Mini rant: functionaries with delusions of power

The BBQ Pit
1

I was just over at my local Walgreens. They have a “we’ll refill your printer cartridge” service, which I decided to try.

So I went to the photo counter and the girl was working on something. Fine. She noticed me but said nothing. After about 30 seconds she said, “I’ll be with you in a moment.” OK.

I give her the cartridge and she tells me to come back in fifteen minutes. Now I know she could have other things to do, but it probably takes all of five seconds to refill it. There was just an attitude from her that I can’t quite convey, like she was in control and in charge and if she wanted to make my life a little more difficult, she would do that.

A better example, from a few years ago…I had a headache and decided to go to Wal Mart to pick up some aspirin. The Wally here is 24 hours but we all know that 11:00 PM is “dead time.” They close the registers to count out the drawers and nobody can buy till they reopen the registers at 11:15.

I arrived at about 10:45, made a dash for the aspirin, got in line. A manager was standing there. He smiled and said, “Hey, you just made it!” The checkout girl clearly heard him say this.

I check my watch: 10:55 and the customer in front of me completes the purchase. Whew! Then the idiot girl presses the button of death, starting the irreversible process of totalling the machine. “You’ll have to come back at 11:15,” she smiles.

The manager looked at her. I put down the aspirin and said, “As a matter of fact, I don’t.” And I left.

I tell ya, these people who make low salaries and have no prestige or future or something like to queer the deal for the rest of us.

A third and final example, and the worst of the bunch by far:

One week ago, I had people in to fix my air conditioning. I hear we’ve hit record highs and believe me, it was uncomfortable. When they left, it wasn’t fixed (though they thought it was). I called their office and they agreed to return Monday. Because they’d already offered to come Saturday, I figured I’d be first on the list…great.

Monday, 9:30, no call no service people. I call them. “Oh, um, somehow you didn’t get on the list. We’ll have to come out tomorrow! We’ll be there for sure.”

Tuesday, 9:30, no call no service people. I call again. 20 minutes on hold. “Yes, we’ll be there between 12:00 and 4:00.” I can’t believe I wasn’t first on their list.

4:00 rolls around, still nobody. I call. “Well, the tech says the job he’s on is taking longer than he expected…but he’s really going to TRY to be there tonight.”

So I call my home warranty people, who referred the AC people to me in the first place, per our agreement. I explained that I had an appt on Wednesday at 11:00 and I couldn’t just be here on a whim. He faxed them that they should be here after 1:00 PM.

Nobody showed by 7:00 PM.

Wednesday, 4:00 PM. Where the fuck are these people? I call their secretary and she gives me the same line as Tuesday: “Well, the tech says the job he’s on is taking longer than he expected…but he’s really going to TRY to be there tonight.”

I reply, “Or maybe Friday? Or maybe next week? Or maybe next month?” or something similarly snarky. “YOU can EXPECT a call from the warranty people!”

I call the warranty people. They contact her. “We have her assurance that you’re FIRST on the list for tomorrow. Nobody’s going to bump you.” I say, “I’ll believe that when I see it,” etc.

Thursday morning, 9:30. I don’t even call the AC people, I just phone the warranty people and leave a message. “That ‘promise’ about them being here first thing? Didn’t happen.” At 11:00, they still haven’t called or sent anybody. The warranty people call and, I gather, rip them a new asshole.

The woman she talks to tries to tell her that they’re having problems with their truck and that’s why they can’t come out. “I don’t care,” says my warranty rep, “that’s not what you promised me yesterday! Now is my customer on your list?”

“Well, I don’t know…”

[I don’t know where it went from here, but you can imagine]

11:30 AM the warranty people call me. They’ve gone over her head and talked to a manager. “Our customer has been waiting almost a week for his air conditioner to be fixed.” Finally, success. He’s sooo sorry, and I’m going to get some free maintenance deal from them. Wow.

11:35 AM the AC people call. “We have a truck we’re sending out. We’ll be there within the hour.” I’m afraid to hope.

Here’s a tricky bit: I fielded those two calls on my cell phone because I’d gone to get something for lunch. When I get home, there’s a message on my machine: “Hi, this is the AC company. Sorry, the crew that was supposed to fix your AC didn’t report for work today, but we can reschedule you for tomorrow.”

I do a quick check, and I’m pretty sure that call came at 11:33 or something.

About twenty minutes later, the AC truck shows up. And they fix it. They still screwed up because there was another job I had specifically requested they do at the same time, but at least I have AC now.
I understand incompetence. But I swear, that woman scheduling had it in for me in a passive-aggressive way. I hope they put the most unholy smackdown on that bitch…

OK dopers, I feel better now. No, not really. Any war stories you’d like to share?

2

As a possible explanation, she may have been in the midst of developing film or making prints for their one-hour photo service. You often can’t even step away from the machines or let your concentration wander enough to speak immediately to folks who come up to the counter (ever try to disassemble a disposable camera in a dark box without being able to look at it?), and much of the process requires a modicum of attention to keep things going. And with a specific one-hour time-limit to get the job done, regardless of how many rolls or (obnoxious to open) disposable cameras someone just dropped off, non-time-specific services like ink refills get pushed back.

Plus, she’d probably rather risk pissing off the ink-jet guy than the crabby and loud cat lady who dropped off a drawerful of ancient 110 film filled with precious cat pictures, as well as a finicky disposable that simply won’t open in the dark box, and who is picking up her prescriptions after which, by God, those pictures better be done because it SAYS one-hour photo, if she’d wanted to wait she could have just dropped it off, and, by God, there are other places that develop film and fill prescriptions, and she can take her business elsewhere!

3

Bad management and bad working conditions breed bad customer service. Too bad people who understand this tend not to get very far in business.

4

I got lots of bad attitude in schools and universities in Italy. The stories tend to be similar: some petty employee gets an overinflated idea of their importance and try to get my life difficult just because they can.

The secretary of my Junior High School wanted to release their diplomas about a couple of weeks after the deadline to enrol in high school. We had to go and fetch the Head of school, and she had to handle the paperwork in person (stamps, registration and so on) because the bastard secretary wouldn’t budge.

In the same Junior High School a teacher got into the habit of smoking in class and there was no way to make him stop. One day the room was so smoky that we refused to go in, with the only result that we got scolded and threatened with suspension.

There was an asshole in my High School that whinged because I printed a very short form (only a few lines of text, really, and my dad’s signature) on A5 paper and not A4. So I had it done again on A4 paper. A pink sheet. He wanted to give me trouble on that but the Head of school scolded him :slight_smile:

The same Head of school did everything to sabotage my plans to create an RPG group in the school when she found out there would be simulated fighting. Tsk tsk.

The enrolment office in the first university I attended wanted to make me wait two weeks for an enrolment certificate, which I needed to postpone military service. When I went there I found they forgot about it. And printed it on the fly, therefore proving they were lying.

Later I decided to change from Engineering to Computer Science, but they didn’t have that in my university, so I wanted to switch to another. The people in the old uni were extremely hostile and unhelpful and I ended up having to give them an endless string of documents providing my need. Not having CS was not enough justification, I had to lie and say I was moving closer to the second university.

And in the new university things didn’t start well, as there was a secretary who was crabby and hostile to, well, just everyone, and started making up rules to justify why I couldn’t convert my credits. I had to go over her head to the Head of the course, who had to argue with her, and I’m talking about loud shouting in the corridor in front of everyone, that he was the one making the rules and not her.

The same secretary gave everyone a lot of problems when she decided she wanted to stay in her office as little as possible and do things like collecting printing paper in person veeeery slowly rather than asking a tech, and going to the bar for extended coffee breaks, so that there would always be a long queue of students outside the door. And she would be rude at them because they made her actually work.

Oh, and I nearly forgot the lecturer in the second university who was in charge of handling transfers, and who would almost never show up in her office for the allotted time to receive students. She’d show up after the end of that, and had the cheek to complain with us that we should have come during receiving time! I ripped her a new one, I swear.

5

The worst are bureaucrats who like abusing their power over the people they are supposed to be serving. We had applied for a certificate of citizenship for my (adopted) daughter, and the time was rapidly approaching for us to leave the US for at least a year, and the certificate hadn’t been issued by USCIS (Citizenship and Immigration Services) You have to sign for it (and I have to swear an oath on my daughter’s behalf), so you have to be in the US to get it. Our lawyer says, “Go to the Boston field office and see if you can get it expedited.” We go, explain the issue to a USCIS officer. She is super nice, and is willing to issue it same-day, but her supervisor steps in and forbids her to do so. Officer then says, “Okay, then, we can waive the signature requirement so that when the certificate is issued, we can just mail it to you.” Supervisor nixes that idea too. I explain to the supervisor that a plane ticket from Qatar to the US is $2000 per person in economy class, and I can’t afford to fly back just to pick up a certificate. She says, “Your life choices are not my problem.” Which is true, but she is still a bitch. We go home. Our lawyer writes a letter to the District Director, and lo and behold, the very next week the certificate is ready. The supervisor could have helped us, at no cost to herself, but she just didn’t give a shit about us, our trouble, or our expense, and so had to throw her weight around. We have had this problem with Homeland Security before–some people are very nice and helpful, but others are pathologically indifferent to the hardships they inflict on others when it would require little effort for them to be helpful.

6

Example one: She told you she was busy, and you got cranky about it.
Example two: That doesn’t happen anymore, and you knew at the time that it was going to, anyways.
Example three: TLDR, after the first two, I figured you were just whiny…

7

I figure you don’t know what you are talking about, since you didn’t bother to read it. So you shouldn’t post about it. In other words, STFU.

8

Oh, I just figured out that Darth Nader’s comment wasn’t directed at me. I’ll go work on my reading comprehension.

9

If only the workers of the world could somehow unite…

10

It was an appropriate response to an incredibly shitty post, though. (Internet Rule #6536: People with “Darth” in their nicknames are pretty much always terrible.)

Threads like this make me hate humanity, and yet I somehow always feel compelled to read them. I don’t get that.

11

Sounds like a major major major major PITA :slight_smile:

12

…and then their functionaries in that united state could become just as demeaning and useless as the management functionaries they were meant to overcome! Brilliant!

13

I object strenuously to that sentiment.

14

Say no more. The USCIS (or INS, as I knew them) have elevated bureaucratic asshattery to a fine art, then refined upon said art until it lost any resemblance with the process it is supposedly serving. Their employees hold incredible power over applicants, they know it, and they’ll gladly remind you.

15

Well-known quote from TSA Supervisor: “I have power! I have power! I have power!”

16

Dear OP,

You’re paranoid.

You’re pal,

-FrL-

17

Really? There’s a rule about me?

It’s well-known around here that gravity is a myth, just look at the way neutron stars really suck…

Forgive me, dude, I was drunk and upset and stupid. But don’t bash my username, which was cool and funny back before Nader really ran for Prez.

[we need a blowing-a-kiss-smiley]