Ooh, I’ve never done a fast-food rant, but this thread seems like a good place for it.
Increasingly, this is a horrible combination at fast-food sandwich joints:
Blasting loud pop music from a speaker right behind my head.
Thick (and dang near soundproof) plate glass between me and the sandwich maker to keep me from snotting on the food.
Surly teenage sandwich maker who’s tired of saying the same phrase 5,000 times a day and now just slurs it out as fast as possible.
All this results in me screaming “what?!?” as they and I try to communicate. Hey, I admit I’m not as young as I used to be and my hearing might not be up to snuff, but this only happens at fast food joints. Today, I could have sworn the girl was repeatedly asking me “rice and beans?” when the phrase was actually “breast and wings?” It was almost impossible to make it out over the blast of KPOP music.
One of many reasons I almost never do fast food nowadays.
There, I fixed my bolding problem. I’m pretty fucking sure that “quantity and selection may vary” isn’t the same as “not available in all locations”. The regulation even recognizes there is a difference between “limited quantities” and “not available in all locations” by of the inclusion of the “and/or” in text. It is not a difficult regulation to follow, and if a business runs ads regularly they should be familiar with it. Hung Mung’s company almost got it right. Almost.
I’m going to help you out by pitting my clutter-stutter. There’s nothing that makes me sound more idiotic than my inability to get words out and pronounced correctly. After I’ve finished butchering my words in front of people and I see how bemused/embarrassed for me/horrified they look, I just want to jump off a bridge and kill myself. Sometimes I just want to cut out my tongue and never speak again. I hate my voice that much.
I have intense jealousy for people who consistently speak well.
Back when I was in retail management, I’d occasionally have customers threaten, “I’ll never shop here again!” – to which I was always tempted (but never brave enough) to ask, “May I have that in writing?”
Hung Mung, I hate entitled customers. And even if the customer has a point, it’s still not your fault the ad is bad.
My mini rant:
To the parent with the “non-emergency” emergency that kept calling for her teenage son’s probation officer today:
J. has voicemail. It’s really neat. You can leave a message and then, she can call you back! Oh, that’s right, you don’t have a phone but somehow you are able to call every ten fucking minutes to see if J. is available yet. I don’t suppose you could leave a message and let someone, anyone, know what the hell major crisis is happening that you must speak to her right NOW? And demanding that I look in my fucking crystal ball and tell you when J. will be available isn’t going to get you anywhere, because I am unfortunately not psychic. If I was, I wouldn’t answer the phone when you call.
Also, after I finally got fed up and gave you to J.'s supervisor, do not call back to get a different answer from J. because the supervisor didn’t tell you what you wanted to hear. Guess what? The officers talk to each other.
Oh, and fuck you for being nastier each time you called. You refused to talk to anyone but J. until I gave the call to her supervisor without telling you who you were talking to. J. has more clients than your son, bitch, some of whom actually are having real problems right now.
Is your problem only with extemporaneous speech, or all the time?
I have a speech… thing. I don’t know precisely what it is. It’s like a stutter in that I’ll be unable to force a word out, but it happens really randomly, sometimes in the middle of a word.
I’ve found that making recordings of myself forced me to pay more attention to how I was shaping words, if that makes sense. So I started doing poetry recordings. Then I was offered a gig doing readings for a poetry podcast, so that paid off. Not in money, of course. Poet-types don’t DO money, the bastards.
I wouldn’t say that. Haggling is an art form. It is one I don’t like to take part in, same as interpretive dance, but I recognize that some people indulge.
The Regional Manager who caved is the issue. If the couple lied about Hung’s comments and assertions, that would also put them in the asshole classification. And having been the guy on the receiving end of both, I understand and commiserate with Hung’s frustration. I can also say that having gone to a store to find out-of-stock sales items is also frustrating, but I understand that when it says quantity and availability limited that the store may not have any.
I love it when customers say that. I always feel like saying things like “It would appear that you aren’t shopping here now,” or “I am pleased that we can at least agree on something.” I worked at a large electronics retailer for a couple of years some time ago, and great Og, there were some customers for whom a smack upside the head with a Hummer would still have been unsatisfying. I’ve seen customers scream – quite literally scream with such force that I thought they’d launch their larynx clear across the store – at the CSRs and every store manager who, of course, had by that point all gathered to try and defuse the situation. One even picked up a chair and whipped it at the store manager. He (the manager) narrowly missed becoming an impromptu Geraldo impersonation. (The cops were called on that one – and a couple of others, too.) Another customer was screaming at a cashier because she had the audacity to ask for photo ID when presented with a credit card. Kept going on about how we’d use her personal information for evil, nefarious deeds and unsolicited mail. The tinfoil was thick with that one.
My point though is that acquiescence to bitchy customers just to get them out of the store in cases where they are clearly in the wrong actively encourages them to be assholes. They’re like little kids testing boundaries; the more they get when they piss all over store staff, the more they will continue to do it. Fuck that shit. The customer is not always right. Sometimes, the customer is a dumbass. Sometimes, the customer is just an asshole. In either case they need to be shown the light. It’s red, and it says “EXIT.”
It’s not all the time. When I’m talking to myself, I’m fine. And when I’m giving a prepared talk or speech, I can be quite eloquent.
The moment when I have to start talking to other people off the cuff is when my speech becomes cluttered, stuttered, and stammered. I can’t seem to think and talk at the same time, especially if I’m excited or nervous. And because I’m aware that I’m not getting my thoughts out well, I start rambling as I rephrase and reword what I’m trying to say. So not only do I sound like a stuttering fool, I sound like a blithering idiot.
I know it’s hard listening to me sometimes, so I sympathize with the OP. But he should be aware that people who stutter aren’t doing it on purpose.
I agree with the OP and his tale of woe in retail. I worked in retail for a big-box office supply store and every damn week we had the same problems with the fucking ads! The usual gaggle of entitled dipshits would accuse us of using bait-and-switch tactics and then demand some compensation (one person wanted to be reimbursed for his gas after driving 50 miles to the store, never mind the fact that he didn’t think to call first before making his pilgrimage to our store). Often times the big featured items on the front page of the ad would not be in stock, so all day Sunday (which was a shitty day to work for this very reason, for which I was glad to not be working on that day after awhile) I’d have to pacify all the whiny pricks who bitched about shit we have no control over. Yeah, I know, it sucks for the customer, but it’s not fair to shit all over the drone who can’t just magically pull the item out of his ass (and if he could pull it out of his ass would you really still want it at that point?) Thank God I got out of that job when I did. I could write an entire book on “Why It Sucks to Work in Retail”.
Now for my mini-rant:
To my callers: When you want to book travel, it is very helpful if you have SPECIFIC DATES AND CITIES you want us to look at! Each availability search takes anywhere from a few seconds to a couple minutes, depending on how fast or slow the system is operating that day. If you give us too broad of a range of dates and too many possible city choices this can easily multiply into literally hundreds of possible permutations. I do not have the time to check more than a few flight options for you, especially when there are more callers in the queue waiting for the lines to open up to take their calls.
Case in point- one of the most egregious offenders of this kind called yesterday. This guy was one incredibly excruciating pain in the ass. He lived in some bumblefuck town in Oregon whose “airport” is likely little more than a strip of dirt and a wooden shack that had once been an outhouse that now serves as the control tower. He said he wanted to fly out of any west coast city and into Manila, Phillipines. I narrowed this part to only include Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles in that order. He then told me that he could leave on any day in December and be away for 30 days. This amounts to 124 possibilities. Even though I kept telling him that I could only check a few dates and cities, he insisted that I keep checking until I find something. Since he was traveling over the holidays (for which flights are already filling up), finding a flight that was eligible for use with his travel points was impossible. He just would not concede and accept the fact that he would have to pay for part of his flights out of pocket due to not having eligible award space available. He was going to get a free ticket and he wasn’t going to get it without a fight. Simply telling him “there are no award-space flights available on any of these dates out of any of these cities” was not enough to get him to take his “full option” award and just pay the difference, be happy he’s still getting a big break on the cost of the flight and shut the hell up. Just to show how much of a tenaciously persistent and unrelenting pain this jackass was, he claimed that last time he booked his flights it took him 37 phone calls to our travel center to finally get the flights he wanted.
After having me search at least two dozen different possible itineraries on various dates he finally told me that he had always taken the same flights each year. Why in the holy blue fuck he didn’t tell me this in the first place I cannot fathom, but it would have saved over 30 minutes of the 55 utterly wasteful minutes I spent talking to this low-grade moron.
He said, “this is ridiculous!” Yes, sir, it is ridiculous, but your’re the one who’s making it that way! Most people. Then he said, “I’m not getting very good service from you guys!” Believe it or not, sometimes, part of getting good service means putting in some effort on your part to help us give you the good service you’d expect in return.
Yeah, retail pretty much provides no end of fun. I go back and forth a couple hundred times a day thinking “I hate my job… I love my job… I hate my job”, simply because I deal with people constantly, and so many of them are awesome (I work in a big ol’ chain retailer, but as a cosmetician where I have fewer customers and am able to focus really strongly on their needs - this results in a LOT of regulars who love me), but the few asshats a day really stick in my mind. We’ve had a lot of fun lately with customers who are angry about something that isn’t our problem or under our control AT ALL… the St. Louis paper is constanly running promotions with the Cardinals and the Rams for collectible rings, medallions, butt plugs, etc. They print coupons which customers can use to buy the Collectible Bullshit at several local retailers. The last couple of years this hasn’t been an issue, but lately it seems like the promotions are being run every couple of months and are not terribly well-coordinated. This results in customers coming in and yelling at us because they want a Collectible Bullshit but don’t have a coupon, and there isn’t a coupon in that day’s paper, and no, we don’t know when they’ll run the next coupon, and no, we really can’t sell the Collectible Bullshit without the coupon, and gee, I’m really sorry that you live 60 miles from here and you drove all this way and you can’t come back tomorrow, but I guess you should have READ THE FUCKING RULES, or even just called us, before you made your crazy 60 mile trek for some plastic Collectible Bullshit.
It’s bad enough to be yelled at for corporate stuff I have no control over (I always want to tell people "Ma’am, if I were responsible for hiring/product mix/ads/etc., do you think that I would be standing here in this silly vest?), but it drives me totally bonkers when it’s another’s company’s crazy corporate shenanigans that I’m getting upbraided for.
But I hate it so much when my parents forget me. When they tell me they’ll come pick me up after dance class or play practice or school or work and I end up waiting for hours, calling over and over again, everybody looking at me like I’m the girl nobody loves. Sometimes somebody waits with me… that’s the worst because they start getting really annoyed with me because they usually decide to stay thinking it’ll be ten minutes, not three hours.
And then if I just give in and take the bus or walk, I get in trouble. Usually because somebody eventually sat up and thought, “hey, didn’t we used to have THREE children?” and got to my dance studio/show venue/school while I was off sitting at a bus stop or walking my sixteen-year-old ass home through the decidedly unsafe city in the dark and I get in trouble because they showed up and I wasn’t there.
And it’s not even the taking the bus or walking that I hate. I do that just fine most of the time. It’s that they say they’re going to come and they don’t. And the sitting there waiting for something that I’m not sure is coming, but if it does, I’d damn sure better be waiting.
And to top it off, this happens all the time with me. and NEVER with my sisters. So I know it isn’t just that my parents are absentminded and prone to forgetting important things like, say, their daughter.
What’s worse is when the host asks every caller how she is or how the weather is where they are. The host on Marketplace is always doing this on the call-in segment. You can hear the caller’s exasperation at least half the time – they just want their question answered. Of course, what also passes understanding about that show is why they have a host *and *the expert (sameo one every week) answering questions. The feels the need to repeat or rephrase every question, no matter how clearly and concisely the caller has expressed it. Lame!
SurrenderDorothy, I don’t think there’s anything whiny or childish about expecting adults to do what they say they’re going to do. Especially for their own child. I wish I could tell you how to change them. Just know that it’s not your fault and you don’t deserve to be treated that way.
Would it be possible to indicate day-of-the-week in your reservations page? I’m one of those people who don’t remember whether we want to travel on the 10th or the 20th… all we know is “the second monday in september.”
To those that have the dates in calendar form:
Thank you.
To that hotel chain which showed the calendar with weeks starting on Sunday if you used the English version and on Monday if you used Spanish:
WOW, I’m impressed! SurrenderDorothy, your parents’ behavior sucks!
Please indicate, somewhere obvious, the area you cover, in a way that those of us outside the “tri-county region” will understand. It’s frustrating to get a link, and have every mention of location be “Washingtonville” or “Leonard Township” or some other name that could be just about anywhere.
Web pages are available world wide, and interesting stories in your paper can be read by anyone, so it would be nice to know whether you cover Southeast Pennsylvania or Central Oregon, without having to play Sherlock Holmes.
To the professor with world-ending (according to his attitude) article woes:
So you don’t like the new journal search on the library homepage. Tough shit. I and many other people find it much more useful than the old method. Here’s the name of the guy in charge of the website, call him. He will tell you tough shit as well and be much less nice about it than I was.
Oh look. Here you are in person. With a printout, even! Yes I searched the database you searched in. Yes I searched the library’s journals. What you are looking for is an article about cancer. Do not get snippy with me when I point you to the medical school. This is the library for the rest of the campus. Yes I can look in the medical library’s databases. Oh look, they have bound copies of the journal you need. Yes, I see that their subscription expired in 1991 and your article is from 2005. You are going to have to get your butt over to ILL to find this article from another library.
Goodbye. Next time you want to find an article on cancer, please go where such things are housed–the MED-I-CAL SCHOOL. And don’t give me attitude when I tell you that. You’re the idiot who can’t figure out the difference between the medical library and the regular library.
Don’t let the door hit you where the Good Lord split you.
