seething again. I am seething as I write it up in more detail now.
There are not words for how much I have come to despise that man.
(For an example, read this post from January 2009 in which he told a story about Rod Serling being a sexist jerk as if the story were a wonderful and completely unproblematic joke.)
Anyway. I have been trying to write up this post for a couple days now, but I am generally so drained when I get home from work that the last thing I want to do is work myself up again. But this new incident has been bugging the hell out of me, and I think it will continue to bug me until I drain the abscess by making it public. The dialogue is paraphrased because I don't have an eidetic memory, but it's true to the gist of the conversation.
On Monday afternoon, TBF came in and bought some tobacco. I was doing paperwork on one side of the counter and pretended to be too busy to deal with him, so ET waited on him. While he stood at the counter and fiddled with his tobacco tin, TBF asked ET if he kept up with current events.
"Not really," said ET. (ET's responses throughout this conversation were delivered in an 'I'm not really listening to you; I don't agree with you; please go away so I can stop humoring you' tone, which went right over TBF's head.)
"Well," said TBF, "I am not making this up -- it's in the Ithaca Journal, if you don't believe me -- but the head of Iran's air force is called General Salami."
"Oh?" said ET.
"And that's no bologna!" TBF added, grinning around his pipe.
"Oh," said ET.
"You might even say it's a turn for the wurst," said TBF, and then immediately killed any possible humor by adding, "spelled W-U-R-S-T. Like sausage." (Note, incidentally, that this is not a new joke. *sigh*)
"I see," said ET.
TBF proceeded to change the subject. "Speaking of names," he said, "do you know Secretary-Generals of the UN? Aside from Kurt Waldheim (who turned out to be a Nazi, which was great), not a single one has had a normal name."
(This is the point where I was unable to continue pretending that I was not listening to the conversation and began actively gritting my teeth to avoid yelling at him for ethnocentrism and/or racism. I don't know how people can miss the fact that Secretary-Generals come from all over the world -- it's called the United Nations, after all, not "America plus all those fake people who don't count" -- and that their names are perfectly normal in their own cultures... that, in fact, American/Anglo names sound just as strange and silly in other places as foreign names sound to us.)
TBF continued: "First you had Butt-rose Butt-rose Garlic. (Boutros Boutros-Ghali.) Then Coffee Anon. (Kofi Annan.) Did you know that in Elizabethan English, 'anon' meant 'soon'? So his name is Coffee Immediately." He laughed. "And now there's Spanky Moon."
At this point, I couldn't take it anymore. "No, Ban Ki-moon," I said. "He's Korean."
"Like I said, Spanky Moon," said TBF, completely ignoring me. "Which says more than I want to know about his childhood issues!" He laughed again.
MS walked up on the side of the counter opposite to where TBF was talking at ET and asked me what was going on. "He's being disgustingly ethnocentric," I told her. I wanted so badly to turn around again and chew him out for being a racist, sexist, misogynistic, ethnocentric waste of space, air, and brain matter, but it is bad form to yell at customers. It is very bad form. We try to just not respond and chivvy them out of the store via technically polite non-response.
I guess he'd finished his bad stand-up act, or ET's blatant lack of interest/enthusiasm/agreement finally became clear, because TBF left the store.
But oh god, I was seething. When I wrote up the incident for our store booklet of noteworthy incidents, I was seething again. I am seething as I write it up in more detail now.
There are not words for how much I have come to despise that man.
