At one of the numerous soft-serve ice cream stands back home.
Dad: We’d like a chocolate shake, two hot-fudge sundaes, and a vanilla cone.
Clerk: Ok, a chocolate shake, two hot fudge sundaes, and a vanilla cone?
Dad: Yes.
Clerk: What flavor ice cream did you want on the vanilla cone?
Yes, that’s exactly what it is!
[slight hijack]Do people ask you why Southerners wave at them (either from their front yards or in a vehicle) when you pass by? It’s that same sort of friendliness, I guess they just don’t get it.[/slight hijack]
In some cases. My recent experience with a certain Hardee’s near my house.
[Pre recorded voice]Hi! Welcome to Hardee’s. Would you like to try our new swiss mushroom chicken sandwich today?!
[Me clear as an azure sky] No thank you, I would like a 1/3 lb hamburger with ketchup, mustard and lettuce and a water please.
[NEW VOICE!]So you wanna 1/3 lb cheesburger and a water?
[Me]I would like a 1/3 lb hamburger, no cheese, no onions, no mayonaise.
[NV]They don’t come with mayo.
[Me]Ok.
[NV]You want something to drink with that?
[Me]:sigh: A water please.
[NV]You want fries with that?
[Me]:rolleyes: No thank you.
[NV];ifjqweofi Pull around please.
You wanna guess what the burger looks like?
And Lobsang, not to be junior mod but:
FAQ - guidelines for posting at the SDMB
One day I went to the store in a bad mood. I really don’t like small talk and it really bothers me that the store clerk asks “how are you today?” when I know she doesn’t give a rats patootie about me. This one day when asked how I was I responded “i Have cancer” and the clerk said “that’s nice” and continued adding my groceries up. Then as I left she said 'have a nice one"
GGGRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
Aaah the clueless clerks… our Dunkies has an entire roster of them.
They cannot fathom the concept of lite cream cheese.
I never get the right flavor bagel.
The order always costs something new and different each day even when the items ordered are the same each day.
The concept of NOT toasting a bagel leaves them frenzied.
The last time we ordered 2 plain bagels with lite cream cheese and 2 medium regular iced coffes. Get to the window and they only have the coffee. Inquire about bagels. Get blank stare. Get lightbulb moment look from clerk. Get handed bag with one bagel in it no little packet of cream cheese. How hard is this folks?
I get lots of dirty looks when I check the order before leaving but they screw it up every flipping day.
Oh and equal time for clueless customers. I spent 10 years working for a local grocery chain in various departments. Checkout clerk provided the most entertainment. By decree of the board of health we were not allowed to open a customer’s paper bag of pick your own bakery selections. So when I rang through orders I would often ask ‘And what do you have from the bakery today?’
Customer replies ‘3’
Me - Three donuts? bagels? muffins?
Customer - 3
Me - ?
Customer - just look in the bag I don’t know.
Me - But I can’t look in the bag ma’am…
It is dealing with this all day that kills braincells let me tell you!
call restaurant to place a take-away order.
get put on hold three times, waited 20 minutes until the chirpy girl asked if she could take my order. Put me on hold three more times DURING the taking of my order, which was only: “2 blah-blah entrees, two salads with eye-talian dressing” Not complicated. After she came back and told me ok that will be ready in 50 minutes (!!!), I asked her for a total and
Chirpy: Excuse me, what?
Moi: Total. How much is it?
put me on hold again for 4 minutes.
Now, I understand she was probably (ok, obviously) busy, but no matter how many people you have waiting or begging your attention, if I’m up - then its MY turn. You know what I mean? Devote just 3 minutes to me and I’ll be out of your hair. That’s all I ask.
I wear a silver chai around my neck.
I was at the checkout in the library one day, and the clerk looks me straight in the eye and says (100% seriously), “Ah! I see you are a mathematician!”
Oh, all the time. I have to explain these kind of things to my (New Yorker) girlfriend constantly. You should’ve seen her when we went shopping that first time and, in the space of five minutes, the clerk and I discussed the weather, the way I was going to cook the meat I purchase, how the clerk’s mother used to cook it, how MY mom used to cook it…
Isabelle-The clerk may not have a choice but to “small talk”. When I worked retail, we were required (and could be fired if we didn’t) to ask people how they were doing and wish them a good day.
In all fairness, much stupidity comes out of the mouths of those who are tired and repeat repeat repeat the same crap all day. “Do you want fries with that?” will pop out simply because they are following the rhythm/pattern of every other order. Ordering pizza by phone and using a credit card, I ordered my food, toppings, all that jazz. Then at the end when we got to the payment part and it went:
Order-taker: “And what credit card will you be using?”
Me: “FancySchmancy Card.”
Order-taker: “And what toppings would you like… on… your card. I’m sorry.”
Sometimes you get your wires crossed out of sheer repetition. You come out of “auto-pilot” mode and then wonder “where the heck am I?” And about then is when you say something remarkably stupid.
Me: Can I substitute apple sauce for the tossed salad?
Waitress: Sure. And what kind of salad dressing do you want?
Me: No: I want apple sauce as a substitute for a salad.
Waitress: Okay. You can do that. And what kind of salad dressing do you want?
Me: No, I want to substitute apple sauce for the salad. I don’t put salad dressing on apple sauce.
Waitress: Ohhhh: you want apple sauce insteadof salad…
And yes, she was, to all appearances, a native speaker of English.
that story frightened me, slipster
Here’s a quick one before I get ready for work. The braindead clerk is me (at my first job stacking shelves at safeway)
Woman approaches me: Have ya got any breed?
Me: sorry?
Woman: Breed. where’s the breed?
Me (copying the sound of the word exactly): ‘Breed?’
(short delay in which a fellow employee aproaches)
Fellow employee: Bread. She’s asking for bread.
It turns out she was Irish. the brain-dead part was me not realizing that fact. Afterwards I felt like such a tool for unwittingly mocking the woman.
Eats_Crayons In my experience, when you work at that type of job, it is easy to become disconnected with certain parts of the brain like recognition. In my case it’s memory - Many a time have my mother or grandparents walked in to the store and I Have recognised them (in the sense that my brain has said ‘I know these people’), but it’s taken me at least 5 seconds to remember why I recognise them.
For my area manager the lacking brain function was logic. It days of me nagging him before he finally learned that the distance between opposite corners of a rectangle is longer the longest side of the rectangle (or in safeway speak: “the bloody fruit stands are blocking the aisle, fool!”) His idea was to have the stands at 45degrees to the aisle rather than parallel.
Anyway I have wasted too much getting-ready-for-work time typing this. I will finish reading the rest of the replies to the thread at work (on glancing through there looks like some good ones)
Y’don’t know Dad, CADBURY. The chances he wasn’t heard are pretty slim. Not a mumbler, my dad.
But I’m sure the guy was just repeating it back, as we all sometimes do. “Five people, check . . . .” It was just funny because if you stopped to think about it, it was kind of a dumb thing to say. But my dad’s off the cuff response was really the funny part.
Another one, though this involves a clerk being snarky as opposed to dumb. I was at a movie theater on the East Coast. I’m from out West. The theater had a serve-yourself fountain machine, so you didn’t have to order your drink by type, only by size.
“Can I help you?”
“Yes, I’d like a box of M&Ms and a small pop.”
“A ‘pop’? Do you mean a popcorn or a soda?”
Now, really. I know Easterners don’t call a “soda” a “pop,” but unless you’ve had your head in your ass a good few years, surely you know that some people call soda “pop.” And have you ever heard anyone who wanted popcorn order pop? She was just being unpleasant. I said “I meant a soda pop; I guess you’ve never heard the term. I’m sorry if I confused you.” It was a draw in the snarky department, I guess. But she started it!
Ugh. That bugs the hell out of me in not one, but two ways. First, I end up standing there in line bored out of my mind behind the chatty customer and clerk. Second, when it finally becomes my turn, the clerk asks me how I’m doing, where I work, what kind of work my company does, what work I do at my company, etc, etc, etc. I realize s/he is just trying to be nice, but I find it intrusive and annoying. I just want to buy my 44-ounce Coke and get the hell out of the store!
Another Southern convenience store experience is the female clerks who call me “honey,” “sweetheart,” or “boo” (or “cher,” in the case of Cajuns).
And then there are those people that don’t seem to have jobs at all, but rather just hang around the convenience store all day talking to the clerk. They kind of scare me.
CadburyAngel I was speaking quite clearly, there was no background nose, and the servant even repeated the order back to me (and he said gravy). So somewhere on the journey from ears to hands and feet ‘gravy’ got turned into ‘curry’.
Not that I am arguing or anything. Just making my situation a little clearer.
I agree that it’s not all one sided and that customers can lack brains too.
Jodi, cool dad.
Coldie. Each to their own. It would have bugged me that some guy thinks I am a criminal so I would want to prove him wrong and let him search my knickerless bag.
** Eats_Crayons**. Exactly. I ask people if they want butter on their popcorn and abut 80% of them do. The first couple months of working concessions, every once in awhile someone would say they didn’t want butter and I would shout back to the person at the popper “Large butter”. No matter how polite the customer is, I feel like an idiot. It gets real hard to pay specific attention to people. I’ve also asked people several times if they wanted butter on their nachos.
I’m just the opposite of your friend. When I see someone I know at the theatre I get almost ecstatic-after having to deal with strangers and asshole fellow employees it’s great to see a friend.
I really don’t like the mindlessness of my job and I’m really not cut out for doing simple things, but I have a year left here.
Kinda like that Sesame Street (or was it Electric Company?) cartoon of the kid going to the store for his mom:
“Eggs, milk, stick of butter…”
“Eggs, milk, stick of butter…”
<woo-wee-woo-wee…>
“Eggs, fire truck, stick of butter…”
I’ve worked in non-fun jobs like that when I was a student. Sometimes you try your best and you still “go stupid” 'cause there’s just too much going on so your brain shuts down defensively. I’m sure I’ve done stuff like say “here’s your coffee” while handing someone an orange.
Oh, I laugh at it now…
It was Sesame Street.
Heck, after a long shift taking orders at work, I used to answer my home phone “Thank you for calling Pizza Hut.” My friends never gave me any shit about it, either. (Yeah, right.) But I have been the dumb clerk myself:
Me: What can I get you?
Customer: A medium cheese pizza.
Me: And what toppings would you like?
Customer: [Pause] Ummm, cheese.
I work at Munich Airport sometimes. They built themselves this nifty new terminal, with separate levels for Schengen and Non-Schengen travellers. When airport employees want to change levels, they must not use the passport checkpoints for passengers, but the special “staff stairways”, which are located very inconveniently throughout the building.
So, I wanted to go down to Non-Schengen (i.e. “enter the EU”), and this Bundesgrenzschutz (Federal Border Guard) guy lectured me the above.
I got angry, demonstratively pocketed my airport ID card and showed him my German passport, and said
“I, as a native German citizen, want to enter Germany. Do you want to bar me from doing so?”
Well, he called airport security and had me arrested. Only for 10 minutes or such, but nevertheless. Asshat.
