I apologize if I gave you the impression that I give a flea fiddling flying rat's fucking ass.

(I'm quite suddenly moving two towns away, so my response to comments will be .. uh ... non-existent. Also if I don't post as much as usual that'll be why. )

We play bingo once a week at my restaurant, and I'm the bingo bitch. So it falls to me to enforce the rules, hand out materials, play music, try to keep the crowd entertained, etc. And it never fails, somebody's gotta bitch about something.

“You're going too fast!”
“You're going too slow!”
“It's too loud!”
“I can't hear you!”
“This music sucks!”
“I want a winning card!”
“I don't want to listen to this, I just want to eat!”
“Your drink specials aren't very good!”

The most common complaints are the noise and the length of time. What people don't seem to understand is that I don't fucking care. I'm not going to turn it down just because one crusty old fuck doesn't like ZZ Top. Oh, I might turn it down to appease them … but then I start turning it back up bit by bit until it's louder than it was before. Why? Because fuck them, that's why. Especially the assholes who wait until I step away to do something, then come up and start twiddling knobs on my amplifier (one fucker even turned it totally off). Joke's on them – the volume is controlled through my laptop. And anybody who touches that is getting their fingers broken.

Then there are the people who bitch because we do breaks in between each game. Sometimes they're longer than I intended – people like to talk to me when I start walking around. I'm not going to tell them to shut up because people think they're at a damn bingo parlor.

If they complain I'm calling numbers too slowly, you can bet your ass I'll call them slower or find a reason to take a mid-game break.

You think the game's taking too long? Okay, our next bingo pattern will be 4/5 of a blackout.

One night a group of regulars was sitting next to me and heckling me constantly, we had a nice back-and-forth going the whole night. Most of the crowd though it was funny (especially when I announced “people are dumb” over the mic accidentally ….), but several other people starting whining about them “interrupting” the game. I told my friends, and guess what got worse?

This week, I had just announced that we'd be taking a three song break before the next round, and was going through drink specials when a man approached me. We were way ahead of schedule, because people had won the first two games very quickly, so I figured it would be a noise complaint.
“I don't know if you're aware,” he said nastily, “but we have children and three songs is too long of a break!”
I gave him my sweetest smile. “Sorry! I'm supposed to keep the game going until around 11.”
“Well, it's too long! It needs to be shorter!”
I just smiled at him again and said “okay.” Then I got “distracted” and let two extra songs play before I went back to the game.

Because here's the thing: the volume and the pacing are part of my damn job. What these people don't understand is that I'm supposed to keep the music at a certain volume, otherwise everyone can hear everyone's else's conversations … not to mention the cooks yelling and slamming things around. I'm supposed to play upbeat, party-ish music to create atmosphere. I'm supposed to laugh and talk and joke with people.

Not to mention that we don't charge people to play the game – not a cent. We don't even require them to order anything, which I think is a mistake, but whatever. So I'm supposed to keep them in the place as long as I can, trying to get them to order more drinks, more appetizers, more dessert. We're a freaking business, and that's how we make money.

So when I'm already ahead of schedule and somebody wants me to go faster, or when the volume is perfect and somebody decides to bitch about it, I pretty much do the opposite. And I thoroughly enjoy it. Am I being a passive-aggressive little bitch with this behavior? Hell yes I am. But I take great joy in it, because it's basically the only time in that building that I can disregard a customer's request. See, I totally have management's backing on all of it! I even have the regional manager's approval. Someone once wrote a nasty email complaining that bingo starts too late and takes too long, and the regional manager pretty much wrote back, “Sorry, go somewhere else if you don't like it.”

I kind of wanted to hug him.