Ok. I work at Staples, in the copying and printing department. Just like any other job in the public sector, I meet a few nice people, a lot of nondescript people, and a couple of utter assholes. This post being in the Pit, it’s obviously about the utter assholes.
We do shipping for UPS. Our entire involvement in the process consists of finding out UPS’ rate for your shipment, putting UPS’ labels on it, charging you UPS’ rate (we do not charge an extra fee, we charge the standard UPS desk rate), and putting your shipment on UPS’ truck. That is ALL WE DO. For all intents and purposes, we are a drop box for UPS trucks. We have NOTHING TO DO WITH THE ACTUAL ACT OF SHIPPING. Capice?
If something happens to your package, we have to turn to UPS and let their claims department work on it. This involves them going to the receiver of the shipment and determining whether or not the shipment was correctly packaged. If they determine that your item was broken because you packed it poorly and didn’t give it sufficient protection, you get jack-shit because it’s your own damn fault. If it was their fault, and you did pack it reasonably well, they’ll settle with you for the amount of the insurance you took out on the package. We, Staples, have nothing to do with this - we gather the paperwork from you, including proof of value so you can’t say that the wooden pencil you shipped in a box that broke on the way down was worth $10,000 just to scam UPS; this is their rule, not ours. We gather the paperwork, but we don’t have anything to do with the actual claim. Understand?
Of course you do, because you’re intelligent people. But this entire concept completely escapes one putz who came into the store to ship two (two!) bronze statues in one wooden crate. Their insurance value to him was several thousand dollars. He sent us a letter saying that the statues arrived at his client’s house broken. That made us raise our eyebrows because we can’t figure out what would cause bronze statues to break. Then we thought to ourselves, “If they’re worth so much money, why wouldn’t you ship them separately so they’d be better protected?” But we told him about UPS’ claims-handling procedures, including the fact that UPS would have to go to the client’s house and examine the statues and their packaging, and attempted to get a proof of value. He faxed us the invoice from the sale of the statues, with all the important information (the item description, the client’s information, HIS name) blacked out. He also sent a letter in which he informed us that he expected us to take care of this issue without disturbing his client, and if his client was disturbed and things were not handled promptly he would be suing us personally, the people he’d dealt with about the shipping (myself and the person who’s in charge of copy center), as well as the Staples company.
Good luck with that. He’d be thrown out of court because we have no liability in this issue. Dumbass. The hubris of some people.
Then there’s the lady who ordered custom-printed multi-part carbonless forms. She was quoted a price of about $300. The company who prints them told us that quote was wrong, and it’d actually cost $400. We called her and let her know, and she said to print them anyway. She apparently changed her mind, though, and called us back last night to scream and holler. She was screaming so loud that you could hear her through the phone from six feet away. She said that she was going to come down there and throw them at us. Like a two-year-old having a tantrum.
And there’s the lady who ran off some copies on the self-serve machines, let me ring her up, gave me her money, and then went postal on me about how the auto-feeder on the copy machine had wrinkled one of her pages (which I knew nothing about, as she had said nothing about it at the time and I had been doing another job in a different part of the department). She thought it was an outrage that she had to pay for ANY of her 150 copies because one of her original pages got wrinkled (it was still usable, but it had a rip part-way through one corner). She carried on for several minutes, while I tried to apologize and find out what I could do to help, and then she told me that I was worthless and she was never going to run off copies at my store again, and stormed out.
Now, those cases I can almost understand. They were upset about things that weren’t their own fault. I suppose they all had the right to be angry. But do they really need to act like complete pricks about it? For fuck’s sake, are they adults or not?
Then there’s the other end of the spectrum, people who are just scary assholes even when they’ve no reason. Like the guy who told me (apropos of nothing) that he was going to court the next day, accused of beating his wife, and made me promise I wouldn’t testify against him if she turned up dead.
And folks wonder why I hate people so much.