Week 31
Week 32
Week 33
Week 34
Week 35
Week 36
Week 37
Week 38
Week 39
Week 40

Weeks 41-50
Weeks 51-60
Weeks 61-present

A woman called into the health products company to place an order for a muchly needed brain enhancing product. From the outset, she had that "I'm a stupid bitch" aura about her, which proved to be very descriptive. When getting customer names, we are required to attempt to obtain middle initials. With a customer database reaching the tens of thousands, names tend to duplicate often, so this is one method they use to try to keep them separate and more easily identified. But what never ceases to puzzle me is the fact that at least half the people you ask for the initial refuse to give it. First and last name? No problem. Home address? Given with joy. Credit card number? Often given long before you want it. But the first initial of their middle name? They'd sooner nail their foot to the floor with a rusty railroad spike than give you a single letter. Like this woman. who, besides just being inexplicably obstinate, assumed I was as stupid as she was.

Me:  And your middle initial?
Her:  It's not on the card.
Me:  That's okay, I still need it.
Her:  But it's not on the card.
Me:  That doesn't matter, ma'am. If you have one, I need it for the records.
Her:  Then I don't have one.

Week Thirty-Two - Friday, 27 October
There are stupid people. There are irrational people. There are crazy people. Then there are the people special enough to be all three. This is just a peek into what it must be like in their world, where irrelevant details become the focal point for all of life's dealings, and if you're belligerant enough, things go your way. Come gaze with me now, and rejoice that their world only crosses into our own for the briefest of interludes.

A woman called into the health products company inquiring about the magnetic mattress pad. She was worthy of being written up for a multitude of reasons, including the following:

• Fixating on the material the pad was made of. When I told her I did not know the exact make-up of the pad's outer covering, only that it was a quilted material much like you'd find on a regular mattress, she instead asked me if she'd be allergic to it. "You would be the best judge of which things you're allergic to, ma'am."  "Yeah, but I won't know that until I sleep on it, will I?"

• Being intent on finding a cheaper price than the $100 discount she was already receiving. She even went so far as to grill me on what the company did with the returned pads. "Maybe I could just pay less and get a used one."

Week Thirty-Three - Sunday, 5 November
This was actually a close pick this week, we were torn between the winner and the man on the same night who needed instructions for his mattress pad. Thanks to my ever-helpful Art Slave in helping us decide. As she put it, this woman deserved to win "for sheer mind-bogglingly incomprehensible idiocy," which I think sums it up quite well. I find it amusing that even when humans such as these try desparately to use their little grey cells to be cunning and strike a decisive blow against those they feel have wronged them, they manage to fail to utterly.

A woman was placing an order for one of the health products. Everything was moving smoothly until I asked for the call letters for the radio station she heard the infomercial on. In an act of defiance I had never before experienced in all my years in this job, she refused to give them. She said that the reason for this was that the infomercial for the product she was ordering had preempted a program she wanted to hear. I was utterly taken aback by this. I can understand being irritated by missing a program due to a commercial break on steroids, but surely the way to "get back" at them for this travesty of justice is not to listen to the ad in its entirety, become interested enough in the product to shell out $100 for it, give more money to the people who paid for your program to be preempted in the first place, and then attempt to deny any possible bonus or potential future revenue to a radio station which airs a favourite show. The entire premise was so stupid that I almost didn't regain my composure enough to trick her into giving me the call letters anyway.

Week Thirty-Four - Monday, 13 November
After even a week in this job, you become accustomed to people being less intelligent than your average toilet bowl cleaner. You pick up every order line expecting fully that the person on the other end will have no idea what they want to order. You answer every cable call with the expectation of some obsessing lower life form chewing you out for things which are wholly out of your control. They are every day events, basic facts of life for the answering service operator. What you don't expect to have to deal with is the sort of sub-standard mental functionings of your average peon to come from what is supposed to be one of the most intelligent of professionals in our society today - the lawyer. From lawyers you expect a sharp mind, keen intellect, and enough observational powers to know that when you hear an address, it is your own. When even such a basic brain function elludes said professional, it is with great relish that I bestow upon him the muchly deserved Fuck of the Week award.

Following an earlier call wherein a lawyer that we answer for asked Nikki whether he could leave his payment in company's the mail slot (despite his statement that he'd already been told by the owner of our company he could do so), he called back to obtain our address. Sadly, he chose his own office line to call us, and thus appeared to be a customer of the lawyer and not the lawyer himself. Therefore I gave him his own office address and he gladly thanked me and hung up. Only upon checking the caller ID number and finding it matched the lawyer's cell phone did I realize who it had been. This person had never impressed me in the past, and I am now convinced that I would rather rot in prison than have him as my lawyer.

Week Thirty-Five - Monday, 20 November
There are stupid people, and then there are stupid people. Then there are the people that you hope and pray make it out of this life without spreading their genes around and further contaminating an already contaminated pool from which we all much take a refreshing dip. It shouldn't be too hard with this guy, though. Just tell him to write down the alphabet, and I'm sure we'll have him locked in a brain teaser that will last his natural life span.

A caller to one of our companies, one which releases renditions of The Good Book, needed help. Specifically, he needed an address to send his check to. This was a problem, because he didn't just sound stupid, he was stupid. Being unable to spell something like "abyssial" is one thing. Being unable to spell the word "dog" is quite another. Along with not knowing that each line of an address actually goes on a different line, he asked me to spell out the abbreviation of the state when I gave them to him. I don't think this company will have to worry about processing his order (for a product they didn't carry anyway), because if this guy could even fill out a check, much less seal the envelope, I'd eat my shoe.

Week Thirty-Six - Tuesday, 28 November
It's hard to top someone as off-the-wall as this guy. I was rolling with laughter for five minutes or so when I first read Mike's report. You'd think that a $40 "political statement" would at least be moderately understandable, not a string of seemingly unrelated thoughts.

A pledge caller from a station in Texas made his $40 pledge and declared it "a political statement." The real statement came afterwards, as I foolishly said "Excuse me?" which was mistaken for a request for elaboration. He then launched into the following ramble, which I was transcribing while he spoke to the best of my ability:

"He does not own this state," the man began, and then repeated that. "He is inarticulate, he cannot pick up toys. Look at what he did to our education. He needs to get off the oatmeal box, and see about Jackie O and Ladybird Johnson. Look at what he did to our ecology. Mama on an oatmeal box raised a kid who rode to town on dad's bike, with a man who worked for a chimpanzee and had eggs for lunch. Wuss Bush's pretense. Money doe snot make up for manners. It's horse puckey, as Colonel Potter would say. You tell them that one person living where they found a new salamander said if you have something to say, don't say it to my face. I can't afford cable, I have old people and dogs in my house."

Week Thirty-Seven - Sunday, 3 December
People never change, as this week's Fuck proves yet again. Nor do they quite grasp the concept of "giving". Ideally, pledging should be all about the cause. You give money to keep commercial-free, quality programming going. I've said all this in my rant before. But then there are people who take it even further than that, so convined are they that their $100 nets them your will and soul along with a free gift. Truly the spirit of selfless donating.

Only technically Day Three of the pledge drives, and I'm already sick to bloody death of it. In this instance, a woman in South Carolina wanted to pledge for an item, but did not know what the name of the item was, nor how much she had to pledge for it.

Her:  It's the glass, it's yellow with red on top.
Me:  The amber vase?
Her:  Noooo. It's yellow.
Me:  Amber is a shade of yellow, ma'am. It's the only item I have which specifically mentions a colour close to yellow.
Her:  Well it's not that.
Me:  Okay, is it..? <reads off list of all glass items>
Her:  Look, I don't know what it is. If you want my money, you'll have to tell me what I want.
Me:  <biting back comment> Ma'am, I'm not in the studio, I've never seen the items.
Her:  Well screw you, then.

Week Thirty-Eight - Friday, 8 December
Every once in a while you get that special call ... the kind of call that you know, immediately, is destined to be a Fuck of the Week. It's only ever happened once, and karmically, that was with the very first FotW ever. Now here we are, 37 weeks later, and yet another person has proved themselves worthy of joining the ranks, and on the completely different end of the spectrum from the first. You know, if god is a crop circle, I'm fueling up the John Deere.

A man called into our Bible renditions company and immediately made me suspicious by stating that he had information he needed to spread to as many people as possible. After I had him confirm that it was of a religious nature, I said I would give it to the office. He settled for that. He proceeded to tell me how crop circles were made by devils, the size of the crop circle being relative to the power of the devil in question. God himself was the biggest crop circle of all. Somehow -- he never really explained -- this related to an explanation of how the universe was ever-expanding and yet God was always bigger, and we wouldn't understand His majesty, etc. I pretty much tuned him out until he was done, at which point I asked, "So, if devils made the crop circles and God is a crop circle, devils made God?"  He hung up. About five minutes later, he called back to further explain God's glory and amazing size, as if he'd never spoken to me before. Weird, weird little man.

The devil-crop-circle man called back to state that we humans have bodies. Really. He went on to babble almost completely incoherantly about the fact that, I kid you not, "God is trying to warn us about grass. It's evil and filled with cunning and deceit." At this point, I fuzzed out, as the sheer unbelievable stupidity tried to assail my brain. I recovered in time to hear him repeat his warning. I told him I understood (a plain lie) and that I would pass the message on. He said he wouldn't call again. Maybe the grass had him cornered at the time.

Week Thirty-Nine - Monday, 18 December
There's just something extra sad and pathetic about the 22nd-century's version of the slave to television. It's not just about continual entertainment anymore, it's about fulfilling your every need with a projected-picture tube. Now, don't get me wrong, I have a lot of my needs fulfilled with a computer, but there's a big difference here. Like the TV-zombie of old, today's person doesn't need to think about anything they want to buy on Home Shopping Network or wherever. Some person behind the camera tells them what they'll buy and for how much. At least on the internet, I choose where to go among the millions of places you can order something. So, it is with particular disdain and no sympathy whatsoever that I listen to people who say how terrible it is that they can't get a shopping channel on television. They have to actually think or look for something to buy. Who wants to go to that trouble...? <looks around, raises hand>

A cable caller from Colorado said that she had five channels that had been out for three days. These channels included QVC, and this was the source of her interminable grief, for, because she did not have QVC, her Christmas had been ruined. "Absolutely ruined." Apparently there has been items that she had to order for her Christmas to be salvagable. It gets better. Apparently her entire town was destitute in their lack of QVC and sent all their hate calls to this one woman. "You should hear the complaints I've been getting!" she screeched, like some pagan goddess of bargain channels whose followers wanted to know why their sacrifices went unnoticed. The coup de grace came at the end of her three-minute screechfest, where I asked, "But if QVC was off, how did you know it had items you had to order?" She screamed an only semi-intelligible "SHUT UP!!" in my ear and hung up.

Week Forty - No Winner
Nobody worthy enough to win the award this week, although we theorize that this is less due to the Christmas Spirit and more to the fact that we were only at work for three days. Expect much of the same next week, although maybe we'll get lucky and someone will be an outstanding asshole. Let's just hope they do it on Friday or Saturday, though, as I really don't want to greet the new millennium with it.