Meet Phyllis. Phyllis is angry. Phyllis is that special sort of old lady angry. You know, the kind of angry that stems from her vagina being all dried up and her losing her usefulness as a person as a result.

Phyllis works the cash register at the Berks’ cafeteria and has impressively managed to incorporate this resentment over her husk of a uterus into her relatively simple job by being a humongous bitch. She lords over her register like some child-eating witch. Hunched over the big plastic numbers every day, she looks out over a line of innocent college students with her beady little eyes like she was trying to pick out the plumpest one. She regards each of her customers with a customary scowl, as if by merely requesting her service they are asserting themselves as superior. “You think you’re better than me?” she seems to be saying as she looks over each item on a diner’s tray with a bitter sneer. She plugs the amounts in with such tightly-wound, quivering indignation that one can’t help but await the day she flies off the handle and backhands a student across the face. While her colleagues are busy putting their customer’s at ease with smiles and small talk, Phyllis is making each person in her line feel personally responsible for everything that has brought her pain in her life.

But Phyllis wasn’t always like this. No, this harbinger of hate is merely a shell of what used to be a woman of limitless warmth and compassion. As a young girl, Phyllis wanted nothing more than to get married and have a large family with whom she could share her boundless supply of love. So great was this desire that she was wed with feverish rapidity to her high school sweetheart, Fredrick Goldstein, at the much-too-young age of twenty. Yet, it was the latter half of her childhood wish that would sadly never come to fruition, though certainly not for lack of trying. In fact, Phyllis and her husband gave birth to eight children, but tragically, mysteriously, and altogether uncannily, each one eventually succumbed to obscure Pioneer-era diseases. Their first was claimed by cholera, the second by typhoid, the third by dysentery, and so on until their eighth and final child caught an acute case of quinsy. Nobody could explain this strange phenomenon, lest of all Phyllis. So great was its graveness that the government had to eventually seize control of Phyllis’ fallopian tubes and shut them down under their classification as an endangerment to children everywhere. Fortunately, Fredrick stayed with her through the entire ordeal, but their love was greatly diminished as a result and would never return to its former luster, mostly because Fredrick had to fill out a ton of paper work every time he wanted to take Phyllis to bed.

While this article is mostly meant to educate, it also serves as a plea to those who deal with Phyllis every day. I say unto those particular readers, please, the next time you just want a hamburger and don’t feel like dealing with an uppity bitch, remember what makes her so uppity. The next time you just stopped by for a cookie and are wondering what crawled up her ass, remember the sixty-plus years of misery that are wedged up her rectum. And the next time you just straight up think Phyllis is being a disagreeable twat, you put a hand on her shoulder, look her square in the eye and tell her it’s going to be okay.