Well, not YOU. YOU don't piss me off. You're terrific. I don't know what I would have ever done without you. But everybody else pisses me off.

I have my pet peeves. We all do. I just have a lot, I guess. But you know who I hate most?

People who think that just because I work at Kinko's and I'll help them press the Start button on a damn copier that I obviously want to hear their stupid-assed story about their wacky wedding where Uncle Dick drank too much champagne and passed out in the salad bar.

Okay, so that's not a bad story.

But what about when Maude Crankendeshankmeyer needs an hour of assistance pressing the start button on a color copier to copy a single photograph because even though the place is swarming with customers to her we're obviously not busy so before I can show her how to copy a photo and go back to my register she has to tell me a story about her whole experience and the customers around are becoming irate but if I walk away from this absolute wretch of a human being I stand the chance of offending her and destroying the very foundation of what Kinko's is all about so instead I have to listen to her lame vacation story that I wish was mine because it would mean I was in a foreign country away from this vile broad, but alas, it's her story and dammit, she's going to share it with me:

MAUDE: This picture is from my trip to Brazil, it's a picture of the Amazon...

ME: Wow, neat. So anyway, to copy that all you need to do is put it right here...

MAUDE: It was amazing you know. The Amazon. So much water, and trees...

ME: Terrific. So this button starts the copier.

MAUDE: I was telling Earl, that's my husband, his name is Earl, and I was telling Earl that he should have seen this, I said, "Earl, you should see this," and Earl says, of course Earl is my husband, he says...

ME: Yes. Earl. Very nice. Ma'am, all you need to do to run the copier is press this green button and you're all se--...

MAUDE: And the natives would stand on the shore and point and yell at us in Hindi or Swahili or Gaelic or whatever language they speak and hurl large stones at our heads. I think it was their way of welcoming the Americans to their homeland...

I dunno, I just wish I had a button. I mean, we have buttons for everything else. I hit our Panic Button if we're held up and the police will come nab the robber. I hit the Page Button if I need to call another coworker from the back to come assist me at the front counter. And I wish I had the Blithering Idiot Customer (BIC) button so I could press it and someone could sneak up behind these customers with a bottle of ether and a handkerchief and I could return to my coworkerly duties of pretending to work.

So, anyone else out there in retail, help a crotchety Kinko's coworker out. Any ideas of ways for me to escape the grasp of these customers besides pretending to go into drooling convulsions on the floor? Let the ideas come flooding in...