I made a new banner ad this morning. It�s pending approval, and I�m not sure it�ll be approved because of the implied violence.

To those who wonder now� I have never actually gouged someone�s eyes out. But I�ve thought about it. Usually when I�m at work and I�ve just finished taking the stemmy parts out of thirty tomatoes and I go back out front and someone says something completely idiotic to me. I do not suffer morons gladly, but ironically, my line of work has put me into position to have to suffer through the stupid comments over and over throughout the day. Like I was mentioning yesterday, I�ve really had to learn to curb my responses. I�m sarcastic by nature (not that any of you would�ve noticed) and it is generally poor form to be sarcastic to your customers, no matter how ridiculous some of the things they ask you are. I had another one of those calls last night where the person asks me �Are you open?�. I always want to answer �No, they pay me to come in and answer the phone all night when they�re closed.� Wouldn�t it stand to reason that if someone answers the phone, the place is open?

I'm glad stupidity isn't toxic, or I'd have dumbness poisoning by now.

Welfare checks are out tonight, that means that tonight I'll be dealing with the cream of the crap. All those people from down the street that have given up on mowing the lawn and decided to cultivate a festive yard of dogsh*t and gravel. All those nice people with mullets who can't afford curtains (they usually have bedsheets in the windows, sometimes newspaper or tinfoil) but have StarChoice satellite dishes.

My personal favourites are the ones who figure "Oh! We have money today! We don't have to feed our kids, let's send them all to the coffee shop and they can eat soup. They can bring me a coffee, too!" Then they send kids as young as 5 with a list of items that often are illegible or spelled so horribly it's like reading some kind of WWII code. Not like you can really get any help from the really little kids who brought the list, either. They usually can't remember what Mommy wanted, and they can't read, let alone decipher the bizarre heiroglyphics scrawled on the back of a cigarette package.

Do I sound resentful? Well, I guess I sometimes am. These people come in and do this twice a month... when they get their welfare checks and when they get their baby bonus check. Yes, it's true. In Ontario, the government pays for people's promiscuity. Every time someone on welfare has a baby, they up their check a couple hundred bucks. People with lower incomes also get a "baby bonus", an extra 200$ per kid halfway through the month. A woman on welfare can have more children until her uterus falls out and bursts into flames, and the government will pay for it.

So when I have a hard time getting any sort of assistance in the way of a student loan (make note of that- LOAN- meaning it's paid back with interest by me) and I earn my paycheck on my hands and knees scrubbing floor grout while these guys sit at home and watch satellite TV... well, yeah. Of course I get resentful sometimes. I can't help it.

I'd better get going. I feel better now that I've had a good rant, and I've got to get into my uniform and drag myself off to battle the ravenous locusts. It ought to be an interesting night.