The Words You Were Looking For

 A couple of weeks before Christmas this past year I went out for drinks one Friday afternoon with a good buddy of mine, Mike. As we were walking into the restaurant I noticed a young lady inside coming to the door just as we were to leave. Because I believe that it is still courteous to hold a door for a woman I opened the door and held it open for her to step through, which she did gladly. But instead of a "Thank You" or exhibiting any gratitude at all she got this noticeable smug look on her now upturned face, walked silently between Mike and me- her body language clearly demonstrating that she considered her self worth to be much more than ours. With absolutely no regard she marched on her merry way as if the village serfs had done their expected function. I said nothing because it really wasnt worth any sort of acknowledgment , but 25 year old Mike turned to the ungrateful twenty-something and barked out loudly at her in front of a courtyard full of people " The words you're looking for bitch are THANK YOU!". She stopped for just a second but then quickly sped away realizing that the serfs might, in fact, be dangerous.

This incident, like so many others, is just another small bit of life in the big city, but isn't it indicative of a trend sweeping our population - one of self-entitlement and delusions of grandeur. People have FACEBOOK,pages because it makes them feel as though they possess their  own little celebrity web page. Yeah, I know everyone says it's to keep in touch with friends and family, but really, in 2012 aren't there like a zillion ways to do that at this point? No, it's the "I'm A Celebrity- NO, REALLY I AM" virus that everyone everywhere seems to have contracted and desperate to maintain.An off shoot of this growing misplaced madness is an over-entitled narcissistic personal behavior we all see every day on the roads, in the supermarkets, and in our offices around the DC area. I"ll admit, we've been really fortunate at Eyecentral in McLean to have as well grounded a client base as we do-- our daily exposure to crazed unstable people is quite small considering the population. But, on the second Friday of this new year, a day the office now refers to as FREAKY FRIDAY- we experienced a spike in clients exhibiting this type of irrational behavior which illustrated how we are not immune to its effects.

My first Freaky Friday client was a long time patient of Eyecentral- a middle aged man- interior designer- who's first pair of glasses ever were reading glasses he purchased in 2011.The front desk staff had been leary of Mr.Designer for years citing a volatile nature which had him regularly complaining to the employees more often than not. Personally, I had never experienced this side of him - until Freaky Friday, that is. The reading glasses he purchased in January of 2011 he proceeded to bring back to us three times over the course of the year in pieces. That is actually something we see quite regularly with new glasses wearers. Since they have no exposure to handling glasses they wind up breaking the frames or damaging the lenses more often than long time wearers. But, in Mr. Designers case, he broke the frames over and over then demanded his pound of flesh each time he brought them in to be replaced. Since the frames are guaranteed not to break at Eyecentral we replaced them each time with no hesitation, but he kept insisting it wasnt his handling  but poor product quality which caused them to break.  As I said nothing to the ungrateful woman I held the door open for, I said nothing to Mr. Designer in regards to improving his handling of his eyeglasses.

 So, when Mr. Designer came in that Freaky friday morning to purchase brand new reading glasses, he'd lost the third replacement pair a month earlier, I happily offered to pull him a grouping of frames that I knew would hold up better( and make him look better) than the old pair we'd had so many problems with. When I came back to the desk with the first candidates he had somehow found his old reading glass frame on the board somewhere and, (head shake in disbelief) insisted that I re-sell the same frame back to him again. When I asked him to explain to me why he'd consider buying the same frame he'd  broken and complained about all of 2011 he first corrected me saying he;d never broken the frames- they fell apart from being poor quality.When I suggested that if that were the case it would be even more foolish to consider buying them again he stood his ground and insisted I sell them to him. I offered good naturedly that one of the signs of mental illness was, in fact, repeating the same behavior over and over and getting the same undesired results- that altering behavior might actually give better results. Well, that just set him off. He jumped out of his seat, face the color of beets, and quietly screamed inches from my face "I am the customer and the customer is always right- and you will do as I say!". Anyone who knows me knows it takes a lot to ruffle my feathers, so I countered with " that saying is from the 40's when the majority of the customers werent overly entitled, chemically altered, and self-destructive ego maniacs who make decisions based on irrational thought processes". As you can imagine, that observation was not well received.

 Mr. Designer stood up, grabbed his coat, asked me all crazy-eyed again if I would sell him the frame he wanted- to which I said I would NOT- and he quickly exited the office sputtering loudly to all in earshot about his rights, his importance, and his needs being all that matters. In spite of me trying to get him to see that no rational person would want to repurchase a product that they claimed to be defective, he held firmly to doing just that, almost as if he needed to restart a process that would afford him the best opportunity to bring himself back in front of us this year complaining  again about our products or services. Being nearly mentally stable myself I can not fathom why he lost it so totally like he did over something so foolish. And in case you're wondering, the entire interaction with Mr. Designer took less than eight minutes to happen--as if he came in with a problem. I finally saw the hair pin trigger the staff had been talking about all this time-- then again, I probably got blasted on his Fake Celebrity -I mean FACEBOOK- page, later that day for my incompetence or arrogance. 

 About 10 minutes after that first fiasco, which I prematurely labeled as our "one nut job of the day" , I was handed a plastic frame by the doctor to get my opinion on whether the frame was still viable or not. It belonged to the woman currently sitting in his chair in the exam room. The frame had been stretched, twisted, contorted, and mutilated like nothing I"d ever seen in my 20 years as an optician. The doc was prepared to tell the woman she'd need to buy a new frame and pair of glasses but I sort of consider myself to be a MASTER ADJUSTER, and I took this pathetic near death frame to be a challenge I couldnt ignore. I set to reheating and reconfiguring it into its original shape, which I , in fact, managed to do after 20 minutes of expert handling. It was obvious to me that the frame had been exposed to great amounts of heat and had, simply, melted over and over again over some period of time. I was very proud that I had managed to save the frame and save the patient an extra couple hundred dollars and when she came out of the exam room I expected some degree of happiness. Well, of course you know where this going- being freaky Friday and all.

 :"I guess they're better", she sort of muttered disgustedly to me after tossing them roughly onto her face.(I was like "WTF- theyre nearly perfect").I was still trying to come down from Mr. Designers crazy antics minutes earlier so I was determined to make this encounter as civil as I was allowed to . As she sort of weirdly jiggled them around on her face I asked her what had happened to them to make them so unwearable. "You tell me", was what this woman with the color of the Redskins team nastily responded to me. "Well," I suggested, "it appears as though they melted from overheating- and not just once but a number of times" to which this apparently ungrateful woman responded, "Well, I don't know how that would have happened since they are my driving glasses and I always leave them in the car!" Again, people WTF???? I thought she might be joking since anyone over the age of ten would know that car interiors get brutal during the summer time, and since she bought the glasses in May of 2011 she had left them inside of her car throughout the months of June and July  2011- the two hottest months EVER on record. She still didnt seem to make ANY connection between heat and their destruction. The front desk staff later told me she'd called on and off for months bitching about the quality of  the frames -reporting that they were deteriorating on a daily basis- and she accused us each time of selling her inferior products.(Her frame, actually, is the product of a Danish company renowned the world over for their quality and precision). Then, Ms. Redskins Hair went on to inform me that she'd paid A LOT for her glasses and didnt expect them to perform so poorly for all the money she'd spent. After a quick check, I informed her back that she'd only spent $40.00 out of pocket for the glasses her husbands insurance company actually paid the majority for ($385.00) but she remained combative and continued her misplaced criticism of our products and the associated poor reaction by us to her plight.