Accidental Friends | A BTSxReader friendship fic

Chapter 4: The Annual 'Great Shout Out'

(Disclaimer: the image above is not mine)

Inspired by a tweet by @chaseisangry that is reposted by @textpostgiant on Instagram which says:

Concept: The Purge but it's 24 hours where retail workers are as rude as they want
"Do u have a bathroom?"
"No we shit outside like bears"

Also, great thanks to Veles for Beta-ing this chapter and many more onwards (I finally got a Beta!!!)

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It's Sunday, God's day. Or more importantly (according to Hunnie) Hunnie's birthday.  When I woke up this morning, her eyes were half open and half of her blanket has spilt off the bed, yet she was still peacefully asleep. By the time she was finally awake, still smiling and giggling from the leftover surrealness of what happened yesterday, I've showered and downed my second cup of coffee.

"I can't believe I met Jungkook yesterday! Jeon freaking Jungkook!" she beams.

"Yes, yes you did, and I don't need to ask how it went to see how you're feeling."

"And I'm so relieved he's as nice and kind in real life! Imagine if I meet him and he's a jackass, I would—" she interrupts herself.

"You would, hm? Knock him out?" She shakes her head. "A little elbow to the nose action? A German Supplex?"

"Well, probably just kick the shit out of kook junior or something, depends on how many jackass point he scores from the douche meter," she says matter-of-factly and nods along the entire time, agreeing completely with herself.

"I can picture it."

After some time, my phone rings, and multiple notifications banners pop up furiously, all from Instagram, telling me that Hunnie has posted her pics.

"The ones you took yesterday?" I say, opening Instagram.

"Yeap, it turned out pretty great right?"

I nod, scrolling through the pictures. "I still can't believe you took all these while you ate without looking at your ramyeon."

"I'm a pro at multitasking. If there's an Olympic on multitasking, I've probably won it. Maybe my shadow already did it while I was doing something else."

"Now that I think about it, in the store, you also set up card payments while packing don't you? You don't even look when you're packing."

"The only time I'm not multitasking is when I'm sleeping." She leans on the wall smugly then winches in pain. When she lifts the back of her pyjama shirt, there are a few scratch marks and mild purple patches on her skin. "But considering how many bruises I wake up with every day, I probably multitask then too." She rubs her back gently, trying to soothe the pain away.

"I'm pretty sure you do. I heard something last night but I was too tired to check. When I woke up at five today to pee, I saw a half-eaten egg sandwich on the kitchen counter."

"I sleep-eat again?!"

"I think so."

At the end of that sentence, Hunnie's stomach grumbles. She sighs. "Confirmed."

I grab the half left of the egg sandwich from the fridge and hand it to her. She downs it in less than a minute.

Today, per request from the birthday girl, we'll be attending the annual 'Great Shout-Out',  a special event – a role-playing game made and organised by university students across five universities in Seoul in which participants take turns playing the customer and the retail workers. The catch is, the retail workers can be as rude as they want and not hold back. It serves as stress-reliever for students before exams while also being a bit of a radical public awareness campaign for verbal mistreatments that retail or service workers are often subjected to while they're expected to be nice all the time just because they're paid to do it. I heard from some people who participated as one of the planners that the goal is to hopefully encourage those who don't work in the industry to treat the worker with more respect and speak to them nicer by letting them experience it for themselves, which as someone who is a part of the industry, is more than I could ever ask for. There're tons of great and polite people but then again, there're also tons of assholes who think that employees are like some kind of errand-kid they get to bully.