Free On a Scale from Idiot to Complete Jerk by Alison Hughes Page A

his lunch and playing games on his iPod, but his parents were very angry about the whole thing. The new driver is much friendlier, but still wears those freaky, wraparound, bus-driver sunglasses.
    D) Store Clerks
    There’s a convenience store near our junior high school, and we sometimes wander over at lunchtime to buy candy. Some kids, the complete jerks in the school, don’t actually buy it—they steal it occasionally, or so I’m told. At least, that’s why the store has implemented a new policy: only five junior high kids allowed in at one time, and you have to leave your backpacks, coats and boots at the door. Is that legal, I wonder? Anyway, it means we have to wait in line, freezing, until another kid leaves the store. Then we have to strip down and get wet socks, all for the privilege of giving them money for sour gummies.
    The clerk, a guy who’s been there for years, looks at you angrily as you go to pay.
    â€œIs that it?” he asks suspiciously as you put down the gummies.
    I’m in the middle of saying “looks like it” when he yells at another kid, “HEY! No going near the backpacks until AFTER you pay!”
    Just another charming shopping experience. Some kids keep coming back to the store for the candy. Me? It’s the service.
    Rating: Junior high jerks who stole candy: 10 (complete jerks)
    Rating: Rude store clerk: 4 (textbook idiot, but come to think of it, he’s trying to make a living, and it must be stressful having to suspect every single kid, so maybe this can be downgraded to a 3)
    E) Neighbors
    Our neighbors on one side are really nice. We have keys to each other’s houses, we look after each other’s pets whenever anyone goes on vacation, we borrow ladders and sugar. It’s a good arrangement.
    The neighbors on the other side are very, very different. The Wicks are just plain miserable. They seem to spend their retirement staring out the window, just waiting to complain about balls that end up in their yard, kids on scooters or bikes who turn around in their driveway, or branches that slightly overhang their side of the property line. They’re very, very concerned about that property line. I really didn’t know what a property line was, but it appears to be an invisible line that separates their perfect lawn from our scrappy, dandelion-infested one. You know how when you’re sitting in the back seat of a car and you run the side of your hand down the seat and tell your brother “here’s the line” because his books and Lego are spilling into your space? That’s kind of like a property line.
    There’s this two-foot-wide stretch of grass between the Wicks’ driveway and our driveway. Literally, you can mow it by going once up and once down. Mr. Wicks has clearly measured and consulted with the city planners and stuff, because he only ever mows a very narrow strip of this grass. Not half. Maybe a quarter. So he has to position his mower mostly on his driveway to get his precise little strip done.
    This seems like a very small thing. But don’t you think that’s a jerkish thing to do? When I mow the lawn, I always mow the whole strip. He mows, and he mows the four-inch strip of grass that he technically owns and not one blade more. It’s very petty. But is it jerkish? Nah, it’s such a small thing. It’s not like he’s throwing garbage our way, or having loud drunken parties every second night, or parking a monster sun-blocking, oil-leaking trailer in front of our house. In the interests of being nice and neighborly, I’ll just classify Mr. Wicks as an idiot.
    Rating: 5
    F) Servers
    When you are a child, people who serve you at restaurants generally leave you alone. They might ask you a few polite questions, but ultimately, they know somebody else is paying.

    But when our family recently went out for dinner, the server did something that might qualify as jerkish behavior. He