More Bad People Stories:

Last year, around this time, I was working at Future Shop, selling headphones to the moderately wealthy. Life was fairly good, because I wasn't too bad at selling headphones to the moderately wealthy. In fact, I was pretty sure I was going to be kept on once the season ended, because I was making a couple hundred dollars of commission every day I worked there.

This translates into "a shitload of headphones", for those at home keeping score. And my technique was pretty simple, too - I'd just talk to the customer about music, find a band we both liked (easy peasy), and then loan the customer my awesome headphones and play him a song on my ipod. It worked like a charm... and my return rates were lower than most any other salesman in my department.

But then, at the end of the season, my hours were cut short and I was told I would not be permanently hired. Basically, they kicked me out the door.

I wasn't too bummed by this, because, well, it wasn't the best job in the world or anything. And also, they kicked me out the door just before people traditionally return christmas purchases, meaning I got to keep much more of my commission from boxing day sales than those that were kept on.

But I was perplexed, as a few of the people that were kept on made considerably less than me, including one guy who only made one or two sales during boxing day. This guy was allergic to making sales, and actually at one point started telling a random customer about Milton Berle's over-large penis because he got nervous during his sales pitch.

I wish I were making this up.

This begs the question. Why the hell did they keep that guy, and can me?

I found out a while later. Apparently, I was anti-semitic, and made several anti-semitic comments to a jewish co-worker. And, as far as these things go, this is entirely true. And my jewish co-worker was canned because he made anti-native comments to one of his co-workers.

That native co-worker? That would be me. I'm part native, and he knew it. And I knew he was jewish. See, one day, we were sitting in the break room, having our lunch and shooting the shit. We started swapping insults, that got progressively worse. We shared the same sense of humour, and we just let it go away. I told him that his nose was so goddamn huge because air was free. He told me that he locked his bicycle up so that it would force a chug such as myself to do an honest day's work rather than steal shit. I told him that if things had gone right, he'd be living in a ghetto in warsaw with a number tattooed across his forehead. He told me that if things had gone right, my blankets would still have small pox.

And so on, and so forth.

Yeah, harsh words, but if you were there, those words translated more into "hey, look at all this racist shit people say about our ethnic groups. Isn't that bullshit? Let's poke fun at that!"

Of course, whitey got involved, and decided that since we weren't insulted, she was going to have to step in and get insulted for us. She got so insulted, in fact, that she went to the managers and complained. After all, how dare two of us make inappropriate comments in a break room at a quiet level, out of ear shot of customers? How dare we make jokes?

So, I got canned, as did he.

Naturally, I went on welfare payments and stole her bike. I traded it to my new jew friend for some firewater and smoked salmon. He sold the bike at his cousin's brother's deli for far too much and spent the money on a nice brisket.

Apparently, neither of us learned anything from the incident. Which is as it should be.