As I work at my bookstore, I keep notes about the stupidest things that happen. I write them on little bits of scratch paper or discarded receipts, and I shove them in my pocket to be transcribed onto a Web page later. The Web page is a "Work Log" and it is one of the pages lots of people visit, I get a lot of mail about it.
Lately I've gotten more detailed with it, I'm putting down more things as stupid, tolerating fewer and fewer stupid interactions. I seem to get more stupids while I'm on the register, probably because I deal with every customer in the store if I'm up there. Anyway, it's frustrating. And today, I collected a great many slips of paper bearing sentences to remind me of an incident. I had a pocket full of stupid.
The one that takes the cake is this. For some reason, I guess to minimize paperwork, our manager Stephen has taken to only putting one register drawer at the front, so that if I need backup there's no way we can open another register. This is super ridiculous, you should know. There should always be a spare register for if I get busy and need backup. But noooo, not with Stephen. So anyway.
I got a line of about seven or eight customers, and the customer I was dealing with at the front had a return, so it was taking longer than usual to process her transaction. While I was waiting for the gift card machine to put store credit on a card for the woman, my co-worker Kyllie came up and asked me if I was in the middle of a sale, because she wanted to use my register to check the price of something that had a barcode but no price. I told her that actually she could use one of the registers beside me, but she was confused by them not having any money in them and I had to explain to her that she could just log onto it and use its price check feature without there being money in the drawer. Keep in mind I'm still waiting for the processing of a gift card credit.
So, the lady behind the lady doing the return, she decides to get up in our bid'ness. She addressed her comment to Kyllie and said, "You know, she's got a line of CUSTOMERS here, maybe she can help YOU a little later."
My first thought was, uh, excuse me?
My second thought was, BWAHAAHAHAHA!
So, I started laughing.
I mean, come on, that's just ridiculous! If your time is so precious that you can't spend it waiting in line, then you don't have time to shop and you can come back when you do have time. Secondly, here's a revolutionary idea: If you don't know the situation, it's not cool to make rude comments as an attempt to make people get in shape. Lady, I'm sorry you feel that way, but you would have been standing there waiting JUST as long if I hadn't helped my co-worker. 'Cause I was waiting on the goddamn fucking machine. Not that you were supposed to know that. But if you DON'T know what's going on, then stay the hell out of our business. Believe me, we can run the cash register quite efficiently.
So after I got a few giggles out I told the lady (in sort of a what-are-you-TALKING-about tone) that I happened to be doing two things at once. Then I laughed some more. And Kyllie started giggling too.
Soon enough the gift card thingie went through like it was supposed to, and I had to wait on the bitchy woman. Neither of us did anything unusual. Woo-hoo.
Beyond that, there were just a lot of people insisting that items were on sale when there were no indications that they were (why is it that if it's on a table they automatically think that means it's cheaper than the labeled price? We're not allowed to use our tables for things other than sales?), and people not understanding the discount, and people not knowing how to count money. The usual.
I will be updating my Work Log with my pocket full of stupid pretty soon.
Notes:
The concept of laughing openly at a customer makes me smile :D - Ian
My whole career is because of stupid people, so I salute you for all you have to put up with [wunderkont]
Nice to know you handled it well :3 - Toraneko
"Stupid rant" by CB It is hard to believe how incredibly stupid you are. Stupid as a stone that the other stones make fun of. Stupid so stupid that you have traveled far beyond stupid as we know it and into a new dimension of stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid cubed. Trans-stupid stupid. Stupid collapsed to a singularity where even the stupons have collapsed into Stuponium. Stu [Optimus_prime]
Beautiful. At least you turned something as irritating as rude and stupid customer, into something others (and yourself) can enjoy ^___^ Just be glad your not one of them. [katqueen]