Hey lady, what the hell is YOUR problem?

The BBQ Pit
1

Try as I might, I can’t work up the BURNING HATRED OF A THOUSAND SUNS required as for a pitting. Probably a good thing too, since that would probably point to issues on my part more than anything else. So I offer you here a MPSIMSing.

Anyway. I work for Burger King. As you might expect, it gets very busy around noon. So busy that the entire area in front of the counter fills up with people and we put twice the normal number of staff up front so we can work each till in pairs, we actually assign someone to fill up drinks, we keep up a constant supply of the most popular burgers instead of making them on demand… well, it’s busy. So out of the chaos steps a woman, who begins to place her order…

But wait! Her mobile phone rings, interrupting her! So what does she do? SHE PICKS IT UP AND STARTS TALKING.

Wait, what? Is she really talking on her phone in the middle of a fast food order?

WHY YES SHE IS! While a crowd of others waits behind her. And she hasn’t paid me yet. The till software is set up so that while I can keep several orders on the screen, I can’t have more than one “live” one. So until her order is finished and paid for, I can’t take any others. “Uh, excuse me?” I say. She looks up at me like I just strangled her dog, and walks away and disappears behind the crowd.

O… kay then. What can I do? I can’t tell if she’s even in the store anymore, thanks to the crowd. And I still can’t take any orders because hers is unfinished. So I tell the guys in the back room to forget about her order and delete it from the screen. I start serving other people. All is well.

Until, that is, she comes back, having presumably finished talking to her friends about Aimee’s new job and how much Ryan’s car blows. “Where’s my food?” she asks. “Sorry,” I say. “I wasn’t sure if you were coming back, so I cancelled it.”

Oh boy. Her face contorts into a grotesque mockery of human life as she reveals her true form. Well actually, she just puffs up a little and looks kind of pissed. “EXCUSE ME? DID I TELL YOU TO CANCEL IT?” Well, no, but - “I’VE BEEN WAITING HERE FOR TEN MINUTES.” Well see, when you walk off without saying anything to talk on your phone, holding up the whole line behind you, we don’t consider that “waiting”. :roll:

“I want to talk to your manager,” she says, glaring. No need, lady, the manager has already come out to see what all the fuss is about. “What seems to be the problem here?” he asks.

Phone Lady puffs up. “I’ve been waiting here for TEN MINUTES,” she asserts. He asks what she ordered. She tells him. He checks my monitor.

“According to that, it’s been under a minute.”
“Yeah, well that’s because they DELETED IT.” Glare glare.
The manager looks at us. “Did you delete it?”
Well, uh, see…

GAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!

Only because she walked off to talk on her phone and we weren’t sure if she was coming back, I tell him. But apparently it doesn’t matter. He calls down the mike to ask if they can make her order super fast, please, and throw on a free chips on top of that. Meanwhile Phone Lady is staring at us, and me especially, as if we strangled her dog AND her firstborn son.

They say you’re not REALLY a retail worker until you’ve had one true asshole customer. So yay, I guess I’ve been initiated. It’s been an educational week. The things I have learned are:

  1. The customer is always right.
  2. Being an asshole will earn you free chips.
  3. Insisting your chocolate milkshake is actually vanilla will get you extra chocolate syrup in it, even though you’re the one who deserves it least. Asshole.
  4. Some people probably go to fast food places because they’d get kicked out of a real restaurant.
  5. The customer is always right.
  6. I put extra ice in your Coke.
2

It’s unfortunate your manager didn’t stand up for you more, but if things were as busy as you say he was probably going the ‘route of least resistance.’

3

Wait, this IS the Pit? Crap, wrong tab :smack: Could a passing mod please move this? Or whatever.

4

Back in my banking days, on a particulary busy afternoon, I met what must have been the same lady. Let’s see, that would make her about 87 today. Was she 87?

She walked up to my teller window, bypassing the line, and shove a handful of checks into my face. “Deposit these in my account”, she demanded, “and I don’t have time to wait, I’m double-parked.” While the checks were all made out to one person, there was no account number and no deposit slip. To do what I needed to do would have taken some time, during which customers were waiting. I decided I’d either a) wait until she came back from the CSR area where she’d disappeared to, and tell her she needed to fill out a deposit slip, or b) wait until a less busy time and process the transaction then.

In the meantime, I took another customer, one who was not a complete nimrod.

Halfway through that next transaction, Souper Biyotch comes back to my window demanding her receipt. I told her my situation. She screamed that of course she’d filled out a deposit slip and she wanted her receipt NOW. I told her I’d be happy to help her as soon as I’d finished with my current customer. Not. Good. Enough. She practically pushed my good customer out of the way and started yelling at the top of her lungs.

Somehow in the ensuing “conversation”, it became obvious that I was the one responsible for her double-parked car. My fault. How dare I?

So I backed out of my current transaction, and took care of Souper Biyatch. When I was done, she went back to the CSR area and tried to get me fired.

Nice lady.

5

I work at a Domino’s Pizza. We have a list of suck-up rules for keeping customers happy, even when they’re wrong. The last one on the list is “Accept the fact that some customers will try to take advantage of you.”

One late night, we had a lady who complained that her sausage pizza had hamburger on it instead. Following the suck-up rules, I appologized and sent her a free sausage pizza. Then she called back and complained that it was hamburger again. (I had made the remake, so I knew it was sausage.) I tried to explain that the ground sausage looks similar in consistancy to ground beef, but the color is different: sausage cooks up golden brown, and hamburger dark brown. She started bitching that it wasn’t her job to judge color and that I must have messed up and she wanted to speak to a manager. :rolleyes: He wasn’t available, so I made two little mini-pizzas, one with sausage and one with beef. I delivered them myself to her and showed her the differnce. She looked at both of hers and admitted that they looked like my little sausage pizza. Then she had the nerve to ask for another free pizza, since hers were cold. I lied and told her my manager said there was a 1 pizza remake per night per customer. I offered her a free side item on her next order, and she accepted.

I just didn’t feel like wasting my store’s resources and my time for what would be a no-tip.

6

Ah, sorry to hear that, FRM. She certainly put you in a no-win situation, which you, not surprisingly, did not win. I think one positive thing you could take away from this is asking your manager what you should do in this situation, when a customer takes a call in the middle of ordering and you don’t know what they want you to do and they won’t tell you. Make him earn his money as a manager by giving you definite policy on this.

And yes, customers do indeed suck. So do co-workers, managers, relatives, friends, lovers, etc. Life is not fair, and the best we can do sometimes is shrug it off and not let it bother us too much (I’m still working on taking that advice :slight_smile: ).

7

I had a roomate who was a Screamer. He sincerely believed that this was the only way to deal with a problem, though his girlfriend and I tried mightily to convince him otherwise. It was as embarassing as hell to go somewhere with him.

Once, we ordered takeout and when we got home, we discovered that they had given us someone else’s order by mistake. I insisted that I would call to deal with it. He listened to my side of the conversation as I explained to the person who had answered the phone that there had been a mixup. They offered not only to replace this meal, but to offer us a voucher for our next meal free. He was astonished, because all he had ever managed to get was a grudging replacement of the incorrect item.

Having been on the receiving end of screaming complaints, I have always made it a point to be extra-nice to service people. They have to deal with a lot of shit, and I figure maybe I can brighten their day for just a few moments by being pleasant and friendly.

You know, the weird thing is that you see people who have the exact opposite opinion. They seem to have this notion that having been screamed at in the past, now it’s their turn-- revenge on the world that abused them, or some such. You see this a lot in people who have achieved middle-class status after being in lower socio-economic brackets-- they seem to want to prove their status by their contempt for the working man.

8

Bolding mine.

Fuck that shit. The customer is NOT always right. Paying for a service doesn’t, contrary to what some people seem to think, give customers the right to act like complete assholes or to treat the service staff as subhuman. Cunts like the woman you describe need to have it made clear that their shit will not be tolerated.

Which brings me to my next point. If there’s one thing that makes life in the service industry even more shitty, it’s spineless jackoff managers who won’t stand up for their employees even when the employee is in the right, and has done everything possible to keep things running smoothly.

You manager should have realized that this one stupid bitch’s business is worth less to his establishment than the business of all the people she was delaying with her selfishness, and told her so. Her idiocy didn’t just make your life difficult, it delayed a whole bunch of paying customers.

There, that should suffice to keep this in the Pit. :slight_smile:

9

I’m continually surprised that retail establishments are interested in putting up with this nonsense from customers. It seems to me that you have two choices:

  1. Appease the idiot (a good way to ensure he/she will be back for future encore performances).
  2. Tell the idiot to get lost (a good way to send him/her off to cause trouble for your competition).

Unless you are desperate for business, #2 looks like much the best choice.
From the perspective of a manager, it’s a choice between rewarding a bad customer while stabbing your employee in the back, or backing up your employee while driving away an obnoxious customer. I’d be hard put to say why that choice is anything other than a no-brainer.

10

Exactly!

Especially when appeasing the asshole customer might also annoy other customers who have been inconvenienced or angered by his or her rudeness.

11

I just have to mention that I covet that sentence.

I have actually suggested a “Giving precedence to a cell phone call will result in you losing your place in line” sign at the reference desk where I work and at other businesses where I’ve gone. People think I’m joking- I’m not. I will gleefully humiliate the hell out of a student who takes a cell phone call to say anything other than some five second or less synonym of “I’ll call you back” while I’m teaching a class. People who have no common courtesy or common sense with those things should have to forfeit them.

I used to work in a hotel that had a big “100% Refund if Not 100% Satisfied With Your Stay” sign, and this was not a roadside dive hotel but one of the nicest hotels in town. I would never ever ever ever ever have such a sign because a well run company (like Marriott, which I also worked for and which at the time was well run) would never have that policy but at the same time would automatically refund all or part of a guest’s bill if something truly warranted it. (e.g. The fire alarms going off in error at 3:00 a.m. on the night before you have a really important 8:00 a.m. meeting is worth a full refund; the ice machine being out of ice does not, though I’ll be glad to send a bellman with some ice from the kitchen until the ice machine has ice again). Needless to say this brought out the con-artist and the bitch in more than a few guests of all demographics, including some that you knew damned good and well checked in with no intention of paying for their room (they wanted to shack up) and some that you knew good and well wanted somebody to pay for the bad day they’d had with their spouse and the desk clerk was their “tag you’re it” person and any excuse would do.

The most ridiculous was during Hurricane Opal in the mid 1990s when the hotel was filled with refugees from the coast. Montgomery AL was hit HARD by Opal- the hotel’s power was knocked out, hotel employees had to stay at the hotel because they couldn’t drive home, the phone lines snapped, etc… You’d be amazed how many people who were fleeing a hurricane that wiped out the city they lived in

1- called the ONE line in the hotel (an underground emergency line) to complain that there was no room service (IT’S BECAUSE THERE’S NO POWER, BITCH! YOU WANT THEM TO START A FIRE IN THE ATRIUM AND ROAST YOU A STRAY CAT, WHAT?)
2- demanded a refund because “this is not what I expect from a hotel like this” (I’m sorry, the hurricane was something we really shouldn’t have scheduled when we’re this full)

and these included a couple that we’d squeezed in when we didn’t really have rooms available strictly because they were so pathetic in trying to find a room for the storm (and who cried with relief when we did so) and a Jewish guest from NYC who we gave special permission to pay when he left because he was orthodox and not supposed to handle money on (whatever Jewish holiday it was- Yom Kippur? Rosh Hashonah? etc.- in any case our office manager was [admittedly secular] Jewish and had never heard of the custom that would allow you travel by plane but not handle money on that particular day).

The hotel ended up comping about 50% of the rooms that night because of complaints about the storm. I hate people.

Except for the ones I don’t.

12

I’ve had customers like that, as well as ones that have tried to pull scams. Everywhere I’ve worked retail was a small business with only 5 or 6 employees, meaning the owner was also the boss, the manager, and the final authority on everything. It was always so satisfying when he was there to tell a jerk to take a hike and not come back. I remember one conversation I had fairly late into the second shift (probably 8 or 9 PM)…

Stupid customer, very heated over an issue caused by his own stupidity: Who’s your manager? I want to talk to him right now.
Our hero: [Owner’s name], but he won’t be in until tomorrow morning.
SC: Well then, who’s the boss?
OH: [Owner’s name], but he won’t be in until tomorrow morning.
SC: No manager and no boss here?! What’s the name of the owner, I’m going to complain to him!
OH: [Owner’s name], but he won’t be in until tomorrow morning.

That got the customer away and I highly doubt he showed up to complain the next morning (if he did, the boss never mentioned it.) And I know the boss would’ve backed me up, especially without me there to be caught in the middle of a shouting match.

13

You haven’t had it bad until you’ve had a customer complain that you’ve put human feces on her food and then demand gift certificates as compensation.

Gift certificates. To a place that supposedly put shit on her food. :dubious:

14

Amen! I was in an Arby’s about a month back, standing near the back of the line chatting with a Columbia city officer. Three people ahead of us, the customer at the head of the line was hmm’ing and haw’ing and finally puts in the order. The total was $20-something. Bitch customer starts yelling “How can two sandwiches, two fries, two drinks, and two pies come up to $20-something!?” The cashier did the whole apologize song and dance, pointed to each product individually, pointed to the reciept, and was very plesant throughout. At this point, the customer says forget about it and demands to see the manager. Fast foreward two minutes.

CPD officer and I are putting in our orders and the manager butts in, interrupts the order, and pulls the cashier away for a second. CPD and I look over and see the customer poke the cashier in the center of her chest, and watch the cashier haul off and belt the customer. I mean, this is one which came along with the movie ‘smack’ and the customer goes asses over elbows. The customer gets up and comes over to CPD and demands to have the cashier arrested. CPD officer laughs and says “Why? What I saw was a resonable demonstration of self defense after you assaulted her. If anything, I should arrest you.” Customer starts cursing and calling the officer “stupid nigger” this and “fucking nigger” that as she walks off. The manager starts yelling about how the cashier was fired, and CPD officer speaks up again and says “Well, you allowed your employee to be assaulted, and as such you could be charged with…” and drops a litany of charges. Cashier comes up, gives us a $10 smile, takes our order, and we’re on our way.

The nice thing is, that manager’s gone now and the cashier is still there, smiling and taking orders. FRM, you’ll have to take some gump from customers some times, but just remember that there’s “hard to please” and “abusive.” They are not one in the same.

15

The nicer you are to me, the better service you will get from me. You will always get the minimum – only because it IS my job and I can get in trouble even if you deserve to hear “F*** off, jerk,” from me – but if you are nicer, suddenly I will be as extra helpful as I can. Really, I want to help you find what you want. It makes me and the store look good and makes you happy. You don’t have to be rude to me to get what you want; in fact, it’s counterproductive.

This may sound like I have an attitude, but I don’t. Quite the opposite. No, I’m not perfect, but I’m generally willing to help. For some reason, I’m not quite so eager to help somebody who is being a jerk at me. I don’t think that’s so strange.

Service people are human too. And we’re not automatically dumb because we have retail or other sorts of service jobs. Most people have had one at some point, haven’t they? If they haven’t, they should! Maybe they’d be nicer to us.

16

If I’m reading the OP correctly, she walked away before she paid you for the order. To me that would negate the transaction then and there. How could she come back later and expect that the food had been prepared when she walked away without paying?? :dubious:

Oh and since it’s the pit, What a bitch!

17

Hehe. This reminds me of a guy at my church. When he found that he had lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking, he wrote a letter to Philip Morris demanding that they owed him a lifetime supply of cigarettes. :rolleyes: This is in spite of the fact that Philip Morris didn’t make the cigarettes he smoked. He just wrote them a letter “because they’re the biggest.”

I think he’s still waiting on a reply :wally

18

To be fair, that wouldn’t be all that many ciggarettes, would it?

19

Your manager should’ve covered your back – later. In the moment, there’s probably nothing else he could’ve done. Get her happy, get her out. I’m sure as hell glad there weren’t cell phones back when I was doing fast food, that’s incredibly rude. I hope the other customers were giving her the evil eye.

I’ve worked fast food and retail, and it seems to me that being hungry brings out the worst in people. Or having a pressing need, like at a bank, or at the public library when a deadline’s looming (still remember the woman who’d escorted her teenaged daughter in and announced with great importance “We need information on SHARKS” - finding the info is part of the assignment, lady). Some of my library patrons included people who’d been spelling in front of me when I was handing out chicken - all of a sudden I was a font of knowledge.

OTOH, when I worked at the fancy soap shop at the mall, our clientele behaved quite differently - and I know these are the very same people you’re feeding in the food court. When they’re buying a luxury product, one that draws them in with a positive sense of anticipation, they’re pussycats.

When I’m doing portraits at art fairs, I love working with the public. I almost never have unpleasant clients. It’s maybe 2 out of 100. But it’s not a need, they’re not hungry, and they wouldn’t even be talking to me if they didn’t already know they wanted what I have. Totally different attitude.

Fascinating.

20

I have a brand new job - after 3 years of unemployment. Still in customer service but in an odd sort of way :cool:

I get paid to talk trash … I work for a ‘broker’ we interface between companies and garbage companies. They pay us a fee to deal with the garbage haulers so they won’t have to take the time to do it, so I spend half my time talking with places like the Gap, Borders, 99 restaraunts and so on, and garbage haulers.

Many of the CS staff loudly claim that they hate the haulers, that the haulers are always surly, rude and nasty. I sit and listen to a lot of them, and they arent overly nice to the haulers. I am very polite and nice with the haulers and can frequently get the hauler to work with me to solve a problem where the others really get nowhere.

I always hate it when people are rude to me, so I try to be nice to everybody. I can be firm about something, but even when I am firm, I am always very polite. Like they say, honey gets more flies than vinegar!