Favorite customer quotes

The BBQ Pit
1

I’m killing time, pretty much, in the deli. Pacing, pretending to look busy. Guy comes up to the counter and asks, “Do you take money?” No more, no less. “Do you take money?” How does one ratiuonally respond to this? No, really. How? No explanation. “Do you, an urban supermarket chain, take money, by definition, what is taken for goods and services, which are precisely the things that one would find in a supermarket?”

My deli co-worker is making this guy a sammich, and he’s swiping his card on the debit terminal. Guy turns to my co-worker, who is still making abovementioned sandwich, nowhere near the register (which is closed and locked when not in immediate use).

“Hey, is this thing broken? It says ‘Closed.’”

You ever hear of Lewis Black? He does this bit about the Dumbest Thing You’ve Ever Heard. It goes in one ear and gets stuck. You slowly drive yourself nuts from the brain outward. Your brian aneurizes itself trying to figure out what the hell it could mean. Three days later, “they find you dead in your bathroom.” I instantly realized what inspired this. It won’t get out. How could someone say something so stupid? How could Darwin have been so wrong?

I’m gonna go bleed out my ears now. I suppose if it weren’t for his horse, he wouldn’ta spent that year in college.

Add your quotes here, not the run-of-the-mill, “Where’s the bread”-in-the-bread-aisle. I mean truly inspired dumbness. Plus, it’s conveniently pre-posted in the Pit, which is the only place such a discussion could ever properly take place.

2

I had the joy of handling tech calls from ISP customers.

There isn’t enough storage on the SDMB drives for me to type out all the dumbass shit I’ve heard.

3

I had a classic just a couple of hours ago. I’m a shock/horror telemarketer (for legit. charities) and was doing my spiel to sell raffle tickets for the Red Cross, when the guy said, “Yeah, I’ll take them, but how do I send the money?”

I replied, “We enclose a reply-paid envelope to make it easier etc”.

He came back with, “But I’m talking to YOU, how come you don’t put YOUR name on the envelope?”

“Because…” I patiently explained…“the money goes to the RED CROSS, not to me personally, SIR. If you were to send the money to ME, then it wouldn’t be going to a charity would it?”

“Oh”, he said. “Yeah, OK. I get it now”.

Geez, if I was clever, I could’a made myself a few bucks tonite!
And they wonder why telemarketing has taken-off in recent years…BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE STUPID. SHEESH. :stuck_out_tongue:

4

When I worked in a video store and Malcolm X came out (1992), the customer said she didn’t remember the other nine coming out.

5

hardygrrl - “BigAssBank Customer Security, hardy speaking, may I have your account number please?”
brain stem on legs - “Is that on my credit card?”

:smack:
hardy - “At this time, your account is thirty days past due. I can’t authorize a charge until you make a payment.”
on crack person - " But it’s an emergency!"
hardy - “Ok, what’s the emergency?”
on crack person - “I need a new pair of Nikes.”
:smack:

6

“My Microsoft is broken!”

“The Internet isn’t working”
Stop the presses- the INTERNET is down?? Holy shit! And your Microsoft is broken? Well, I know how much you use your Microsoft, so I’ll get right on it.

Thank you God that I don’t work in computers anymore.

Zette

(PS- almost forgot the call I got once from a user: “My powerstrip is on FIRE!!!”)

7

As told by a worker at Archambault music store in Montreal:

Customer walks up to him and asks:

“Excusez-moi… avec vous une copie du CD de Carmina Urina?”

loosely translated as: "Excuse me, do you have a CD of ‘Carmina Urina.’ "

Urina, in french, is the past tense of “to urinate” - perfectly gramatically correct, in this case, if the songs were about some broad named Carmina, who was gleefully pissing.

I just about lost it laughing… Orff probably twitched in his grave.

E.

8

Preview is my friend…

That should be “avez”, not “avec”

Carry on.

9

I think he was asking whether he could actually make a purchase at the deli counter, or had to take his stuff to the regular checkouts. Most of the grocery store delis in this area only package your deli stuff for you; you have to pay for it up front.

I’ve told this one before, but what the heck: I make jewelry and sell it at summer festivals. At one show I was in my booth and making stuff while I sat there, as I usually do. I had three or four pairs of earrings going when a man came in and started telling me about his flea market about a hundred miles away; he was looking for vendors. I told him I don’t do flea markets, and he looked around and said, “Oh, yeah, your stuff does look very nice . . . but you don’t actually make all this stuff yourself!?”

I gave him the blankest blank look I could muster (to keep from rolling my eyes) as I held up my hands – pliers in one hand, earring-in-progress in the other, beads and jewelry parts strewn all over my table. No, dumbshit, I’m just the troll that sits here and runs the booth. The talented artist is up in her enchanted tower. :rolleyes:

I have another crazy customer who’s a regular, but I won’t discuss her in detail here. Suffice it to say that she could use some serious meds. She’s a huge pain in the ass to deal with, but since she always spends mucho dinero when she sees me, I’ll put up with her as long as her checks don’t bounce. :slight_smile:

10

I worked in an engravers shop once back in college. We also made keys, with one of those huge, loud, counter-top machines that makes the whole room shake when you use it. One time I was grinding up a set of keys with my back to the counter, hands thrumming, ears aching–and I hear this half-hearted “hummph, excuse me, hummph” behind me. It was a guy who was trying to get my attention, but wasn’t really brave enough to actually shout, you know? So I thumb off the machine, turn around holding five or six keys, with key-dust all over my smock and the guy at the counter smiles at me and says…
“Do you make keys here?”

11

Used to work at Radio Shack, a woman and her daughter come in looking for plug converters for use in Europe. I mention that they really needed to get a voltage converter to go with the plugs, since Europe is on a higher voltage.

I get tons of push back, the girl says “I went to Europe before and didn’t need a thing like that!” blah, blah, blah it goes on for like 10min. At that point mom says “Was that the trip where your hairdryer caught fire?” :smack:

12

My favorite from my ISP tech support days…

Customer: “I have a problem. I just deleted the Internet.” :smack:

Only through superhuman force of will did I avoid responding: “Dammit! Now I’m out of a job!” :smiley:

13

Hm.

At Disneyland:

SC: How can I help you?
Weird Woman: I need to find the castle.
SC thinks: We’re standing in the Castle Christmas Shop. You just walked across the moat. HUH?
SC (baffled): Well, Ma’am, if you step back out the door and look up…
WW (huffily): No, I mean the other castle.
SC: Small World?
WW: NO. The OTHER castle.
SC: Florida?
WW: There is another castle in this park. I am supposed to meet my daughter at it. Where is it?
I ended up sending her to the miniature castle at Casey Jones just because that was the only place I could think of.

=====

Also at Disneyland:

“Where’s Magic Mountain?”
(After the 100th or so time this question was heard…)
“Well, you exit the park and take the 5 freeway until you reach the 210…”

Usually, we just asked did they want Big Thunder Mountain, the Matterhorn, Space Mountain or Splash Mountain.

=====

And, a question that they told us we would hear, but I never believed it until I did:

“Are you open until you close?”

14

I just used some of these in the bad customers thread, but I’ll include some new ones:

From the magazine store I work at:

“Which of these magazines have ads for Absolut vodka?”

“I’m looking for a magazine with an article about art – it’s not an art magazine, it just has an article about art this week…”

Holds a movie with a huge pink label across the title that says Anglais/English: “Is this movie in English?”

This one a coworker told me yesterday – “Look, I don’t have any money. Can I take it anyway?”

“Can I take thismagazine and photocopy this article?”

After a magazine fell out of a shoplifter’s jacket. “How did that get in there?”

From a shoplifter, after I told him to give back the magazine he put in his jacket, and while he was slipping a second magazine in there: “You’re only accusing me because I’m black. You’re racist.”

After I was unable to answer a man’s question about the compatibility of software for one of the 100’s of programs on the French PC Driver magazine’s CD: “You shouldn’t be working here if you don’t know the stock.”

I get this one all the time. Montreal is 60% French-speaking, and the province is 80% French-speaking. So I shouldn’t have this conversation once every couple weeks:
Customer: “I bought this earlier today, and I’d like to get my money back.”
Me: “My company has a no-cash refunds policy unless a product’s defective. you can excahnge it for something else, if you like.”
Customer: “It is defective. It’s in French.”

Okay, this is more general stupidity than customer stupidity, but why do my customers feel they can share their political views with me? Especially the fascists and the conspiracy-theorists? Here I am, pinned behind the counter and required to smile no matter what. I do not want to know what segment of the population you think should be all killed off. I do not want to know what the Freemasons and Illumanati are doing. And for the last time, just because I am an English-speaker, I do not agree with you that anglophones will wind up in death-camps if Quebec ever separates. Thank you and good night.

And why is that at least once a month, someone will come into my store asking if we sell toothbrushes, always close to closing time? Why do so many people need toothbrushes in the middle of the night? And why do they come to a magazine store to look for them?

15

If you love this stuff, you’ll love Computer Stupidities.

Zev Steinhardt

16

Summer. Block Island, a little tourist trap off the coast of Rhode Island. Not too long ago.

The island has huge breakwaters, made up of VW Beetle-sized rocks, that extend a quarter mile out into the ocean, protecting the little harbor. Enormous feats of engineering, which the waves batter day after day, spectacular testaments to human perserverance and the usefulness of really big cranes.

I was working at a restaurant that had a spectacular view of the harbor. A woman was sitting at a window, eating lunch, contemplating the view. I could only wonder what thoughts she was entertaining; was she musing on the vastness of the ocean, the imponderability of its depths, the futility and nobility of man’s struggle to hold it back?

As it turns out, no. She turned to a nearby busboy, got his attention, and asked:

“Do the rocks in the breakwater go all the way down to the bottom?”

17

I used to do customer service for a fairly-large electronics retailer. I did CS for the catalog sales (so I didn’t have to deal with customers face-to-face, thank God).

At one point, we included some software (for free) to customers who bought a scanner from us. One day I get a call from a customer who bought such a scanner. She complained that the software was for a PC while she had a Mac (the scanner was compatible with both). When I told her that the software was a freebie and that we didn’t have the Mac version of it, she started ranting and raving. In the end, she demanded a written apology from the president of the company for sending her software she couldn’t use. She didn’t get it.

Another doozy was from a customer who wanted to return a game he bought for his granddaughters for Christmas. He said the game was defective. OK, no problem so far. I asked him for his order number, but he didn’t have it. I asked him his name and he gave it to me. A search of the order database turned up no match. “Are you sure you bought it here?” I asked him. He was sure. Finally a lightbulb went off inside my head and I asked him when he bought the game. “Oh, about three years ago.” (Our company only keeps the 1.5-2 years of data in it’s active database). Sure enough, I checked the old orders and found his order. I patiently explained to the man that this was well beyond our 30 day return policy and that there was nothing we could do for him.

Another “winner” was the guy who wanted to return a reciever that he bought. Try as hard as I might, I couldn’t find his order anywhere. Finally, it came out that he didn’t buy it from us; he bought it from a Radio Shack in Nevada (our company is in New York). It turns out that someone at a third store sold him another unit which, he was told, would work with the receiver he bought from Radio Shack. Turns out that salesperson was wrong. He figured that since we sold that item, we had to take it back from him. Mind you, we didn’t sell him either unit! He hung up insisting that he was going to send it back and that we were giong to credit his credit card. I don’t know if he actually sent it back…

The ultimate winner was a customer down in the Virgin Islands who ordered a large TV (I don’t remember the exact size, but it was over 40" and cost an extraordinary amount of money to ship). Anyway, I get his call and find out that the TV is sitting on the beach by his house and he wants to return it. Why? Becuase he can’t get it in the front door… :smack:

Thank goodness I don’t do Customer Service anymore…

Zev Steinhardt

18

MRs. RickJay would like to repot that whilke working in the IT department of a school board, she was asked by a principal why he could not send an E-mail to Jane Smith.

She looked it up and discovered that there was no Jane Smith in the board’s E-mail book. He replied; no, I know she doesn’t have E-mail. How do I send her en E-mail?

Mrs. RickJay: But… uhhh… but… if she doesn’t have E-mail, she can’t receive any.

Principal: But I have E-mail, so I want to send her an E-mail. What’s her address?

This went on for twenty minutes.

19

From a friend who worked TechSupport (everyone who was at TorDope already heard this):

“It keeps saying, ‘insert disc three’, but it was so hard just getting the second one in…”!

20

Yeah, that’s what I reckon he meant. Seems a bit silly when he was standing directly at the payment counter, with the register screen glaring at him about a foot in front of his eyeballs.

I swear, pretty soon I’m gonna be giving very SDMB-like responses to these schmucks.