I, Misanthrope

Now I know how Ceasar felt. I was stabbed in the back simultaneously by a roomful of people. I'm a moderator of a discussion board at work. The discussion boards started back a few years ago and were filled with book, music, dvd, and electronics categories, but now only a handful remain, and mine is the largest of them. In all my dealings with the regulars of my board, I've tried to be honest and fair with them. I used to wonder why the other editors didn't get involved in their boards. Now I think it's because they knew what I had forgotten about retail, the cardinal rule: Some customers are assholes all of the time; all customers are assholes some of the time.

I've taken on one or two before, and I've known how to handle them. Invariably, they will bicker with each other and I have to go in there and enforce our nice-nice rules. They routinely exclude others from their clique. Two guys who have been trying to get noticed have decided to wreak havoc by spamming the boards. A bunch of them got mad at me for not kicking these guys out fast enough. What they don't know--and what I can't tell them--is that it's not as simple as that. One can get around it simply by changing their screen name. So I had to do some other things to refocus the topic onto games--since the only thing anyone had talked about in the last two days were how messed up things had been. These things included making the off-topic area read-only for the "immediate future". This made several of them furious since they perceived it as me punishing them for someone else's misdeeds. One person even said "It's too late--we're already talking to each other on AIM and we're already in contact with your superiors about this!" What really hurts is that this came from some of the more rational ones. No one came to my defense. But they also missed some key points:

• I've always been on their side and have gone out of my way to thank them
  
• I was doing this to make them happy
  
• It very clearly states that off-topic messages are not allowed and that the only reason there is an off-topic area is because I built it for them
  
• That the only reason there's still a discussion board for them to use as their own private club is because I've made cases to keep it

They're made crazy by the belief that, because they sometimes spend some money in my store that makes them always right. I suppose that means that, while I'm in retailing, they are always right--they're the customers. Please refer to rule No. 1

I'm facing a man who joined the table adjacent to mine. He's eating sushi with a knife and fork and drinking a glass of jug wine out of a plastic cup. He's an older man, in his 50s, who listens to headphones as he eats. Inexplicably, he is dipping both his knife and fork gently into his wine and sucking each dry. Then he gulps from his wine and uses his fork to pick at his teeth. Then he makes those horible teeth-sucking sounds so that everyone within a 25-foot radius can hear, except him since he's probably listening to John Tesh on the CD player.

I'd really like to punch his lights out.