When I was 16 I got my first job at a local Target. I was psyched to start making money, cleared my schedule to be able to work as often as possible and showed up 10 minutes early to my first day. I can remember having my Polaroid taken and hung in the employee lounge as a newbie – my smiling braced teeth, my perfectly styled hair, my vibrant red shirt. How little I knew about working with the public then.

I stood at the conveyor each shift sliding purchase after purchase into bags that I had separated the way my mother had advised me: wet things, dry things, personal products, clothes (FOLDED!) and greeting cards in a separate smaller bag. I greeted every guest with a smile, made small talk, pushed Red Cards (a Target credit card) and got them moving along as quickly as possible.

I started working at this dream job during the Christmas season. The store was always busy and buzzing with parents carting out brand new bicycles and other goodies from Santa. One day, a guest in my checkout line purchased a toy fire truck that came in a large box that didn’t fit in our undersized oversized holiday bags. After trying a handful of times and ripping three bags with the obnoxious box, the guest rolled her eyes and grabbed the box picturing smiling boys playing fireman from my inept hands.

“You know what your problem is?” she said to me, “You’re too stupid to realize that this box is just too big for that bag. Look at all the waste you made.” She took her receipt and huffed out into the cold December night. I seethed. The audacity of this woman! Not only was I certain that I was far from stupid, I was only trying to help her so that she didn’t miss the patch of ice that she potentially slipped on because the box was in her face. I’ll never know for sure, but I hoped that she did slip on the ice. I didn’t want her to be seriously hurt, of course, but maybe a sore rear and a sense of looming karma.

The berating at Target was fast and furious and for every pleasant customer there were three or four miserable ones. Needless to say, there is only so much one 16-year-old girl can take before she’s crying before and after every shift and her father finds her a new job. 

I quit Target and began working at a jewelry store in New Jersey for a family who hired me and after a few years claimed me for their own. In the five years that I have worked there I’ve seen countless customers get engaged, plan weddings and get married. In all of that time I had never seen a “Bridezilla” until this summer. Sure, there are times when brides were stressed, complaining, or cranky, but they always came back another day either apologetic or in a better mood. This particular woman, however, was always wretched.

She would come at least twice a week to complain. First, she handpicked her own engagement ring and expected her fiancé to surprise her with it. When he made some adjustments to the piece to make it more personal, more from him to her instead of her to her, she demanded that it be changed. When it came time to pick wedding bands, the groom chose his without any problem. The next day she came in and exchanged it because, “he doesn’t know what he wants.” Her ring would need to be custom made.

The happy couple planned their wedding in six months and waited until two weeks before the wedding for our onsite jeweler to hand make her wedding band. As you can imagine, this takes a lot of time and concentration and he made it after her set deadline, but before her wedding. 

This is when the proverbial matter hit the fan. Because he was in a time crunch, the ring was not crafted to her exact specifications. The ring was polished, glittering with thousands of dollars of diamonds, but there was no inscription inside as she had requested. Of course, the day she came to pick it up my boss was on vacation and the jeweler was off.

My coworker and I stood unprotected at the counter, anticipating the carnage that was sure to follow. We noticed the oversight when we were admiring her ring earlier in the day, but without any experience or training ourselves to scratch in the design she had requested, we were at loss to remedy the situation. Any normal person wouldn’t worry about what was inside the ring where no one would see, but from past experience we knew this would not go well.

We saw her car pull in, watched her sashay through the door, handed her the ring, held our breath as she turned it over in her fingers to inspect every detail, and covered our ears after she opened her mouth.

She may have screamed well into her wedding ceremony, I’ll never know for certain. My coworker and I tried unsuccessfully to appease her. We padded her with gift certificates and made a rush appointment with the jeweler to engrave her ring the moment she came back from her honeymoon. But I can tell you that as far as I know, this woman’s mouth did not stop spewing even after our front door slammed shut.

There was simply nothing that could be done to help this woman, and that’s when I recalled the customers I ran into at Target. There will be times that we run into people who are unhappy and unreachable. Maybe it makes them happy to belittle someone who is, for the most part, a perfect stranger.

I’ve probably overused this example in my short life time, but John Steinbeck wrote in East of Eden that he believes there are true monsters in the world with malformed souls. There isn’t anything you can do for them and they’re unavoidable. The woman determined to ruin my night at Target when I was 16? What a pity for her that she’s spiritually deformed. Bridezilla? Such a shame to be void of a perfectly formed soul.  A past professor who made me nearly cry in the middle of class and then actually cry later in the privacy of my bedroom? How unfortunate to be born with a personality like that. Accept these people and move on because, really, what else is there to do but pity them? Oh, and read East of Eden.

Laura Knoll is finishing her junior year at Drexel University, majoring in English with a Certificate in Creative Writing and Publishing.