5/31/06
Heh, one of my coworkers told me that she had to go through several repetitions of this with a customer: They wanted the new Kenyon book in paperback and it has just come out in hardback only, and they kept insisting they wanted the paperback, not the hardcover. So over and over, "The book has only been MADE in hardcover. The paperback isn't available yet." "Yeah, but can I get it in paperback? I want paperback." How do people who can't understand very simple things like this even READ a book?
Some annoying child was fairly polite when asking for a computer book, but after I found it for him he just took it and walked away. I kind of inwardly rolled my eyes and decided hey, he's a kid, kids are sometimes rude without meaning to be, so I let it slide. Then he came up and asked another question later, and did the same thing, just walked away after I helped without saying thank you. I decided he deserved to be punished (or, rather, mentioned publicly and shamed in some small way) when I found the computer book I'd found for him just sitting on an endcap where it didn't belong. Grr.
I was going into the back room and this older lady suddenly yelled at my back, "LET ME ASK YOU A QUESTION!" Damn, lady. I stopped and let her ask me, and it turned out she wanted Redbook. I had forgotten what kind of magazine that was even though it sounded familiar, so I asked her what type of magazine it was. She replied, "IT'S A MAGAZINE." Oh really? Hmm. That narrows it down, thank you. Then she began trying to tell me it was a women's magazine and that it was like Cosmopolitan, except she couldn't pronounce "Cosmopolitan." It kept coming out "Cosmetology." She kept saying that and stopping herself and then saying it again. I supplied "Cosmopolitan" several times but she never did get it. Then we actually found Cosmo and she said, "Oh, well there's Cosmetology." ::sigh:: We did eventually find it. I do have to wonder how "politan" looks like "ology" to her though.
A guy wanted a new book that actually turned out to not be out yet. My coworker explained to him that right now it wasn't the on-sale date yet and they were just in boxes in the back room waiting to be released; that's why the computer said we had copies, but we couldn't sell them yet.
"Well, but you have it, right?" he asked, and she explained the situation again, at which point he suggested, "Well why don't you go sneak one out of the back for me then?"
Because that's ILLEGAL?
Hello.
She had to explain to him that books can't be sold before their on-sale dates or else the publishing company won't deal with the bookstore that did it anymore in some cases. What an ass.
And at the register, some lady swiped her debit card through the machine with the magnetic strip facing the wrong way, and then just put her card away and stared at the screen like something was supposed to happen. When I told her she needed to put it through again because she'd swiped it with the magnetic strip facing up instead of down, she said, "Oh, well, these things are ALL DIFFERENT!"
Well, if you know that already, then why not read the directions on every one of them? It's not difficult. They have pictures.
5/30/06
A guy came up to me in the morning and asked for The Da Vinci Code. I wasn't thinking too clearly I guess, and just said, "Which one?" forgetting that customers don't usually know that there's a bunch of different versions of it and that "Which one?" doesn't necessarily prompt them to choose a version. When the guy said "Huh?" I realized I ought to elaborate, and explained that there was a hardback and a paperback . . . and before I got any farther, he said, "Well I want the illustrated version." Okay, that's weird--he knows there's an illustrated version, which means he knows there's a NON-illustrated version, which means he knows there's more than one. Why'd he give me the blank look and the reaction like I was speaking Martian then? What killed me is that I took him to the section and showed him the illustrated version he'd asked for, and then he picked up a non-illustrated version and said, "Well what's the difference?"
I don't know. Perhaps in the illustrated version there are PICTURES?????
God.
My coworker had come in on a day she wasn't scheduled just to get some displays squared away before our big visit with regional management tomorrow. So she was dressed in jeans and a tee shirt, and she happened to be down on the floor looking in a sale book bin when a customer came over and yelled at her, "Books on fishing!"
She turned around and said, "Excuse me?" because a) She didn't like the way she was being addressed and b) She didn't have an apron on or anything so it wasn't like it was obvious she worked there; she wasn't supposed to be helping customers, just working on her tasks. So the guy decided to be a dick and talked to her like she was incompetent: "The FISHING section. Where IS it."
I've convinced myself that neither of us should feel bad at being amused at her reaction: She informed the man that he should find someone who works at the store. That'll teach him to act like he can treat employees like dirt just because he thinks they're slaves of the establishment. He probably felt differently about being rude to a private citizen who was on her own time, huh?
Isn't that SAD that people can be made to feel shamed when they treat someone like crap only if they're not an employee? Sad, sad, sad.
Yesterday someone called on the phone and had this sort of vague disposition. Basically she made the whole conversation very difficult by generally being unspecific, not listening, answering questions with responses that made no sense because she wasn't listening, et cetera. It is par for the course but she didn't really do anything that was annoying enough for me to have mentioned her yesterday. What's funny is I got another phone call today and the person was acting annoying in exactly the same way, and I was reminded of my customer the previous day. Perhaps it is a particular pattern that I have learned to recognize. But then after I asked for her name to put the books on hold, she gave me the same name as the person yesterday. It WAS the same chick! I guess she's an asshole all the time! Wow.
5/29/06
Argh. One customer kept on ringing the bell over and over instead of just once until I got there, which was really obnoxious, and then she said, "I'm here to pick up the books?"
Ahh yes, the books. You're the one who wanted books! I know exactly who you are!
Get bent, lady.
CAN YOU TELL I'M SICK OF THESE PEOPLE YET?
A woman came up looking for book 1 of a series where we only had books 2 and 3. She only knew the name of the series, not the books' individual titles, and she knew the name of the author but unfortunately he had written at least four other series so it wasn't easy to narrow down with my bookstore's stupid system which only shows the books' titles, not which series they're in (sometimes).
After telling the woman that the easiest thing to do would be for me to run to the shelf, get book 2 or 3, and FIND book 1's title, she suggested--in that genius way customers always have of knowing better than I do how to do my job--that I just read her the list and she'd tell me which ones it WASN'T. Too bad there's over fifty books here and that's the damn REASON I can't narrow it down. C'mon. Seriously just let me work here.
Turned out we didn't carry the first one. And that makes more sense than it sounds like--see, most people would say "why the HELL would you carry book 2 and book 3 but not book 1 of a series?" Well, because our company is ridiculous and does things by numbers and dates. We have book 2 because it is new in paperback. We have book 3 because it is new in hardcover. We don't have book 1 because it is old and not very popular. That's all there is to it. The computer that decides these things probably doesn't even consider that those books are related.
Oh well.
And here's a couple weird opposites.
Normally, customers who think they can check out at the customer service desk are really rude and snippy. They throw their shit down and look at me as if I must be operating on half a brain cell because I don't start checking them out. But this guy today, he just came up to the desk and when I asked if I could help him, he just gave me the calmest, most sincere look straight into my eyes, and put his book down on the counter. Without saying anything. I asked him again if he needed help and he goes, "Just this." When I told him he needed to go elsewhere if he was to check out, he saw the giant "CHECKOUT" sign and said, "Oh, I can read that."
Nice change.
And the other one was a couple customers apparently thinking I'm a genius. They were looking for school reading books and it turned out their kids were assigned things that aren't usually assigned. They were weird history books that we usually only carry one copy of because they're totally not popular. When I mentioned for the first title that we usually only keep one copy of it on the shelf, the lady of the couple asked me how long I've worked at the store. I shamefacedly admitted that I'd been there six years. She kind of laughed and then explained that no WONDER I knew automatically how many copies we have of the book.
I didn't understand at first but when the same thing happened for the second title and they were again impressed that I'd know how many we carry of one title when we carry so many books, it came clear to me that they thought I just knew the information myself. That the computer wasn't telling me the quantity.
Now, the way the computer tells us the quantity of the books on the shelf is kind of stupid. It's usually about 2 days out of date, which means it's not useful except to either be fairly sure we're OUT of something, or to see that we're supposed to have 72 copies so if we can't find any then we need to find out where the display is or whatever. But usually customers expect us to be able to pretty much punch up a book on the system and know for sure exactly where it is and how many copies. These people were backwards. They were impressed that I knew how many we usually carry. Har har har.
And then this minor one, I had a lady returning a quilting book "because I got it for her and it turns out she's not a quilter." Okay. So she wanted to exchange it and asked me, "So could you tell me where the section is please?" I asked her WHAT section and she's like, "QUILTING!" Um, so you're exchanging the book because she doesn't like to quilt, and I'm supposed to know you want to replace it with another quilting book. Brilliant.
Interestingly enough, we had a guy in the store telling us he had had a book transferred from our Tampa store to our store, but he never got a phone call to tell him it was here. Problem is . . . we don't have a Tampa store. So we were kind of calling around trying to figure out who it had been. While waiting around on hold for answers from our competition, my manager shared a story with me about the time a woman in a wheelchair got all up in her face about "YOU GUYS don't know what you're DOING!" because we couldn't find her book she'd supposedly ordered, and she made such a huge scene and then rolled herself out of the store to her vehicle. She hadn't gotten herself out of the parking lot yet by the time my manager figured out (through her desperate phone calls) that it was actually one of the other bookstores that had her book sitting there waiting for her, and she ran out into the parking lot to tell the lady it was them, not us, that she'd ordered the book from. My manager said she was waving her hand at her like "go away" or something, but my manager insisted on approaching and informing her that it was this other bookstore. The woman responded by giving her a look and driving off.
My manager said she thought the lady behaved like that because she'd suddenly realized in the middle of the encounter that she WAS at the wrong store and didn't want to admit that it was her own fault and that she had been blaming the wrong damn people. "The least she could have done is say 'Sorry, my mistake,'" said my manager. Indeed! But she made sure that lady knew that WE KNEW what happened--that she was at the wrong store--just because she'd made such a scene and accused us and everything. That deserves a little humiliation. So there.
5/28/06
Some guy asked me if we had any books on how to speak Italian. I asked him if he was looking for a specific book or if he just wanted me to show him the section.
His answer?
"Yes."
You didn't see that coming, did you?
Some lady came up and asked me about books on Microsoft Office. She didn't know what version she had, so I just led her to the spot where she should browse and left her alone. Then she found me again and said, "Do you think I should just get the program?" I didn't know what she meant--to tell you the truth I didn't remember what I'd helped her with by then--and she revealed to me that she actually didn't own the program and wanted to know if she needed to get it in order to learn to use it or something. Actually she wasn't being very specific about why the hell she needed a book on it if she didn't have the program, but then again of course we're not talking about someone who seems to have all her marbles, so that stands to reason. . . .
I had to tell her we don't carry software and that if she wanted to learn to use the program it's probably best to, ya know, have it.
No wonder she didn't know what version. She didn't even have it.
5/24/06
So. A lady came up to the customer service desk looking sort of confused and frantic, and she asked me about the sign we have in the door that advertises children's storytime. Did we, indeed, have storytime? I told her we did, but that it wasn't today; it was yesterday at 10:30, and also on Saturdays. She informed me that she was asking because she used to work for a bookstore or something and THEY did storytime. I'm like, so? And she went on to ask whether one of us was the one who read the stories or whether we would like her to do it.
I explained that it wasn't a community gathering or anything; it was a store-sponsored event, run by an employee. She said that she used to run the storytime at the other place she worked and OURS wasn't successful but hers was successful. So I explained that what she didn't understand was that the company has someone who is being paid by the company running it.
Her response:
"Well you could pay me, I wouldn't care."
So then I had to go into how we weren't going to hire a person just to do storytime, it was going to be an employee of the store, and it seemed that part of the reason we are having trouble getting a following is that so many kids are in preschool now and on top of that a theater right in the neighborhood does free kids' movies during the same time. Whatever.
She dropped the subject, seeming disappointed, but then asked me if I carried any of the black and white baby. Black and white baby? I asked if it was a book, and she said no, just "the black and white baby products." I asked if that was a product line or something--I never heard of it--and she said no, she was just looking for books and toys for babies that are black and white, because "You know, babies like black and white."
Ohhhhh-kay.
I have actually heard that babies appreciate contrast when they are very young and that it helps their eyes develop, so I kind of haltingly volunteered that I'd heard about babies liking black and white, but I didn't have any section dedicated to books that showed contrast; everything's pretty colorful over there. The best I could do is take her to the baby section, where she was apparently content to browse. Um yeah whatever.
And a funny for today: We got our stuff for a Pirates of the Caribbean display, which includes a cutout of Captain Jack Sparrow. It actually came with TWO cutouts, and I was helping another girl put the displays together because she hadn't done it before. She couldn't figure out how to get the standee to, ya know, standee, so I pulled out the directions and followed them. They sounded dirty to us, so we laughed about it. It instructed us to lay him on the floor, peel off the strip for some adhesive that holds him together, and "fold Jack's torso down and press firmly." Oh baby. Oh baby. Hehehe. It was fun to molest Captain Jack Sparrow in public. He is quite the sexy pirate.
5/23/06
This is my third customer in recent memory to have issues with Spanish dictionaries. First off I found him standing in front of the plain old English dictionaries, whining that he'd been TOLD this was where the Spanish/English dictionaries were but he couldn't find one even though he'd been picking up every book and methodically flipping through it in an effort to find any Spanish. I turned him facing the OTHER way to see what the employee who'd directed him had been talking about, but then he picked up a dictionary and turned to a page and immediately said, "I don't understand this." I explained to him that the first half had the Spanish word with the English definition, and the second half had the opposite, but then he just kept looking at words and reading them and then moving his finger to the place beside the word and saying, "But I don't understand this!" Turned out he was confused by the pronunciation and its funny characters. He'd just look at it and his brain would go kablooey, and he didn't bother to look any further than that. Why? People learn about pronunciation guides in third grade or something. Finally after saying he didn't understand half a dozen times and listening to my attempts to explain, he finally got a little light bulb over his head and started to get it. I was glad, because I was on the verge of looking through all of the dictionaries there trying to find one that didn't have any pronunciation so it wouldn't confuse the poor bastard.
5/22/06
A woman walked up to the register carrying a plastic bag and a slightly embarrassed expression, which usually means "I'm going to return this for a stupid reason." Indeed, she asked to return the book, but the first thing I noticed was that the bag was from one of our competitors. I knew what was coming, but decided not to say anything just on the off chance that perhaps it just happened to be the bag she had grabbed to keep it clean. After all, I bring my lunch to work in a Wal-Mart bag. But when she pulled it out, the receipt was from there too, so she was out of luck. Now, the funniest thing was that after we told her that we were a different store, she tried to blame it on someone else! She said her girl friend had TOLD her that we were the other place, so I guess it was her fault . . . after all, why would you bother looking at the sign on the outside of the building, the sign on the doors, and all the signs as you walk to the register if your girl friend said we were actually a different store? Friends are never wrong you know.
My coworker was helping a woman who was asking for books on Swahili. After she explained that we didn't have any and asked if the lady wanted to go look on the computer to see if any could be ordered, her phone rang. The customer simply picked up the phone and started talking, ignoring my coworker. When she did that, my coworker just walked away. She figured she'd be damned if she'd just stand there wasting her time while this lady had a conversation. Guess what? If you decide to treat us like people, feel free to approach the desk and order a book. . . .
And the same coworker got some woman who was . . . get this . . . whining that the cooking magazines were down on the bottom rack. She wanted them to be on the middle rack so she could reach them easily. And she was ready to kill someone over it. "I'm sorry, ma'am, something has to go down there, in our store it just happened to be the cooking magazines," my coworker explained, but the customer insisted that "you can't SEE them down there," which makes no sense because of course you can, the bottom shelf is very visible. She repeated that they shouldn't have cooking magazines down there--they should choose magazines on a different subject, like kids' magazines--so my coworker pointed out that the kids' magazines WERE on the bottom but they didn't take up that much room, and we have to use all our space. The lady started suggesting how we could change it to suit her needs, and my coworker told her that we didn't have control over the company mandates for the placement of magazines. At that point the customer asked to see the manager.
Continuing in her quest to raise a stink, she repeated her bullshit to my manager, who told her pretty much the same thing my coworker had and suggested that if she wanted to complain she could fill out a comment card. (As if that's going to do any good. I can see the corporate office now, saying, "Why the hell does this bitch think anyone cares what she thinks about where the magazines should go?") She also began to insist that stepladders should be available every few feet so that the higher shelves could be reached by anyone, and she ignored my manager's assurance that if she needed to reach anything we could assist her. She went on to say that EVERY OTHER STORE HAS THEM and also that at EVERY OTHER STORE the cooking magazines are where she wants them, where she doesn't have to bend over, which she apparently cannot do because she has a bad back. (Which makes one wonder why she was so keen on the stepladders.) In any case, she then suggested that we should put the computer magazines on the bottom shelf instead of the ones about cooking, because "MEN can bend over!"
And that is so wrong on so many levels I don't know how to start. I guess computer magazines are always for men, and there is some obvious reason why men can bend over better than women. Whatever.
In any case the lady left unsatisfied and my manager mailed the office about it so they would have fair warning if they do happen to get a complaint about it. But it made me think about how I wish my life had so few speed bumps in it that it was a big deal if a magazine wasn't exactly where I wanted it. I mean, WTF? I need a stool to get around my own kitchen, but it's not like I whined to the apartment complex that a series of elevators should be built into my kitchen floor. This is just a prime example of a lady who needs to be smacked, reminded that there are people on the planet who can't afford to EAT much less buy cooking magazines, and told to GET THE FUCK OVER IT.
5/21/06
Today Satan called and said the air conditioning is working really well in Hell, and then I got through the day with no Assholes. Wow.
5/20/06
A woman came to the desk today saying she was looking for a well-known book that is about history, and the author's last name is so-and-so. She had no other info (not even a first name), so I did a search on the author's name, then narrowed the computer's findings to only show results in the category of history. There were only four books in the list, none of which seemed to be her book, and then she said, "Well I'm not entirely sure that's the author's name."
So basically the only shred of information you have is the author's name, and now you're not even sure of that?
What's even more classic is her continued response: "But you haven't heard of a guy who writes history books?"
So now we're just down to it's some guy who writes history. Brilliant.
Yeah, I told her she needs more information. She told me that she'd been told his books were hard to find. I guess that's always going to be the case when you come in NOT KNOWING ANYTHING ABOUT THEM.
5/17/06
I only had one of note today, while I was on the register actually. Mostly I think it was just a misunderstanding. I asked if she had a discount card and it sounded like she said she didn't, but I didn't hear her clearly because she was turned away from me toward an old woman in a wheelchair who was with her. So I apologized and asked her if she said she had one or she didn't, and she said, "Hang on, I'm looking for it." Ahh. So I guess I heard wrong, she does have one.
But then it turned out that she didn't find what she was looking for in her billfold, and said she'd be going out to the car. I assured her that she didn't have to go out to the car to get her card because I could look her up, but she said she didn't need to get her card, it was something else, "I'm not looking for my card." Okay. She left and came back shortly after, carrying her forgotten checkbook.
"I thought it was in my checkbook," she said, and kept rifling through it, so I decided enough was enough and asked her for her phone number to look her up. She gave it to me willingly enough, but when I looked her up there was no entry. I told her so, and she said, "Oh, I don't have a card."
I guess she didn't realize that the whole time I was trying to get the transaction started I was indeed talking about the discount card, but all her weird vague answers that seemed to indicate that she had one were really just mostly her talking to herself. Oh well.
5/16/06
Only one Asshole for today and it wasn't that bad. A student looking for her college book came in and it was about teaching. Books for teachers--the few we carry--are my territory, and I didn't recognize her title, so I told her so and explained that probably if I had never heard of it we didn't carry it. As I said this we were walking toward the desk, and I explained further that I would look it up anyway just in case. So she told me she knew we must have it because she found it on our website.
I know I've said it before, but I wish people would use a little common sense. Did you type your zip code in when you looked for the book on a national website? No, you didn't, because we don't have the option for our website to check particular locations' in-stock books. Did you see an option to check whether the items were in stock on shelves? Did you call us and reserve one? Then you don't "know" we have anything at all about what we have.
Incidentally, we didn't carry the book. Surprise.
5/15/06
One of our favorite (not) regular customers came in today. She has an intellectual disability and she hangs around trying to talk to everyone about her favorite books and thinks we're all her best friends. Which would not be a bad thing except then sometimes she interferes with the store's functions. She keeps trying to get a job at the store (we don't have a position for someone with her skills), and she keeps trying to prove that she would be a good employee by helping other customers and then coming up to all of us in turn and telling us how she helped someone and we should hire her.
So anyway, today she was here and she saw that a woman was just standing at the customer service desk not getting waited on. She hadn't rung the bell, so me and the other associate who would have been fielding the desk questions didn't happen to notice she was there. But our pal did. She walked over to the customer, whipped out her cell phone, and called our store number, reaching the other associate who had the cordless phone. She explained that someone was waiting at Customer Service for help.
So my coworker went to the desk, and I followed. It turned out that because the lady hadn't rung the bell, our pal thought IT MUST BE BROKEN. That the lady must have tried to ring the bell and it didn't work, so she was forced to just stand there helplessly and wait for us to notice her.
When we showed her that the bell worked just fine, she looked shocked, looked at the sign that said "please ring for service," and said, "What? Then why didn't she ring the bell? I GUESS SHE CAN'T READ!" And she went from there saying she'd called us because she just wanted the lady to get waited on, but had no idea that she hadn't even bothered to ring the bell. You could see it confused the hell out of her. It confuses the hell out of me too, why people would look at a sign that says please ring for service and then not do it because they feel uncomfortable making the bell noise or something. C'mon. We hate obnoxious bell-ringers who abuse it but we don't mind if you use it reasonably for its intended purpose.
So, some lady expected me to figure out her kid's homework today. She didn't really understand exactly what the assignment MEANT, but I needed to find her a book with the information in it, pronto. So we're there in the nature section and I'm suggesting general books on the basic subject her kid is studying because the specific report subject doesn't seem to have any books written on it, and she's like, "Well would THIS one have it? Would THIS one have it?" How do I know whether any of these books are going to feature articles on your kid's science project when all we know about the damn thing is that we need a book? And then I mentioned one more place she could look on the off chance we might have something more specific (the regional section toward the back of the store), and because I was gesturing toward the back of the store she was like, "So you mean MAGAZINES?" and I had to explain that I wasn't talking about magazines just because they were also in that direction. I guess even though I said "books," I must really mean magazines because the back of the store has a big magazine sign. ::sigh::
While I was helping another customer nearby, I saw a family, with a mom and a couple kids and I think there was an itty baby, and the mom asked one of her kids (who was apparently more familiar with the store than the rest of the family was) if she knew where the bathroom was. The family was RIGHT in front of the bathroom when the mom asked. The girl turned around immediately and LOOKED AT THE BATHROOM DOOR, then turned back to Mom and said she didn't know where it was. (And yeah, the little girl was well beyond the age where they're just learning to read. . . . ) Well, if I hadn't been with another customer at the moment I would have happily told them where the bathroom was, and I think I would have enjoyed pointing out that they were within three feet of it or something and would have seen it if they'd, ya know, turn their heads or something, but alas. . . .
I think this might've been my most annoying. A lady asked me for a book and after I took her to the shelf she was asking about companion books that were related to the book, one of which we didn't carry as far as I knew. I was telling her I could check and see what other related books were available even if we didn't carry them, but then her cell rang.
You see where this is going, don't you.
The cell rang and she answered it. And then she did this very odd and rude thing where she began talking to both me and Gary on the phone. She'd be talking to Gary about how she's at the bookstore getting the book and then without looking at me or trying at all to make it clear who she's talking to, she asks me how much the book is. Then back to Gary. Then back to asking me another question. I thought she still wanted me to check on one of the companion books for her, so I waited to see if she was going to get off the damn phone and talk to me like I was a person rather than part of a computer, but after I'd answered her questions she did this weird thing where she turned pointedly away from me until she was showing me her back, and she just started chatting with Gary, "SO, what's up?" In other words, "Go AWAY, annoying bookstore girl, I'm trying to have a conversation and I'm done using you now."
Have fun jerk. I didn't want to find your book anyway.
5/14/06
I was at the customer service desk having just finished helping someone when I noticed a guy clear across the store walking toward the desk and . . . how to describe this . . . he was pointing at me. But not straight out pointing. Just kind of . . . gesturing, perhaps. And I could tell from the way he was gesturing that he expected me to understand what the gesture meant, even as he walked toward me continuing to make it with a questioning look on his face. I just stood there and waited for him to get in my personal space, and then when he was actually at the desk he just sort of made a smaller version of the gesture, pointing at the desk itself, with his eyebrows raised for all the world like he thought I knew what sort of question he wanted answered. If I had to guess, I'd say that the gesture meant, "Is this where I am supposed to be?" But since he hadn't SPOKEN, I didn't know if the desk WAS where he was supposed to be for WHATEVER THE HELL HE WANTED, so I just said the usual "Can I help you?" He asked some short question that I can't remember anymore and went away after that.
But right after him was another man DOING ALMOST THE SAME THING! Except he had a newspaper, and was gesturing with the newspaper at me. He held it face-out at me and showed it to me with that questioning look on his face like I was supposed to know what he wanted. But then he spoke: "Can I pay for this here?" I told him the desk didn't have a register and he could go to the checkout or the café. "There's nobody OVER there," he snapped, and I repeated that he could check out in the café (from where I was standing I could SEE the café guy right where he was supposed to be), or if he preferred to check out at the register I could call someone . . . but he was long gone making a show of storming off to the café where his important ass would not have to wait to pay for his paper. Truthfully if you'd go to the cashier and wait like you're supposed to, they'd see you soon after and come back and help you if they've stepped away. They probably don't even know you need help if you don't go over there and stop at the desk, so quit your whining. Wahhh.
A lady called flipping out because she doesn't have all the books by some romance author in her collection. She thought she had them all, but all of a sudden she read a blurb on the back of one of them that credited this author as being "the author of more than twenty published books" and--gasp--she only has eighteen in her collection! SHE MUST BE MISSING AT LEAST TWO!!! So she wanted me to pull up a list of all the author's books and read them all to her to see if they were in her collection. The lady wasn't an asshole or anything, I just thought it was kinda amusing that it was freaking her out so much. So the ones I found that the lady didn't have seemed to be one of three things: One, not out yet; two, an anthology of short stories which this lady had contributed a story to; or three, a bind-up of two of the books in one cover. Maybe that's what they meant by "more than twenty" books. But she wasn't willing to be satisfied with this.
She wanted to know what else she could do to find out what other books she might have, and she didn't have Internet access so looking on the author's or publisher's site was out. She went on about how maybe the library would know. I was very patient and gave her all the suggestions I could, and then . . . well, she wouldn't stop talking and my other line started ringing. She was doing those "Okay, thank you very much for your help" conversation wind-down lines, so it wasn't something I could interrupt and say hold on while I get the other line, and I thought sure she was about to put the phone down but then she kept going thanking me for taking the time, saying not all bookstore people would have taken the time to help her like that, and how a lot of them don't have any book knowledge these days, "especially the boys, the boys are CLUELESS," she joked, and then she started reiterating all the things she was going to try about the library and shit, and my phone's just ringing and ringing and I've given up hope that I'm going to be able to answer it, hoping one of the other employees would figure it out and get it. (They did. But still. The phone rang like seven times and we're supposed to catch it by the third ring.) Yeah. Argh.
And finally, some lady called the store looking for this book on Lincoln. She thought the book's name was his full name but the only book I could find by the author she was mentioning was one that was only his last name. We argued about this for a while, about how she "thought sure" it was his full name, but hey, how likely is it that the same dude wrote two books about the same guy and named them very similar things? Anyway, I told her it was a book I'd have to order, and then she started being hilarious.
"No one seems to have this book," she said, claiming the library was "out" also. "I HAD NO IDEA PEOPLE WERE SO INTERESTED IN LINCOLN! WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT HE WAS SO POPULAR??"
So I guess she doesn't realize that her inability to find the book anywhere probably means that it's very NOT popular--as in, not popular enough to even be carried by anyone. Instead, her inability to find the book must mean that it's just flying off the shelves EVERYWHERE. A book about an ex-president that was written in 1984. Yup. She's got a firm grasp on reality.
5/13/06
A woman interrupted me repeatedly while I was trying to help her, resulting in my inability to give her any helpful information. First she was just wandering around in the Christian section expecting this book to be there (because people always think they know where a book "should" be and are absolutely certain the bookstore will carry it), but then she encountered me and asked me about it. After she told me the title, she interrupted my explanation that I could look it up to see if we even carried it by blabbering away about how it should be in the front of the store because if we put it in a featured position it would sell a lot of copies and become a bestseller. Because that's how bookstores work--we make things bestsellers through our placement, yeah that's it. We don't just put books in the front that already sell well or anything. . . .
So up at the desk we search and it turns out we do carry the book, but it's in Self-Help and not the Christian section. So as I'm trying to communicate with her the way I always do, she just keeps running over me about her husband and this and that and some people don't like this book to be recommended because it does have a Christian slant but it can be helpful to EVERYONE, not just Christians, blahdeblah. She's continuing this tirade as we're looking for the book.
I tried several times to tell her that it was not on the shelf where it was supposed to be, and explained that because of that I was looking around a bit in case it got jammed where it doesn't belong. But she didn't hear a word I said and kept yammering, mostly by noticing weird or interesting book titles and reading them aloud and commenting on them, sometimes picking them up and blabbering. Then finally she realized we'd kind of been standing there for longer than she might have expected and interrupted herself--fancy that!--to ask me if these books weren't in any ORDER perhaps? My third explanation that I was looking for the book where it shouldn't be because it isn't where it should be finally got through the ear shield her mouth had made. We ended up not finding it, so she left. Woo.
Some frickin' guy came to my coworker and said he was looking for a book and he knew it was about World War I and besides that he didn't know anything but "I would know it if I heard it." She told him he didn't have enough information and just took him to the World War I section, and browsing through those books didn't jog his memory, so he told her to go to the computer and look up "World War I" and READ HIM ALL THE TITLES.
When I heard about this later I told her I wouldn't have let him do that. I would have typed it in and told him the impossible number of books that brings up (my search just now on our website gives up 11,381 matches). But she's more congenial than I am and did what he asked, and I'm not sure why she did this but instead of "World War I" (the traditional way to indicate this war), she typed "World War One" and only got 85 matches. That's still a lot of frickin' titles to read off to someone--which she did painstakingly, ending in his announcement that none of them were "the one"--but still, I can't believe the dude expected to find his book only knowing what it's about . . . on a subject like that! It's like walking into an antique store and telling the dude you want to buy some old stuff, and have him show you everything that qualifies as old stuff!
The same coworker also had this lovely experience. A woman came up and was asking for 24, which even I who do not ever watch TV know is a popular television show right now. I guess this lady assumed that walking into a bookstore and asking for 24 would be enough, that she wouldn't need to specify that she wasn't looking for books, but since we don't sell videos my coworker automatically assumed she'd be looking for books on it. She didn't find any, but somewhere toward the end she must have said the dreaded word "book," because the lady corrected, "No, no, I want the DVD." My coworker told her we don't carry DVDs. "You don't? I thought I've bought DVDs here before." She explained that we carry promotional ones once in a blue moon if they're book-related or something (like we had some Harry Potter once), but not anymore, and not a large selection. "Well, you used to carry DVDs a long time ago. Like ten years ago."
Anyone see a problem with that statement?
Let's see. The earliest DVD players, according to my sources, were released in the U.S. in 1997 . . . but the technology didn't become popular until a couple years after that, and . . . okay, never mind. This is just silly. WE DIDN'T CARRY DVDS TEN YEARS AGO OR EVER. Shut up.
A woman told me she'd seen a write-up in "the paper" about a local author who'd released a book. But of course she didn't know the author or title. So I told her the best I could do is say we might not carry it if he didn't have national distribution, and take her to the regional section. She didn't see what she wanted there, though, so I told her maybe it would help to look it up in the same publication she looked it up in before. Thinking it might be possible that we would have the paper she was talking about, I asked what paper it was featured in.
"Here."
"Here?" That's not a paper. It took a couple more tries to get her to tell me that it was the city's main paper that had written it up. But it wasn't recently, so we were screwed. Oh well. You can probably tell I cried buckets over that.
A woman bought stuff on the register only to find that she'd not quite spent all the money on her gift card. She had a little over a dollar left. Instead of taking it with her and using it toward her next purchase, she told me she'd like to add something else, and quickly grabbed a cute plastic bookmark that hooks onto the top of your page. They had prices on them, but when I rang it up she seemed surprised that its price was $2.95, and told me it wasn't THAT cute and that she'd just save her gift card and use it next time. Which made my register lock up with a void until a manager could get there and take it off, dammit. And the other cashier was in the same situation because a customer changed HER mind about an item, so we were both standing there waiting for managers because customers think the register is where you decide on your purchases instead of where you pay for them. Argh.
A woman with a list of about twelve books for her kid was wandering lost in the kids' section and I offered to help her. Since I'm the Kids' Specialist I know everything pretty much off the top of my head, so I didn't need to look up any of her titles. The first one she wanted was a hardback and she was one of those people who shrieks at price tags of hardback books, so we abandoned that one. I noticed that almost all the books appeared to be newly released books. Grandma, you can't shop for the brand new book in your grandkid's favorite series and then refuse to buy hardbacks. Almost everything is a hardback when it first comes out.
So we go down her list and the next SIX are books we don't have. I told her so. She seemed suspicious when I kept telling her we don't carry such and such. And then I guess she decided that since the answer was "no" on a lot of them, then I probably really meant "I don't know," and told me she would look around somewhat and wanted to know "Are these in ALPHABETICAL ORDER or ANYTHING??" I told her they were in exact alphabetical order by author. But the problem is, not all her books were going to be in the same section. Some were Kids' Fiction, some in Series, some were Newbery Award winners, and a couple were even Teen Fiction. I told her that she would not find them all in the section if she expected to just wander around looking. I ended up helping her find maybe four of them, most of which she kept refusing to buy because they were hardbacks. She thanked me for my help and went away, but then I saw her wandering later and she had to stop and ask me where all the sections were again. . . .
5/10/06
Let's begin today's Inventory of Walking Douchebaggery by featuring a guy I didn't deal with. This man was the responsibility of a coworker, who relayed the story to me with much frustration.
He had a heavy African accent of some kind--sounded like he came from South Africa or something like that--but somehow he spoke English very quickly (though not clearly). His first request was for a book that sounded like "Joozt Dee Prince." My coworker said that she decided he must be saying "Just 'The Prince,'" which became very, very likely after he claimed it was by Machiavelli. Who, of course, wrote The Prince. But this assmunch was convinced that "Just" was part of the title, and he was getting very angry that he apparently wasn't being understood. His head almost blew up when she said that The Prince by Machiavelli was in the fiction section, and he yelled, "NO, it is POLITICAL!" at her. Well, regardless, the book is fiction. It may have a political message, but it is a fiction book. She dropped the subject by telling him she would get him a copy in a minute, and moved on to his second question.
Now he wanted a book and claimed it was by "Carnegie Dale." My coworker found Dale Carnegie. The man was upset because he thought it was the other way around, and again thought this incompetent bookstore girl was helping him incorrectly. She managed to find records of his book being in the business section and again said they would look for it in a moment, because the dude had one more question.
"I am looking for 'Pluto Republic.'"
Anyone who's studied philosophy or has had a complete literary education has probably heard of Plato's Republic. But this man thought it was "Pluto," and besides that, he SPELLED it for her. My coworker told him she knew how to spell "Pluto," but that there was no such thing as "Pluto Republic"; was he sure it wasn't Plato's Republic?
A bunch of drivel fell out of his mouth then, and my coworker ended up telling the man we didn't have it--we indeed did not have the Republic, whether it was by Plato or perhaps Pluto in another universe, and this man couldn't handle that. "Well where do you have it?" he demanded, and she was like, "SIR WE DO NOT HAVE IT." She then was faced with the annoying task of helping the man find the other two books we did carry.
He was snotty to her while she found him the Dale Carnegie book, and then when they went to find The Prince he again whined about how it should be in the political section, then started shrieking, "I do not see it, where is it, WHERE WHERE? IT IS NOT HERE!" while she was combing the shelf. She didn't say a word when she plucked it from the shelf and handed it to him. And then she walked away and told me all of her woes. Poor gal. I'll give her a cookie later.
As for me, today I had to help a lady with no teeth.
Also, if people's brains are made up of fifteen marbles, this lady was missing perhaps two of them. Which is to say that she was not completely batshit, but definitely wasn't all there. Her first verbal onslaught at my desk sounded mostly like mouth-mush, but I picked out a fragment of sense that sounded like she was asking for books in a certain series.
"Books on WHAT?" I requested, and she replied, "CROCHET."
Ahh. I told her that we had a good craft section and made as if to take her there, but she was determined to inform me that we only had TWO back there and she's already looked and looked. I know for a fact we have more than TWO crochet books, so I walked over to Crafts & Hobbies . . . only to find that a) We have a whole SHELF of crochet books and b) She is not behind me. She was just waiting at the desk. Perhaps she thought I would bring the selection to her, or more likely she thought that I would go to the shelf and confirm that she was right about there being only two books.
When I came back and told her I had found plenty of them, she replied back--as if she hadn't heard a word I'd said--"Right, there's only a couple of them back there, everything is knitting and quilting." "NO," I countered, "there are LOTS of them." "I looked and looked and I didn't see any, I guess you guys just don't have them like you used to."
Unsure of what to do faced with this problem of "Let me show you where they are" shot down with "Yeah, you have none," I tried making it simpler. "I SAW SOME. WE HAVE MANY!"
The headlights started to brighten and she realized I was telling her good news. She agreed to follow me, but when I went down the craft aisle she said, "Oh, no, no, I know what you're talking about. I don't want hardbacks."
Huh?
Who says they're all going to be hardbacks?
I just ignored her and got to the shelf and was about to start pointing out paperbacks when she said, "I'm looking for the MAGAZINES."
Hmm. Well, if she mentioned that she wanted magazines at all, she must have done it in the first string of drivel that I didn't understand, because that's the first time that word registered with me. Which is why it puzzles me that when I asked "Books on WHAT?" she replied "Crochet." I thought we were talking about books all along.
So we took a short jaunt from there to see the crafting magazines and true to her previous experience we only found two crochet magazines. I'll be fucked. ::sigh::
And here are some trends I've noticed.
First off, people who come to the wrong desk to check out don't have the ability to speak.
That's right. They know they're in the right place the same way that weird guy in Las Vegas knows he's Elvis. So when they strut up to the customer service desk, which has no register, and toss their stuff on the counter to get rung up, they don't say anything when I ask them if I can help them. They just push the merchandise toward me.
So I play the game and ask them if they have a question. They respond by just pushing the stuff at me again, or patting it, or tossing a credit card and/or discount card onto it.
Don't bother speaking to the girl or thinking about the meaning of her words. Anything with a wide enough surface on it to be a counter is surely a place to check out.
I have no idea why these people can't just open their mouths and ask a question, or speak to me, though some of them rudely inform me that THEY are here to CHECK OUT.
I always pretend to be so surprised when I find out what they wanted. Hehehe.
I had a guy do this silent-attempt-to-check-out-at-Customer-Service today, but before he did that he also started yelling, "Excuse me, exCUSE me!" at my ass trying to get help while I was facing the other way helping a customer who was at my counter! (After I told him where the section was that he wanted, he later came back and committed this annoyingness.)
And the other trend I've noticed is this.
People who watch Oprah's show can't remember book titles.
Three people called today for a book that's been advertised on her show. It's called Lies at the Altar. The first person was someone I talked to. She thought its title was something along the lines of "201 Things You Should Know Before You Get Married." That wasn't even in the subtitle. But while I was on the phone with her trying to determine whether that was it, her friend looked it up and said that was the title, so I put it on hold for her with another book that had a title about things you should know before you get married. She came in and looked at both of them before deciding on the Oprah book. And RIGHT after she left some lady called and asked me the same question and had the same startling lack of information. The third call went to one of my associates. But still, I've seen those programs. They repeat the author's name and the title like fifty times during the show segment. I don't know why they insist on not writing these things down, assuming the bookstore will know what they're talking about even though the workers are AT WORK, not AT HOME ON THEIR BUTTS WATCHING OPRAH.
And lastly I had someone want to know where the nonfiction section was. She was looking for a book that had been featured on the Today Show (and, sadly, it must not have made a big enough splash to be on our media alert page, because nothing on the subject she was looking for was in that show's feature list). Since it was about behind-the-scenes stuff in TV, I took her to Entertainment, and she didn't see what she was looking for. She had also wanted me to take her to the Florida section, and on the way taking her there I lost her because she walked in a different direction, distracted by a table that was labeled "New Releases," thinking her book would be displayed there. After she found me again and I took her to the Florida section, she told me that she figured she'd just browse through the "nonfiction section" next and asked for directions to it. I told her everything in the store is nonfiction except the front strip that's labeled "Fiction." Everything's in a category of some kind. I admit that some things are tough to categorize but we have no "general nonfiction" area. Most things that are uncategorizable end up in Reference. In any case, I'm sure a book that discusses TV would have been in the Entertainment section if we had it. Problem is, things like THE TITLE and THE AUTHOR are mighty helpful in finding books, and she had neither. . . .
5/9/06
I saw a couple walking up to Customer Service so I went up to greet them. The woman of the couple looked very pleased and called out, "Hi, Nicole!"
Yeah. My name's not Nicole. I guess Nicole must have helped them on the phone or whatever, because they were there to pick up their book and I hadn't been the one to find and hold it. . . . I wonder how come they assumed that the person at the desk helping them would automatically be the same person they talked to . . . and why they didn't look at my name tag?
I was at the register and a couple came up and immediately started asking questions about books rather than trying to buy them. The woman was so adamant about rattling of her titles and the specifications and whatnot that I had to repeat myself: "I can't look books up here. This computer is a register, it isn't smart enough to do book lookups." The couple looked at each other like, "God, what shitty service this place has!" so I hastened to add that if they'd go to the desk where they DO look books up--Customer Service--I would call someone to meet them.
"No," said the woman, "we don't want to stand in line for TEN MINUTES." And then they walked away . . . back into the store. Passing Customer Service on the way. Which didn't have any people waiting at it, by the way. I guess it was one of those things where they wanted to try to make ME feel bad that THEY waited in the checkout line only to find out THEY had gone to the wrong place.
I can't say it's ever occurred to me to walk up to the cashier at the grocery store and then act like she's an incompetent jerk because she says she has to call someone else to slice my cheese in the deli rather than running over and doing it herself, but some people don't want to hear excuses, they just want help. . . .
A lady was buying a bunch of shit, and two of her books were special deals--one was on sale for 20% off (plus another 10% with discount card), and the other was on sale for 10% off (plus another 10% with discount card). While I was ringing up her shit she kept grilling me about the discounts, trying to understand them, and I assured her that the discounts would come off the books automatically, plus another 10% off the entire sale with her discount card.
But then she hit me with something I didn't understand.
"But wouldn't it be a better deal if you rang those up each by themselves?"
Nooooo. . . .
That's why it's a percentage, not a dollar amount. . . .
I told her it would definitely be the same whether she bought one book at a time or bought them all together, and then admitted that I had no idea really what she was talking about because ten percent is ten percent. She again asked for reassurance that it's the same deal whether I ring the specially discounted books in with the rest of her shit or separately. Lady, what you pay for each book is going to be the same whether you buy crappy Hallmark cards and farting dog stuffed animals on top of it or not. Somebody was absent the day they taught percentages in like fourth grade.
I talked to a woman named Francesca on the phone today. I think she got an Annoyance degree at Irritating School. First she asked me twice whether she was calling our store and mispronounced our store's name, and then she had to spell everything she said instead of saying it, telling me she wanted Dr. G-E-R-S-O-N's book. It turned out that she was spelling it repeatedly because she couldn't figure out how to say it. When I found her book on the shelf she kept asking me if it was indeed the same title as the one she was asking for, like I might be making a mistake and pulling the wrong book from the shelf, and repeatedly asking me if it was by G-E-R-S-O-N. I didn't have the other book she wanted, so then I had to go through the gymnastics of ordering it for her, and she asked me if I knew how to spell "Francesca." I told her I did. She then ignored me and spelled it anyway. Then she mispronounced our store's name again while claiming that someone told her we had this book. GUESS-WHAT-THEY-LIED. I wish people wouldn't claim we have stuff without calling and making sure. It just makes us have to deal with a bunch of righteously indignant people. And then she kept trying to give me her discount card number--two different times--even though I told her I wasn't going to take any payment for it over the phone, she could just bring her card when she picked it up. And on top of THAT she made the entire conversation difficult by repeatedly TALKING TO HER SON randomly without taking her mouth away from the receiver, so that I'd be trying to ask her something or trying to say something and she'd be talking to someone else, or she'd say something and I'd think she was talking to me. C'mon lady. Grow some courtesy.
Oh yeah, and while I was looking for this lady's book, this asshole said "Excuse me" when I walked into his aisle, and I figured he'd notice I was on the phone and engaged so I couldn't help him, but then he says to me, "EXCUSE ME, I need you to help me find a book!" I nodded to him and pointed to the PHONE in my frickin' hand, and he left me alone until I was done. Damn, I've got a woman in my ear talking to her son when she needs to be talking to me, and then a dude talking in my other ear when he shouldn't be. Can't people just behave themselves? What, did he think I'd just drop what I was doing and help him right there? I was TALKING to her when he tried to stop me! Grrr!
Some jackass in the kids' section let her kid make a minor mess in the train, and while I was over there watching him messing with the shit, she announced to the kid that it was time to go, made him put up the book he was holding at the moment, and then looked at the stack he'd left behind as if considering whether she was indeed responsible for replacing the books since her son wasn't actually touching them right then. She actually lifted a hand and then kind of made a shooing motion at the books like she was thinking "aww fuck it" and then took her kid and left. Right in front of me.
I hope the hemorrhoids your kid gave you are just as annoying as you're sure to be to retail workers for the rest of your life, you ass.
Some lady wanted to know where we have our copies of The Nutcracker. Not whether we have it. Where we have it. I told her I figured that was something we carried seasonally, and she said, "Well, my grandson likes it ALL THE TIME." Yeah. I looked it up and indeed we didn't have any versions of it that we carry year-round, so I told her that and asked if she wanted to order one. She then gave me this snippity story about how the version she has at home does not have a picture of a certain important character and how that is so unacceptable. She NEEDS one with this character in it. And I won't mention which one because there's always a chance she'll do a search for the book's title and that character to try to find out which versions picture her. So at this point the lady's trying to make me find out which version has illustrations of this particular character and I had to explain to her that without the book in front of me I don't know what the pictures look like. I suggested she either check the library out and see if there's a version she wants to order or else do a search on the book sites of the 'Net and see if any of that nifty look-inside technology offers up what she wants. She was one of those people that needed to have "I can't help you with that" pounded into her head several times before she stopped asking, too, so yeah, that was way fun.
A lady asked me if we had "puzzles . . . you know, those puzzles for the kids?" I asked if she meant a certain kind and she goes, "The kind kids put together?" Oh, I thought you meant the kind of puzzles kids brush their dolls' hair with, or those kinds of puzzles they can feed to barnyard animals. Imagine that, a puzzle kids put together. Finally she specified, "For a three-year-old?" Considering we really don't carry puzzles at all (except for in puzzle BOOKS), the answer to that was pretty easy and I got off light.
And now I will wrap this up with one illustrated funny and one general annoyance.
First the annoyance. We just got debit machines, which adds a whole new dimension of jerkitude for customers at the register. Giving them more power to fuck things up was a great idea, really. Now the thing that ticks me off the most is the impatient bozos who swipe their cards before I'm done scanning their merchandise, and then act impatient or pissed off at me or prompt me to push whatever it is I'm supposed to push to allow the entering of their PIN BEFORE I'M DONE SCANNING THEIR SHIT. Excuse me, but you won't have a total until I'm done putting all the items on your bill! That's like getting pissed at the waiter for not bringing your check when you haven't ordered your meal yet! Assholes.
And here's my funny.
A run-of-the-mill asshole lady wanted me to show her where to get a copy of Shiloh for her kid's reading list needs. I took her to the Newbery Awards section and found that there were two versions of the book. When that happens and they are the same price and the same size print and everything, usually it's because it has a different cover or someone else did a different introduction or a different foreword or whatever. It's never going to be actually different text or something unless it says so clearly on it that it's an abridgement or a novelization of the movie version or something like that. When we got to the section and found that both the paperbacks I had were $5.99 and had no differences except that they had different covers, the lady didn't know which to pick.
After I convinced her that nothing was different except the covers and told her to pick the cover she liked best, she said this:
"I'LL TAKE THE ONE WITH THE DOGGIE ON THE COVER."
Hmm.
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Which one would that be?
5/7/06
I'll get my biggest annoyance of the day out of the way first so I don't have to have it weighing on my mind as I write the day up anymore.
Some lady in my register line tried to witness to me again.
First she made a bunch of shitty comments about how the other cashier was sick and that was why she came to MY line, and commented that she needed to WASH HER HANDS (even though she'd been repeatedly using the antibacterial hand cleanser thing any time she coughed or sneezed). Guess what, lady? Some people a) Can't afford to miss work unless they're hospitalized or b) Don't want to screw coworkers over because of a simple cold that's going around anyway. But regardless of that incident, she quickly became way more annoying.
"Let me ask you this. Are you a Christian?"
I later wished that I had both said more and said less to this woman. If I had been going to say less, this is where I should have told her I didn't want to talk to her about personal issues. But no one was behind her or anything, so I told her actually I was not a Christian.
"Oh, you're not? Not yet??"
Huh?
I told her Christianity wasn't my religion of choice, and when she inquired what my religion WAS I was unwise enough to tell her (vaguely) that I follow an Earth-centered spiritual path. I could have told her I'm a filthy heathen Jesus-ignoring Pagan, but I figured she didn't need to know the specifics. So she went on from there to ask me if I had been raised in a churchgoing home (I was not) and then asked if I owned a Bible. I own about four different ones and told her so.
She proceeded to tell me that there IS a God and a Heaven and "YOU don't know where you're going to go, DO YOU???" She told me I need to read my Bible and study a particular verse and pray and ask God to show me if it's real.
Again with the "You're going to Hell if you don't pick the right God." That's basically what the Bible verse she referred me to says, too. And I don't know that because she quoted it. I know that because I'm quite familiar with John 3:16. It isn't that I'm ignorant of the Bible and Christianity's teachings. It's just that in my unbiased listening to the world's religious messages, that one never called to me.
Not that it's any of her goddamn business. And if I'd gotten into this discussion with her while I WASN'T at work, well, that's where I'd have wished for the chance to say more. But alas, I was at work.
So basically, when she began to try to force me into promising her that I would go home and read that Bible because I'm a smart lady, I told her I didn't want to discuss it with her when I've got people waiting for my help. Which at that point I did.
The lady responded by turning around and asking the people behind me if THEY knew about the Book of John.
The man behind her (who was with his little daughter) gave her an unsympathetic glare and said, "YOU must be a BAPTIST."
She protested that she wasn't, and that she is only a Christian who is trying to spread the word of the Lord. Surely that is not only the role of Baptists, she said; why would he assume she is a Baptist?
"Because they're usually the ones who try to PUSH THEIR RELIGION on people."
I guess the lady didn't like that because she left shortly afterwards.
The guy and I didn't discuss what happened but I did joke with him when he said he didn't have a discount card: "For another eight dollars I can INDOCTRINATE you into our club today. . . . "
He laughed.
I was glad he was able to put that lady in her place since I didn't feel I was in a position to do so while representing my store. Yeah, sometimes I actually take the fact that I am an employee into consideration.
So. On with the list of lesser but worthy-of-mention annoying assfaces.
How about the lady who went to Checkout, told the cashier to have the customer service girl paged (and guess who that was!), walked to the desk, and started ringing the service bell because I wasn't there yet when she arrived. Screw you! I had to walk from farther away than you were! And our TELEPORTER'S BROKE and the magical button that produces employee clones to help you isn't installed yet!
Then there was the jerk who walked up and decided speaking to me in a civil manner would be a waste of words and effort. She opened her entitled dipshit mouth and one word fell out: "Bridge."
Understandably, I said, "Excuse me?"
"BOOKS ON BRIDGE."
Is it bad of me that I chose to answer with a pointed finger and a sentence of the same number of syllables? "OVER THERE."
And finally I had the lady who came up claiming she had a question that was going to make me die of laughter. Yeah right. Not after the doozies I've had, lady. I was understandably skeptical, with good reason.
Her question wasn't funny. Just pointless, because she didn't have enough information AND she didn't realize that lack of said information deflated her sails before the voyage began. She wanted a book and knew that the book was by a guy who'd worked with handicapped children and then wrote a fictional book through the eyes of a handicapped child. She didn't know the title or author.
When I told her I didn't recognize the book from that description and that unless she remembered some scrap of title or author it was pretty hopeless, she just gave me one of those sideways looks like, "Well, now you're at least supposed to TRY." And kept waiting for me to say something else. There's nothing else to try, lady. That's like bringing a 1989 computer to a tech and saying you want it to go on the Internet, and standing there hoping they'll be able to do SOMETHING because after all it is a computer. It's not set up to go on the Internet, just like our computer isn't set up to help people who have NO KEYWORDS.
5/6/06
A woman at the register came out with a hesitant "Do you guys carry, like, CD . . . or DVD. . . . " She trailed off there, with her hand rotating like she was trying to use it to pull what she was talking about out of the air. I tried to nip it in the bud by telling her we didn't carry any CDs or DVDs. "No, no, I just mean, like, the books for them." I told her we carry books about music and movies and stuff, but she obviously didn't mean that and reiterated that she just meant the books, the books. I told her I didn't know what she meant and she just fell silent for a moment with this look on her face like, "wow, you're a dense jerk." I asked her what kind of books she meant and she said, "Well, if you DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT, then I CAN'T EXPLAIN IT TO YOU."
Mmm, okay.
I was silent for a moment and then figured out the best way to say it.
"So, is it books with information about CDs or DVDs in them that you're looking for, or do you mean some kind of apparatus for STORAGE?"
Finally some lights flickered and she told me she indeed meant the book-style CD and DVD holders that you can slide your discs into.
We don't carry stuff like that--because we don't sell CDs or DVDs--but I wondered what was so fricking hard about verbalizing that she wanted a storage case that she had to be snippy with me about it. I have no idea why in her mind it was one of those things I should have been able to recognize by the phrase "the books, the books." WE HAVE A LOT OF BOOKS HERE. Screw you.
Ahh yes, and I ended up having to ring up Mr. Wise today. He was not as much of a dickhole as usual, but he was crabby because he was buying a newspaper and our computers don't read the barcodes on some newspapers, so it takes a little longer to do the process to ring them up. (Typing it into a search-for-item search, scrolling down until you find the right one, and then keying in the price to get it to charge for it.) While I was doing it I decided to keep him entertained by lightheartedly whining about the computer, and it worked; he agreed with me about how computers screw everything up and they cause more problems than they solve and he wishes the damn things had never been invented. When the drawer popped, he had paid for a 50˘-plus-tax paper with a $20 bill, so the change was a bit of an ordeal as well, especially considering I didn't have enough pennies open already and had to open a roll. He whined about that too. First he said, "WHAT, you only have SINGLES??" when he saw that I was giving him a lot of singles for change, but when you pay for something that costs less than a dollar with a big bill you are going to get singles. I think he was confused because I used three five-dollar bills instead of one ten and one five because I didn't have any tens right then. I assured him that I was not giving him a fistful of singles, and then when I opened the tube for the pennies he kept barking about how I shouldn't worry about the pennies because it's his TIME, his TIME that's important at his age, not his MONEY. This is rather ironic because he's the one who worked out his purchase plus tax to the penny and then threw a huge fit when our calculation was two cents above his, claiming that that skimming off the top we do is how we make our money. No, Mr. Wise, actually the way we make our money is by BUYING BOOKS AT WHOLESALE PRICES and MARKING THEM UP 40 OR MORE PERCENT TO SELL TO YOU AT RETAIL PRICES, fool. Not by making up little penny hikes here and there to get free money. I got the pennies into the drawer quickly and easily and gave them all to him, but he only took three of the four for some reason and grumbled his crusty ass out of there. What's sad is this was actually a GOOD encounter. Comparatively speaking.
Then I had a lady who had a pervasive inability to listen to anything I said. She answered things I said with answers that made no damn sense. When I asked if she wanted a bag, she replied, "Thanks, you too." When I asked if she wanted the receipt to go in the bag, she replied, "No, just put it in the bag please." The whole conversation was sort of like I was talking to someone who was on their cell phone and only talking to me half the time. Or maybe being in a surreal dimension. Dunno.
Obviously, those of you who know me and those of you who read my work log know that I have no problem with swearing. I do it all the time myself. But when people swear around me and I don't expect it, it always surprises me a little. I had an older lady in my line and she was checking out, but then she asked if I might know the answer to a question she had about a book. I didn't know the answer and told her it would necessitate a trip to the customer service desk, and I offered to call someone to meet her. "No," she said, "I don't want to go over there, there's a fuckin' line." Ohhhhkay! Wow.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that last week some asshole came in and our main cashier sold her a discount card by telling her it would only add $4 to her total. Which is true, because she was spending about sixty bucks. The card costs ten dollars, so if she spent sixty and saved six, the card was only costing her four dollars after the discounts she got out of it (which she wouldn't have gotten without the card). But the lady saw the ten-dollar charge on the receipt and went BALLISTIC.
Our manager had to come to the register to make things right, and the whole time this lady was hollering about how HE said it was FOUR DOLLARS so why does the receipt say TEN??? My manager explained it to her again but she was hearing none of it--she was adamant that if he said it was four bucks then there should be no ten bucks on the receipt. She again explained to the jerk that the card gives you a discount of ten percent off all your purchases, INCLUDING the one you're making when you buy the card, so it is indeed only going to be four dollars more than if you didn't get the card that day. The lady still didn't want to hear it; I think she was one of those people who for some reason believed that the discounts the card gives you would end up on there anyway.
"Well I don't care. Every time I come in here you guys cheat me out of money."
My manager's eyes got a little narrow at that.
She went on spouting her anti-us tirade while my manager undid her previous sale and made to re-ring it without the discount card. She assured the lady that we did not "take" ten dollars from her and that the total she was going to get on this un-discount-carded sale would only be four dollars less, not ten dollars less. My manager asked if she wanted her to try to explain it again. The lady said no.
At that point a loyal customer of ours came up to her and announced that SHE had a discount card, and that it wasn't a scam and that it always saved her money.
"Well then they're taking money from YOU too!"
My manager told me later that she thinks this lady realized at the end of the sale that she was wrong about us "taking" the ten dollars, that she figured it out when faced with the evidence that with the discounts that were applied there really was only a four-dollar difference. But she certainly wasn't willing to admit that. My manager told her that she hoped we wouldn't lose her as a customer over this misunderstanding, but the lady just huffed her way out.
I hope she comes back soon, because as an insider to the company I know how we sneakily take money from all our loyal customers, and I hope she'll return to take more of our stealing and money-grubbing ways. She deserves it. Har.
And here's my last one for the day, just a kind of funny one that's not so much an Asshole as it is an Ignorant or Uninformed.
A girl came up to me and asked me if I knew anything about some author named "Norry." I told her I wasn't familiar with any Norry and she said she didn't know where their books would be and wanted to find them. Luckily she knew one of the mysterious Norry's book titles, which I quickly punched up and then tried to hide my chuckle when I saw the author's name.
The books were erotic fiction, and the author wrote by an obvious pen name for maximum anonymity.
"Oh, I see who you're talking about. It's a French name: 'Noire.' It means 'black.'"
So she got a lesson that her favorite dirty fiction writer's name is pronounced "Nwar," not "Norry." Wahoo. I get to educate people.
5/3/06
A lady called in the early morning to cancel her order she'd made the day before. She told me that she'd done so because she found it cheaper on Amazon.com. I told her that's always the case online, because she seemed to be like, "Heh, I found a better deal at YOUR COMPETITION!!" so I thought it'd be fun to tell her she could have gotten the same deal on our website too. If you don't shop in a retail store, you don't pay retail prices. "OH," she said, "YOU GUYS have a WEBSITE?"
Okay, look.
I know that not everyone is particularly technologically knowledgeable, aware, or advanced. But in a world in which PEOPLE'S DOGS HAVE WEBSITES, it doesn't make sense that a corporate whore bookstore like ours wouldn't have one.
Step into the nineties, lady. That's all you'd have to do before everyone and their momma had a website.
A coworker and I were at the desk when a woman walked up and asked us for study guides on what sounded like "flebomy." I asked her to repeat it and she said "flebomy" again. My coworker and I looked at each other and back at her. The customer's eyes bugged, like she couldn't believe she was talking to such incompetent people, and she said, "Like books on the study of BLOOD. Flebomy!" Beginning to get the picture--ahh, this is a semi-jargon-ish word--I told her I wasn't familiar with that word and asked her to spell it.
"It's P-H-E . . . L-O . . . " she trailed off for a moment, then came back with a hand wave and the flourishing finish, "bomy!"
Considering her spelling wasn't even close to what seemed to be saying, I told her that if it was a medical book of some kind she should go to the medical reference section in Health, and she told us that she would browse there. Knowing she had said her subject was the study of blood, I did a quick search and found that what she was trying to say was the word "phlebotomy," which I guess I have heard before but can't say is a part of my vocabulary. Hey, I know a lot of words, but medical jargon, Biblical words, and specific animal breeds seem to be my weaknesses lately.
I found out later that the lady had gone to Checkout first and asked the cashier, and the girl working up there couldn't even begin to understand her. She sent her to Study Guides, but told me about it later and was relieved to know it wasn't just her who couldn't understand the garbled speech of this lady. The rest of her sentences didn't see to be garbled, though, so I wonder if she just doesn't know how to pronounce "phlebotomy." Never once when she said it did I hear three syllables in the "botomy" part.
And then another one of these run-of-the-mill pathetic losers. Up she came to ask a question about a book. I found it in the system as a book in our fiction section, which is in the front of the store. Because people have an unnatural desire to mindlessly follow me toward the back of the store even though I am only temporarily walking toward the back of the store to GET OUT OF THE IMPRISONMENT OF THE CUSTOMER SERVICE DESK, I always point in the direction I'm going to be going so they don't do that and make me run into them. When I pointed toward the front of the store and said, "It's going to be UP THERE," she still rambled on toward the back of the store while I was coming out of the desk. I think it must be a herd mentality or something that makes people do this. I don't get what's so hard about not going to the BACK OF THE STORE when I say it's AT THE FRONT. But I've raved about this way too often to do it again right now. I'm out of energy for Assholes.
5/2/06
Had a lady come to Customer Service to collect her book, and I decided to play a game to see if I could get her to realize she couldn't check out at the same desk without actually saying it. I gave her three pitches but she struck out. First, after giving her the book, I asked her if that was all she wanted. She said yes and continued taking out her money, an obvious sign that she thought she could pay me. Then I said, "Okay, great," and moved to another part of the desk. She ignored my failure to help her and just fiddled around with her wallet, oblivious to the fact that I wasn't moving to check her out. And lastly, I turned back to her and said, "Be sure and let us know if there's anything else you need." She picked up on that one, finally, and said, "Oh, but don't I need to PAY you for this?" Heh. Oh, oh, oh, no, you take that to the REGISTER. Blarf.
A guy rang the bell and I happened to be in the front of the store instead of to the side or the back like usual, so this created the unusual situation of me having to actually pass him to get into the entrance to the desk. After he saw me coming he attempted to flag me down (even though I was COMING to help him) and tried to chase me when I went for the desk's entrance, like he was afraid I didn't see him waiting there. He seemed very disturbed when he saw I was coming back in his direction, now inside the desk. I don't get it. How would I have looked up his book from the customer side of the desk?
And then there was the dude who was stumped by the Spanish dictionary. He didn't know how to describe what he wanted, first of all, and explained that he wanted a book that would let him look up an English word and see how to say the Spanish word. "Like a DICTIONARY?" I asked, and he didn't seem to think it was the same thing but when I showed him the Spanish dictionaries he couldn't figure out how to use them. He was opening to the front half of the first one he picked up and trying to make sense of it, and I explained like three different times that all the dictionaries had a half that had the English word first to look up how to say it in Spanish, and then the other half had the Spanish word first so you could look up how to say it in English. And he just didn't get it. He kept opening to the Spanish and asking whether this was an English or Spanish word. Well, do you understand the word? No? Then it's Spanish, which you don't speak, assface. But then he would point to the PRONUNCIATION--which as we all know is an explanation of how to SAY the Spanish word, with weird accent marks and special characters that you can learn to interpret with the dictionary's key--and ask if THAT was the English! I showed him a couple more times but when I left him I think he still didn't get it. . . .
This lady ended up behaving all right in the end, but my opening interactions with her were frustrating. She stopped me just as I was coming to the desk, so she followed me, yammering about what she wanted, but stopped mid-sentence when I stepped into the desk and started to walk to the computer, looking at her the whole time. She stopped mid-sentence and gave me this "what the hell do you think you're doing, walking away from me while I'm talking to you?" face. Instead of following me to the other side of the desk over to my computer like most of the other sane customers I deal with, she had just stopped at the side when I walked in, so apparently she had no idea that I generally need to use the computer when someone asks me to look up a book.
"Go ahead," I prompted her, "I'll just need to use the computer to look it up." She caught the clue bus and walked around to the front so she could talk to me without yelling, and told me she was looking for a book by the author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
"Oh yeah, Mr. Kiyosaki," I said, since I am very familiar with the book.
"Right. It's a real estate book," she said, and I had not heard of any real estate books by him, so I dug up the list. I found one about investing in real estate but she said that wasn't it! So I kept going through his list of books and hit the end, and told her none of his other books said they were about real estate, so I didn't know which title she was looking for.
"Well, it's CALLED Rich Dad, Poor Dad," she barked.
Okay, a second ago it was only by the author of that book, and now that's the book she's looking for? Got me.
I told her it wasn't about real estate as far as I knew but it was in our personal finance section, and as I walked her over there she just kept spouting about how it was VERY popular and WE should have it on a display, at LEAST on an endcap! What she doesn't understand is this book has been popular for the whole time I've worked at the store, and sometimes it just doesn't happen to be one of the many popular things we are featuring. Harry Potter is popular and we don't even always have an endcap for THAT!
But anyway, we found her copies and I went the extra mile giving her quotes about how to order from the website and how much it'd cost her, and she was a little catty about how come I couldn't order the books FOR her from the website but I had to explain that once you use the retail store you're paying full retail price (minus any discounts or deals), while on websites it's always discounted more. She started being real nice and thanked me for my help and stuff, and we even had a funny little exchange--Her: "Wow, I didn't know he had so many books!" Me: "I guess that's why he's Rich Dad." Hahaha.
Ugh. My coworker had a doozy and I sort of had to help. We were both standing at Customer Service and I was looking something up on the other computer so she got hit with this jerk. But the jerk had a question about the kids' section, so before going over there to drag the lady to the right section, my coworker confirmed with me that she was thinking of the right place. "That's over there in Special Needs in Education, right?" she asked, and I said, "Yeah, that's right, it's right back there," and waved my hand in the direction. The customer seemed to think that we were leaving her on her own to find it, and she snapped, "Well if you'd just POINT me I will go look!" My coworker explained that of course she was planning to WALK her there, and did so.
But then in a moment my coworker was back at the desk looking huffy. I asked what happened and she told me the lady had sent her back here to "look something up." I asked if she wanted a specific book--I know how they do that, they ask for a section and then once you've taken the trouble to walk them to the right place all of a sudden they want a specific one that you have to look up way back at the desk--but this time that wasn't the case.
"No, we got to the section and without even looking at anything the lady yelled, 'well could you go LOOK something UP because THIS section is nothing but POTTY TRAINING BOOKS.'"
I was like, well, did you show her where the books she wants on becoming a big sister ARE? And she hadn't; I guess the lady was just that much of a rag that she'd immediately scurried away to "look something up" even though it doesn't make any sense to go to the computer, look up books on the subject, and then go back to the same section and say "yeah there's some right here" if you already know they're right there. So I told her I was going over there WITH her, thinking a) I'll get more silliness to write about if she acts like a jerk, and b) I can protect my coworker from her whining if she tries anything. But we got over there and the lady was like, "Oh I found some." Yeah, well, that's because my coworker took you to the right section in the first place, jerkoff.
5/1/06
Let's start off the month with an announcement that I was the back room chair's latest victim. We have a broken chair that we sit on anyway, and I think by now about half of the staff has fallen out of it. I joined them today; I was sitting at the break room table having some carrots and my manager walked back there and called my name, and when I turned to answer the chair tipped and I ended up on the floor. Yay. Ow.
And in the time I have been away (again) my coworkers found some interesting ways to maintain my section. I found a lot of books that were incorrectly shelved that I knew were done by employees because customers don't put books away in the wrong section but alphabetically perfect. So I was going around correcting the ones I saw and I came across a storybook in the favorite character section. I didn't think anything of it until I realized why it was there. It was a storybook whose author was Thomas, and one of my well-meaning coworkers put it in my Thomas the Tank Engine favorite character area. Okay, look, I know it says "Thomas" on the sticker, but come on now. . . .
Some customer came over with a very simple request that he should have been able to solve by himself; he wanted blank cards, but he took one look at the Hallmark section and shorted out so he came to the desk for help. I showed him where to look and he found something he wanted, and then came back to my service desk to try to pay for it. I told him he could go to Checkout or the café but that I didn't have a register. He scurried off, but soon he was back, tossed the card on the counter again like he expected me to ring him up after all, and said, "Sorry, but I went to BOTH places and there was no one at either place." Er . . . I guess I'll make my desk sprout a register, then, and ring you up.
Now my biggest problem with the above interaction was that throughout this scene I could hear the price gun clicking in the café because our café manager was sitting in front of the drink cooler labeling the pop bottles. Translation: I knew she was there. And if this guy went to the café, there is no way he would have missed seeing her. Which means he didn't actually go into the café. He just walked by it and glanced at the counter, and saw no employee standing behind the counter drooling on the computer, and assumed that meant no one was present. The café person sometimes disappears from view to do dishes, but that wasn't even the case this time--she was in front of the counter pricing things and not behind it, so he must not have gone anywhere near it or they would have seen each other.
When I went over to the café after sending this guy away to the register (and announcing over the intercom for the cashier to get his butt to the computer), I talked to the café manager about it just to make sure, and indeed she confirmed that no one had even come into the café. So this is one of those people I hate who doesn't actually put himself in a position to be helped. I have had people claim that they'd been "waiting for twenty minutes" for help at Customer Service, only to realize what they'd thought was "waiting at the desk" was actually standing around looking through sale books nearby and periodically glancing at the desk to see if any employees walked in there. Truth is, we get yelled at if we just go to the desk and stand there doing nothing. We do projects. So unless a customer goes to the desk--actually stands at it--then we'll probably assume that they're just looking at those sale books because they want to, not because they're amusing themselves while waiting for service. You can't stand around outside the restaurant smoking and expect a hostess to come out and ask you if you're ready to be seated.
And here's my first Asshole of the month, 'cause this one happened before my first hour on the clock was up:
We've been having technical issues with our printer and its routing and whatnot. I had been off for four days so I didn't know what had gone on with the printer while I'd been away but when a woman came in and wanted me to print some lists of authors' newest books for her, I got an error while trying to print. I told the lady about the error and said I couldn't print for her. She didn't seem bothered by it, she was a really nice lady. Now that I think back, I think she wasn't bothered by it because she wasn't listening to a damn word I said.
The lady also wanted to order some things for a delivery to an institution, so she was yammering about that and then again she requested a printed list of something else. I told her again that I'd tried a couple times now but we could not print anything at the moment, and I didn't know when it was going to get fixed. (The manager didn't know. She'd been gone for a while too.) The lady told me that was okay, and she'd just get the guy the list was for to tell her what he wanted some other time.
I completed her order to the institution, and wrote down the pertinent information from her confirmation slip on the screen because of course I wouldn't be able to print that either. I explained what I was doing, and wrote down her order ID number, tracking number, the amount of the purchase, the date, the ISBNs of the books--pretty much everything except her own address and the address it was being shipped to, because she already had that on another piece of paper that she'd brought with her. (It was a printed receipt from the last time she'd done the same process.) I told her I'd just paperclip it to her old receipt and she was all dandy with that too. She really seemed to understand what was going on.
Imagine my surprise when she called the store about ten minutes later, asked to speak to me, and said, "When I ordered this book with you just now I didn't get a receipt. Why is that??"
I was like, "Remember, all that trouble we had talking about how I don't have a printer? You didn't get a receipt because I couldn't print it. But I wrote down all the information you needed."
She then proceeded to explain to me that last time she came she got a receipt, and why is it that she didn't get anything this time?
PRINTER BROKE. NO WORKEE.
So she asked how she can go about getting a receipt for her bookkeeping records or whatever. She asked if she could come back now and I could print her one. I told her for the sixth time that I did not print a receipt because I COULD NOT without a WORKING PRINTER. So she asked if we could send it to her, or how she could get a copy. I told her the fastest way to get an "official" receipt would be to go to our website, punch in the number I'd written down for order ID, and print it out from any Internet-capable computer. That flew over her head too and she wanted to know when we would be able to print her receipt. I told her that I didn't know what the problem was with the printer so I didn't know when it was going to be fixed. "OHHHH," she said, "so you're saying you don't know when the printer is going to be working because you don't know your own self!"
Huh?
Does that mean that up to this point she thought I knew a bunch of stuff but I just wasn't releasing this highly sensitive information about the printer?
Except that it goddamn doesn't work right now so stop asking me about it???
Finally she told me she'd stop back by sometime and try to pick up a copy of it and hope the printer was working by then. The end.
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