Eight Things I Hate About Your Kids

I love weekends. And I love my job. But I absolutely hate weekends at my job, not because I resent having to work weekends, but because weekends mean that all the little brats are out of school and their parents will bring them to the bookstore where I work. Here's a list of child-related things I can't stand when I'm at work:

1) I absolutely detest, with a violent and passionate disgust, when parents send their young children (I guess any child under the age of about eight or nine) to pay for things at the cash register by themselves, as the parents themselves stand there and watch from about twenty feet away. I don't get it. What, do they think it's cute? I've had parents send their four-year-old children up to me alone. These parents don't know me; they don't know I'm not some kind of a psychopath! I think it's weird. Not only that, but it bothers me. I am not comfortable with children. I am not comfortable bringing myself down to the intellectual level of a child while I am on the job. I also have this theory that parents send their kids to do their dirty work so that I can't ask them if they have membership cards or if they want to donate something. I also hate when the children hand me their crinkled up dirty money and I have to stand there unfolding it for half an hour, not knowing where on earth that money has been. It was most likely up that child's nose not ten minutes beforehand and here I am touching it. (I brought a bottle of hand sanitizer to work to keep behind the registers. I love when the parents see me using it right after I deal with their kids.) To be fair, some of the children are very well-mannered and very nice, and that always brightens my day. But it's such a rarity that when a child actually says things like "please" and "thank you," I get so excited that I have to tell all of my coworkers.

2) When they knock things over and make a mess (this one is pretty obvious, but still incredibly annoying).

3) When parents tell their children to "bring [your] book up to the lady." I AM NOT "THE LADY." I AM TWENTY-TWO YEARS OLD. I AM WAY TOO YOUNG TO BE CALLED "THE LADY." IF YOU WANT TO REFER TO ME AS "THE GIRL," OR EVEN "THE YOUNG LADY," FINE. BUT "THE LADY" IS SOMETHING I CONSIDER EXTREMELY INSULTING. (This really makes me bonkers.)

4) When parents decide to go into parent-mode in the middle of a transaction. I'm mid-sentence and all of a sudden it's, "Johnny, do you want to go to Chuck E. Cheese?" Ugh. I especially hate when I'm in the middle of ringing them up and their children run off so they go and run after them. I understand they need to catch their children (and I'd be even more freaked out if they didn't) but it still irks me.

5) When (oh this is so gross) parents decide to place their babies (not children but, like, BABIES) ..... are you ready for this? ....... ON THE FREAKING COUNTER. It's happened on a few occasions to me. They'll sit their babies down RIGHT ON THE COUNTER WHERE I'M RINGING THEM UP. THAT IS EFFING DISGUSTING. I would rather clean the bathroom than deal with that, and I'm totally serious. I really don't want to have to be near your baby. I don't think it's fair to put A HUMAN BEING ON TOP OF MY WORK SPACE. I don't think it's any more acceptable than if a grown person were to sit his ass right down on the counter. Gross is gross, and that is GROSS. Then the babies are grabbing at things and messing things up, and the parents don't even apologize. I've tried things before to get them to stop: first I say to them, "Oh, that counter is really dirty," hoping to appeal to their germophobic side. That usually doesn't work. Surprisingly, parents seem okay with putting their children on germy surfaces. Fantastic. Maybe because the little overgrown sperm-cells are overflowing with germs already. When that fails, I start coughing really loud (into my sleeve, of course, not on the children... although parents don't seem to have a problem with their children coughing on me) which sometimes gets them to move the kids. Sometimes that doesn't even work. I'm thinking of saying something to the parents next time like "I'm getting over a bad flu and I don't want to get your child sick" (when in reality, your child is making me sick) or maybe "I have a severe allergy to talcum powder" (this is the only baby-specific material I can think of... I wish I could just say I have a severe allergy to people under the age of eighteen). Any suggestions on this one?

6) I hate when parents try to get special treatment because they have kids. Like today, some woman came up to me and asked me for change for a twenty dollar bill. I said I would need a manager to do so, so I called the manager. While waiting, this woman says to me, "I just need change so that I can pay the babysitter," like it's supposed to make me jump up and say, "Oh, goodness! I wasn't going to open the drawer for you before, but now that I know you have kids, I've suddenly got manager-like superpowers! In fact, there's a button on my register that says, 'Change for Babysitter' for precisely this purpose! I'll get your money out as fast as I can for your darling little children!" They'll try to get extra discounts ("but this one is for my grandson!") or expect me to wait for them at the register while their little brats pick out more idiot toys that will melt their brains anyway...

7) When parents ask me to throw away their children's garbage. This is disgusting.

8) Children stare at me and it freaks me out. I don't understand it. There's nothing particularly interesting about the way I look. I don't have any piercings. I don't have any tattoos. I don't have strange hair or any significantly distinguishing feature. Children just like to stare. It's creepy. It reminds me of that kid in The Omen. It's creepy. STOP STARING AT ME, CHILD.

I mean, they're not always terrible. One day, I was cleaning up toys in the children's section and this little girl, maybe about four years old, wanders over to me and starts going through the toys on the floor around me. I figure she's going to bring a toy over to her mom to buy it for her or something. So the little girl is there for about five minutes and I'm not really paying attention to her (hey, that's her mom's job, not mine) when she starts handing toys to me, one by one. Then I realized... this little girl was helping me put back the toys. She had put back like ten toys on the shelf and had started handing them to me when she couldn't reach the shelves anymore. It really was heartwarming.

So even though I'm pretty sure I don't want kids of my own, it's still really nice to see kids who are brought up well and are polite. I think that if all children behaved like that little girl (or maybe if all parents raised their kids the way that little girl was raised, perhaps?) I would be more inclined to want children.

But because of the other eight behaviors listed above... I'm extremely happy to be child-free.