My Record of Work: The Annoying, the Interesting, and the Just Plain Weird--The Year 2001.

This page should be in frames. If it is not and you want it to be, please click here. If it is and you don't want it to be, click here. Both versions have all the information.

JULY!


7/31/01

Today I received a phone call at Customer Service. I answered with my usual spiel, and the customer said, "Yes, I'd like the book department please." Heh. I told her that was the whole store. Guess she thought maybe we were departmentalized like Media Play or something, which is fine, but I just found it funny that pretty much all we sell is books and she wanted the book department.


7/30/01

I must inform you that as of this date there is NO word on when the fifth Harry Potter book is going to come out. So I must say I was surprised when I got a phone call from a frantic-sounding woman asking me when we were going to receive our copies of it. I told her there was no release date yet so we had no idea when we'd see them, and she was like, "NO, no the book is coming out tomorrow! When do you get yours?" I had to explain to her again that it is NOT coming out tomorrow and furthermore there is MAYBE a tentative date sometime in spring 2002. She insisted that there was an advertisement for it coming out tomorrow and I must be mistaken. I kinda think wishful thinking does odd things to many people's brains. A poster book was coming out 7/31, with pictures from the movie, and Harry Potter's "birthday" was going to be 7/31, but she must've gotten one of those things confused. Or something. I was amused.

A foreign-sounding woman misinterpreted the sign that said "Playmore Classics--Buy 2 Get 1 Free!" She brought up one book that was a Playmore Classic and two that were just random sale books, and she was like, "This buy two get one? Buy two get one?" I told her no, only the Playmore ones were buy two get one, and her response was to look disappointed and confused and then point to the sign and repeat the BOTTOM part of it that said "Buy 2 Get 1 Free!" I had to make her read the rest of the sign before she understood. I'd say it was because English was obviously not her first language, but she knew enough English to argue with me, so I dunno. :)

Some guy tried to return two dog-eared, damaged computer books and get money for them. One even had ink all over the cover. When we wouldn't give him money he just left them on the counter. We found out from the other store that he'd tried to return them there the day before. Weird that he didn't just try to sell them back to college buyback stores.


7/29/01

I was about to go on break and was holding a few books I was going to put back, plus the book that I would read on my break: Wicked by Gregory Maguire. Just as I was leaving the desk, a girl stopped me and asked me for the book Wicked! And I pulled it out of the stack I was holding and I was like, "Ya mean this?" She looked kind of confused, and was like, "Yeah!" I took her to the section while explaining I was reading it too and it was really good. Then at the section I didn't see it! I told her I was going to be annoyed if I had to give her mine. But thankfully we found another copy. :)

A lady brought in the book Olivia and told our cashier that the binding was broken. The cashier called me and told me so, so I ran to the Kids' section and got a non-broken Olivia. I came up to give it to her and to take the damaged one to the damage box, but she told me, "No, I don't WANT another one." She explained that she had bought it and then she had found something else for her grandkid or whatever and just had no use for the book. She didn't have a receipt, so I told her that if an item is damaged we would be glad to exchange it for a good version of the same exact item, but can't accept it as a return without a receipt. She was like, "FINE, just KEEP IT THEN!" and left it in the store. Weird.


7/25/01

Today my district manager came to visit our store and she got mad that there was a radio in the back room and threw the thing in the trash! How weird is that?


7/22/01

A dude buying Penthouse magazine was eyeing me in the checkout line, and as I rang him up he asked me why "a girl like me" wasn't married. Okay.

Also, a man mistook his Sam's Club card for our Discount Club card and tried to give it to me to discount his purchase. I told him he could get 10% off all the Sam's Club merchandise he could find in the store with that card. He laughed at himself as he produced the correct card, and then he eyed me with a mischievous look and said, "You RASCAL!" Heh. I got called a rascal.


7/21/01

Some freaky kid from the Pokémon League was trying to cheat today! He had made his Pokémon deck complete for some certain set by writing the name of some special card on regular energy cards with a blue pen. And then he was trying to use them in the game. He claimed that it didn't say anywhere in the rules that you can't do that, and that since he'd written that on the cards before the game and previously declared them to be Blaine's Teleporter cards (or whatever), then they were the same as if he owned the card. I can see what he means for purposes of the game play, but I was under the impression you actually had to trade or buy to get the cards you need, not just make them up. What the hell?

In other news, some lady paid for her purchase today with money she removed from her bra right in front of me.


7/15/01

A lady came to do a return today, and her receipt said she bought it almost six months ago! Generally we don't have a problem within 30 days, but there's no real exact policy, so I got the manager. I told her before he got there that he might not take it back, because I knew that the higher-ups are trying to get us to lower the amount of returns we accept. Well, I was right; he refused the return. She blew up. See, her reasoning was that she'd only had the book in the trunk of her car for six months; she hadn't even read it, and had finally decided she wasn't going to. Now okay, the book was in fine condition, but isn't that just a little bit of an abuse of policy, how we managed to sell that book to her months ago and now she wants money even though the book was not available in our store for six months while she was driving around with it in her car? That's the part that bugged me--that she wanted money no questions asked when she had something of ours for six months. She said the people next door at Stein Mart were very courteous and took back her pillows from two weeks ago, and my manager was like, "Two WEEKS would not have been a problem!" Then she stole the sign off of our register that said some stuff about returns on it, and the manager told her NOT to take it but she said she would anyway because it was her only "proof" that we were being unfair. Ugh. Anyway, she called corporate and whined and they called us the next day and told us she'd be coming in and to give her a refund. Blah. I think it's severely uncool how people treat our store like it's a library or something.


7/11/01

Today I wore my red bandana at work and some guy asking about Harley-Davidsons came in and he was wearing one exactly like mine. Heh, we were twins.


7/9/01

When I asked a guy at the register today if he'd gotten everything he needed, he replied, "No." I asked him what he was missing, and he replied, "Your phone number!" Ha ha. He then informed me that his son had taught him that.


7/1/01

After I rang up some dude's magazines, he randomly asked me, "Did you hear about the agnostic dyslexic insomniac?" to which I replied, "Yes, he stayed up all night wondering if there was a dog." Random drive-by joking.


On to August!


Backlinks:
MAIN PAGE
WRITING PAGE
JOURNALS PAGE
WORK LOG PAGE