The Designer's Drugs

Medium: Literature
Stimulus: A.J. Adams – The Customer is Not Always Right
Anno: 2009

I’m going to make this crystal clear – I am utterly in love with this book. If I had my way, I would let it have its way with me and degrade me as it saw fit. We would run away to Las Vegas, where an Elvis impersonator would marry us while a pirate dirge version of “Viva Las Vegas” played us down the aisle. Happily ever after.

The greed-soaked Christmas brainwashing is beginning, and like many retail peasants my hatred of humanity is roaring into high gear. At any time of year, a book that savages the customer caste will soothe the rage-fueled spirits of servants drowning in the Needies. Yet the holiday season is a special time when the venting offered in the pages of this slim treasure is more vital than ever.

The Customer is Not Always Right was sold to me on the tale of an auto insurance worker on the phone with a client who ran into a cement divider. The guy acted as though he wasn’t responsible for the accident, since the divider wasn’t supposed to be there. The argument went so into the ludicrous that he stated that he wouldn’t have been responsible for running over a baby in a parking lot, since babies aren’t supposed to be in parking lots.

There’s a special place in my heart for this story, though there are many more tales of ridiculousness and horror. Not every yarn in the book is one of stunned outrage – some of them take a more bemused and benign tone – but the overall point is to take aim at those who believe that spending money covers a multitude of social sins.

Schmucks who can’t read, racist patriots, and spoiled princesses are easy – yet equally satisfying – fodder, but there are also many accounts of customers so bizarre that they defy all preconceptions of reality and sanity. Take the girl who confuses condoms with birth control pills, or the guy who called the Anne Frank House and got flustered when realizing that Anne Frank’s ghost didn’t haunt the house. For the sake of the world, I don’t want to believe that any of these weird events described really happened, but I know that is a pipe dream.

Without any doubt, this is one of the greatest books ever written, and it’s inspired me to start up a special feature. It’s audience participation time! This holiday season, send in your Christmas horror stories and they’ll soon see the light of day. Don’t let the Needies win. Fight back!