One of the obnoxious parts of mental illness, even the relatively benign and easily controllable mild anxiety that I’m afflicted with(*), is that it is occasionally difficult to tell whether you’re authentically experiencing your own emotions or not.  To wit, I had a deeply shitty day today.  I didn’t have a deeply shitty sales day– that was merely average– but a day where basically everybody seemed to be fucking with me.  And right now I’m seriously sitting here fucking gaslighting myself trying to figure out if I’m really allowed to be as pissed off about my day as I am or whether the fact that I’ve been going off the reservation and tinkering with my meds is altering how I react to things.  And the real bullshit?  There’s no way to know at all.  Maybe I really had a shitty day.  Maybe my head’s fucking with me.  Who knows?  I’m blogging.

Anyway.

My favorite customer today was yet another entry in the I Never Want to Talk About Delivery Again series.  Let’s be clear, and I know I’ve said this shit before: there is no such thing as free delivery in a furniture store.  You are either paying for your own delivery via a surcharge, in case people who don’t get their stuff delivered don’t pay for delivery and you know exactly how much you’re paying, or your delivery is rolled into the price of the furniture, meaning that everyone who buys anything pays for delivery and you don’t know how much you’re paying.  There is no free delivery.  There is only a delivery charge that they don’t tell you about.  And those places typically aren’t about to give you a discount if you don’t get your stuff delivered.  So everyone pays.

We charge for delivery.  There is both a floor and a ceiling to our delivery charge; it won’t go less than a certain amount and it won’t go over a certain amount, and within that range it’s pegged to a certain percentage of the value of the furniture.  Also, if you’re over a certain distance away there’s an extra surcharge based on how far away you are.  Because if you’re fifty fucking miles away you’d best be damn sure that you’re going to pay more than you will if you’re down the damn street.

Anyway.  That now feels like way too much lead-in for the story payoff, but fuck it; I wrote it and it’s on the screen and I’m not deleting it.  I had a woman get frothingly angry with me today– like, actual spittle flying out of her mouth– not because we charge for delivery, and not because we charge extra to deliver out to fucking Michigan City, which is nearly fifty goddamn miles away– but because we charge more if we have to deliver more.

She actually said the words “Who charges more if they’re delivering more?  I’ve never even heard of that!”  And, just in case I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly, she said it more than once, implying that she’s never mailed or ordered a package, even once, at any point in her entire life.

I dunno.  It doesn’t sound like much.  But she was seriously irrationally angry about the whole thing, and it was at a point in the day where I was well beyond giving a fuck, and I don’t like it when people say shit that makes no fucking sense at all.  So, there: a blog post.

(*) I always want to make it clear whenever I talk about my issues with anxiety: I’m talking about me, here, not you.  Mental illnesses are as YMMV as anything can get.  I will never argue with anyone, ever, who struggles with anxiety and would not use the phrase “relatively benign and easily controllable” to describe their problems.  That’s me.  I’m not talking about you.