You gave me strength when I was weak

Had a couple really weird dreams last night. They're already starting to fade, so I'd like to get them down as soon as possible.

The first one, Usher (yes, the rapper guy) and I, along with two other guys, broke into this office building. I had a sledgehammer. I was destroying security cameras with it, and smashed a few glass doors as well. I think our objective was to make these two trains smash into each other. However, in the distance, we started to hear sirens, so we left. We snuck out through a back entrance, one of those doors that has a button that makes it open, but the cops saw my sledgehammer and stopped us, and arrested us. I think we ended up at the CSI crime lab, for whatever reason.

Crap. I've only been up for about 10 minutes, but the other ones have already started to fade.

But this really annoying thing happened at work last night. Some lady called back after we took her order (well, Rudy took it), and complained that Rudy didn't say anything back after she said "Merry Christmas." I really, really wanted to walk out there and smack her, or tell her to get a life, or something like that. Actually, I take that back. I can be more subtle. I wanted to tell her that his parents were killed in a car wreck by a drunk driver on Christmas, or he was molested as a child by a department-store Santa, or something along those lines, and is now crying in the back, thanks to the unpleasant memories she just flung in his face. But I didn't. I said, "I'm sorry, ma'am, he didn't hear you. Merry Christmas."

I'm not going to go into the myriad reasons this sort of person bothers me. I'm not trying to deny them their holiday cheer; I do, however, take major offense at their expectation that everybody is required to reciprocate it. What if the person taking her order had been Muslim? Jewish? Atheist? Again, I don't begrudge them their celebration, just don't expect everyone else to do so, and certainly don't complain about it. It's similar to a situation when these two girls were ordering, and prefaced it with "How are you?" I've taken a lot of orders over the years, and well over ninety-five percent of the time when someone starts with that, they don't listen for a response and just start ordering with two seconds. Which is good, because I really don't want to carry on conversations with people through the boards - chances are, there's other people waiting to order, or for me to make drinks or bag, and wasting time like that is only delaying other peoples' orders. However, they called back after their order was taken and demanded to know how I was doing. I wanted to go break their headlights with a baseball bat and say "Better now." Seriously, did they think they were being cute, or making the world a better place, or what? Truly, the service industry is the last refuge of the damned.