it’s so hard to be nice. Yes, I’m a really nice person, sometimes disgustingly so, but I’m only human. I need to blow off steam just like anyone else, but that side usually comes out only in front of friends (who can forgive me) or on the internet (where it’s de rigeur and hardly noticed.) Bingo night usually gives all of us a chance to blow off a little snark, but last night I had to take a little retreat!

Let me give you a little exposition here first.

The end of the school year is always crazy, what with the concerts and kids’ parties and end-of-school things that I always have to do coinciding with the beginning of gardening season. There have been additional things this year, much of it relating to marching band in one way or another. I’ve been busy almost every waking moment. Ummmm. . .busy doesn’t necessarily mean productive. I have to be honest. I have done a lot of stuff, though.

Among the things I’ve been working on have been teaching myself a little more Excel, in the form of updating the band roster and getting it to have multiple tabs for different orders of the list. Hubby had to help, but I am definitely ascending the learning curve a lot on my own. The other thing I’ve been doing is honing some photoshop skills, assembling and editing images for band buttons. I thought it would be a cool thing for the kids to have buttons for orientation night that showed their section instrument. I was able to find some free clipart images of a number of instruments, but not all the ones I needed. So, it was off to Google image search, then a good amount of time trying to make photos look more like drawings, layer, resize, and skew multiple images (and then try to make them look the same so that I could then make them look more like drawings. . .) then play with the layer styles to make them look related without totally obscuring the background image. I think they turned out pretty neat.

So, I go to do the Bingo thing last night. I usually sell two different game sheets, and the money for these goes into separate boxes. However, people who are buying both usually give me a single bill to pay for them, so I need to make change and transfer money to the other box. It’s not such a big deal for me, but last night we had about 30 more people than we usually do, different jackpots, and a couple of new games. Even the cranky people still got smiles and thank-yous from me – and believe me, some of these people seem to be so stressed out by every little thing that you wonder why they even come.

Well, we get to one game, and a woman asks me how it’s played – it’s one where you have to get two bingos in two separate squares, but I don’t play this game, so we had some regulars yelling at me from the back that I was explaining it wrong. This table is our crankiest by far, but I figured I’d head over there and be all agreeable and let them explain it to me. I did this knowing it was probably a bad idea. There are certain sacrifices we disgustingly nice people have to make.

So this little group starts telling me that it’s two bingos in a column but they can be rows or columns or diagonal but it has to be two out of three and they can be in different columns but they all have to be in the same column and I’m saying wait, they don’t have to have two B columns or two N columns, so what columns are they talking about and they start screaming at me two out of the three, not the columns, it’s two bingos in the same column but they don’t have to be up and down!!! Holy crap, it could have been a comedy routine about people who don’t know how to explain things, but it wasn’t funny. I smiled and said that as long as they all knew how to play it, then we wouldn’t have to worry about anyone getting it wrong, and as I walked away they began talking about me to each other. “How can someone be that stupid?” “She’s so stupid she can’t even understand Bingo!” Mmm-hmmm. Smart enough to know the difference between stupid and deaf, which would put me a step ahead of them. . .

As it turns out, a rational person explained to me that the two bingos could go any way in two separate boxes, but that the boxes on the sheet were arranged in three rows and two columns – therefore, a bingo in row one, column one and another in row three, column two wouldn’t win, but any two rows in the same column of boxes would. Aha! Believe me, I’ve been spending enough time with Excel to know what rows and columns are, but when I see a grid, the rows and columns within that grid are the first thing I think of!

Oh, the things I would love to say and/or do to these people! The huge, steaming piles of snarkiness I could unload on them in one fell swoop! What a thrill to contemplate an act of revenge, delivered with the unbesmirchable sweetness I have perfected through years of practice! But no, what about an actual snub, a wise and witty retort guaranteed to cut them off at the knees? Why, they’d never see it coming! Perhaps I could be too stupid to be able to sell them eight of each game and give them correct change for a fifty? Maybe some choice phrases from several different languages uttered before them, followed by a sugary “Oh, you don’t know Latin? I’m so sorry. . .” The direct, in-your-face confrontation enumerating some concrete differences in our levels of intelligence and/or education just to see who exactly is stupid around here. The possibilities were swirling through my head, tempting and intoxicating.

Let’s get real, though. These people come every week, and spend an embarrassing amount of money that helps support the band. I have to deal with them only once every four weeks, and for such a short time in the grand scheme of things. On top of that, I am unaware of anyone who would find them a credible source of character judgement – I don’t have to worry about getting a reputation for stupidity on their say-so. Whatever I might fantasize about doing would never have any positive result in real life.

Still. . .I might just have trouble adding and subtracting money next month. Just a teensy little bit, and I’ll be really, really, really nice about it. . .