When I was a student I worked in a number of jobs where I had to deal with the general public. As most of you who do this will be aware, the general public are on the whole a bunch of arses. At the time, this got me wondering — why is this the case? I've never had the same volume of problems and arguments with my friends, or the people I work with.

And so I came to the conclusion that there is a certain mode of thought, let's call it 'Arsey Customer Mode', which people get into when they are dealing with shop-persons. Of course the thoughts of the customer are closed to us (at least, without some very expensive brain imaging equipment) so we can only observe it by its symptoms. So I will refer to this condition as 'Arsey Customer Syndrome'.

Symptoms include:

• A rise in tone of voice, sometimes taking on a nasal quality
• A hardening of facial expressions, perhaps tending towards the aggrieved or aggressive
• Repetition
  • "I gave you a twenty"
  • "I'm sure I gave you a twenty"
  • "No, look mate, I defintely gave you a twenty"
• An almost supernatural belief in one's own correctness
  • "I swear by Odin and mighty Thor that I gave you a twenty"

I'm not saying here that it's wrong to complain, just that it's wrong to be an arse while you're doing it.

Anyway, to fulfil the promise in the intro: this morning I found myself adopting the persona of the Arsey Customer over 11p in the price of a jug of milk.

Argh. If you have a (non-violent) cure for this syndrome, I would love to hear about it.