As we get older, sometimes we try to be a little more cognizant of the things we say, even in knee-jerk reactions or the heat of moments. When I was a moody teenager who hated everything, I was pretty quick to wish death unto others, for the most minor and inconsequential of circumstances. Cut me off in traffic? I hope you blow a flat and crash to your death. Take my parking space? I hope you become collateral damage to an MS-13 drive-by. Beat me in Street Fighter by chip damage? I hope you have heart attack and keel over you fat cheap fuck.
Yeah, death is a little bit extreme when it comes to momentary lapses in judgment of gauging the value of life. I’d really be kind of disappointed if I ever wished death unto another human being, and then it actually happened. And although the chances of such are microscopically minuscule and would obviously be the perfect storm of freak circumstances and not because I mentally wished it upon them, it really does make me think twice about even absent-mindedly, wishing death unto others, especially for overall trivial matters.
These days, I just wish diarrhea unto people who piss me off. Like, really bad liquid shits, that alter an afternoon, or ruin a night’s sleep; just a temporary dull pain with inconvenient side effects. It seems like an adequate amount of comeuppance to mentally wish to inflict on other human beings who piss me off. Take too long to order at Willy’s? Clog up the self-checkout at Publix? Aggressively whip around four lanes of traffic to ultimately end up one car length ahead of me? Be the shitheads sitting in row 25+ on a flight that rushes up to row 23 to get off ten seconds sooner, and ruin the entire deplaning process? Yeah, I wish diarrhea unto all these asshole motherfuckers. The more severe shits depending on how insufferable their actions are. One really bad episode, or nuclear shits that come back several times.
However, there are admittedly still some instances where my frustration bubbles over, and I still fantasize about some horrific death occurring, as much as I don’t really want to admit it. One is very specific, to when the perfect storm of human beings all spawning on every single toilet in the gym/office when I really have to go; seriously I rarely feel as enraged as I do when I feel the need to relieve myself, but every single stall in the numerous bathroom options I have are all occupied, regardless of the fact that it’s sometimes very early in the morning at times in which I deliberately choose to workout, banking on the early time reducing the amount of people that are present.
The last time this happened, I wanted to a meteor to fall onto the building. If I can’t use a crapper, then nobody should. 🙁
But very recently came an incident where the only feeling swirling in my head was how much I wanted someone to drop dead, wherever in New York they were, and a little bit of guilt and a little bit of self-deliberation to decide on whether or not I really wished another person would keel over and die, before concluding that yeah, I would shed no tears if this individual spontaneously dropped dead, and how the world would be a better place without insufferable thieves like this.
I was at a Starbucks with my wife, and long past are the days in which I went every single weekday, and my Starbucks gold status was at like set until the next decade. But I still had the app, with my gold card loaded in it, and through numerous gifts and funds that my dad never uses, I knew I had somewhere around $70 in my account.
Except when I launched the app, there was a big fat $0 next to my available funds. Perplexed, I logged into my account via browser, to see if there was an error to the app, but then it read as $0 online as well. Clearly, something was very wrong, but because I didn’t want to hold up the line, I just paid for my drink and went off to the side to find out what the deal was.
So I look at recent transactions, and it turns out that five days ago, my account made a $90 purchase at a Starbucks – in Queens, New York. Obviously, my account was hacked into, and my funds drained. Needless to say, I was quite upset by this, and while processing my disappointment in humanity, it really boiled down to the fact that I wished that whomever did this would just drop dead, wherever they were.
In spite of the thievery and some general research that Starbucks customer service is iffy and that it was more likely that I’d have to assume some responsibility for having a shitty password, calling up Starbucks’ customer care actually resulted in some positive and quick results. They immediately understood the situation, and with no arguing or resistance at all, deactivated my compromised Gold card, and issued a replacement card with my $70 worth of credit back on it; apparently, the shithead who hacked my account decided they wanted a nice round $90, and used $20 from somewhere else to ring up $90 in total, presumably on a separate brand new gift card, which frankly should be a red flag for cashiers, since fewer things seem more obvious to some theft going on than buying a high-dollar gift card, using an existing gift card, but that’s neither here nor there at this point.
People are typically really fast to put big companies like Starbucks on blast for whenever they feel they’ve been wronged, but let me take this moment to applaud Starbucks on how quick and painlessly they handled my situation, and get me my money back. I wasn’t expecting it to be so easy, but I am grateful that it was, and it gives me a positive outlook on their customer support.
I get that in the grand spectrum of things, a person having a weak password cracked (set in 2008 standards) and having $70 stolen from their Starbucks account is basically the very epitome of first world problems, but that’s really not what this entire post is about. It’s about how I feel frustrated that there are thieves all over the world who steal for non-altruistic purposes, and that when the day is over, I wouldn’t give two shits if they all spontaneously combusted and were removed from the planet effective immediately.
Like, the person who steals a loaf of bread to feed their family? That’s one thing. But the shithead who hacks Starbucks accounts to steal money so that they can get their venti peppermint frappuccinos on someone else’s dime? Or the inevitable Facebook memory I’m going to soon get of the video clip of some fuckface stealing packages off my old house’s front porch? Yeah fuck them, I wish all the people like this would drop dead. The world would be a better place without selfish thieves, and I’d probably not bat an eye if they were to all just eliminated like in that episode of Black Mirror with the killer drone bees.
