Post your memorable encounter with a brain-dead clerk.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

Fast Food Assistant Service Schmuck: Welcome to Boo-Boo Bunny, would you like to try a Bunnyriffic shake?

Me: No, I’d like (interrupted)

FFASS: There’s a special on Bunny Family meals: 10 Big Bunny Burgers, 10 Boo-Bunny fries, and a 5 gallon bucket of Bunny-Butt cola, for only $49.50

Me: Thanks, but I’d (interrupted)

FFASS: Sourdough Bacon Bunnies are on special, too: buy three, get five! Do you have the coupon?

Me: NO! I’d like a Bunny Broiler, and a small Boo-Bunny fries. That’s all, thanks.

FFASS: Can I get you a Bunnyriffic shake with that?

Me: No, thanks.

FFASS: Would you like the Value Bunny special? Only a dollar more?

Me: NO!

FFASS: Your order comes to $2.87. Please pull forward to the first Bunny window.

Me: (To myself: Just. Get. Food. Leave. Quickly) Hands FFASS three singles, fanned like a card hand.

FFASS: Out of three?

Me: (To myself: NO, dizbag-I gave you three three dollar bills, so you owe me $6.13-I’d like a four and a two, if that’s not a problem!)

FFASS: Any special Bunny sauce for your broiler?

Me: NO.

FFASS: Any salt, pepper, mustard, custard, ketchup, mayo, day-o, rye, lye, thai, soy, oy, or polysodomized diglycerate with your order?

Me: (Reaching beneath seat for machine pistol and magazine) NO!!!

FFASS: Would you like an application for a Boo-Boo Bunny MasterCard®? Transfer up to a million dollars at 0% interest until next month. Earn Bunny Burger miles!

Me: (Leaning out of vehicle with muzzle pointed at FFASS) Give me my order and don’t say a word, or I will have to hurt you.

I leave the restaurant, only to find three blocks away that it’s not my order, and they forgot the goddam napkins.

42

Fast Food Assistant Service Shmuck: Welcome to Boo-Boo Bunny, would you like to try a Bunnyriffic shake?

Me: No, I’d like (interrupted)

FFASS: There’s a special on Bunny Family meals: 10 Big Bunny Burgers, 10 Boo-Bunny fries, and a 5 gallon bucket of Bunny-Butt cola, for only $49.50

Me: Thanks, but I’d (interrupted)

FFASS: Sourdough Bacon Bunnies are on special, too: buy three, get five! Do you have the coupon?

Me: NO! I’d like a Bunny Broiler, and a small Boo-Bunny fries. That’s all, thanks.

FFASS: Can I get you a Bunnyriffic shake with that?

Me: No, thanks.

FFASS: Would you like the Value Bunny special? Only a dollar more?

Me: NO!

FFASS: Your order comes to $2.87. Please pull forward to the first Bunny window.

Me: (To myself: Just. Get. Food. Leave. Quickly) Hands FFASS three singles, fanned like a card hand.

FFASS: Out of three?

Me: (To myself: NO, dizbag-I gave you three three dollar bills, so you owe me $6.13-I’d like a four and a two, if that’s not a problem!)

FFASS: Any special Bunny sauce for your broiler?

Me: NO.

FFASS: Any salt, pepper, mustard, custard, ketchup, mayo, day-o, rye, lye, thai, soy, oy, or polysodomized diglycerate with your order?

Me: (Reaching beneath seat for machine pistol and magazine) NO!!!

FFASS: Would you like an application for a Boo-Boo Bunny MasterCard®? Transfer up to a million dollars at 0% interest until next month. Earn Bunny Burger miles!

Me: (Leaning out of vehicle with muzzle pointed at FFASS) Give me my order and don’t say a word, or I will have to hurt you.

I leave the restaurant, only to find three blocks away that it’s not my order, and they forgot the goddam napkins.

43

You don’t need math skills to work cash. I am notoriously poor at mathematics, but I was a good cashier when I did it back in the 80s. Back then, the cash registers were only just starting to have an “amount tendered” button, enabling the machine to tell you how much change to give. But even today, you might find yourself working an outdoor Sunday market or something where your cash register is a fanny pack with money in it. No fear - there is a simple technique which every cashier should know, and which doesn’t need arithmetic, and you can make up change correctly every time.

Using the (former) Australian denominations of 1c, 2c, 5c, 10c, 20c, 50c, $1, $2 in coin, and $5 , $10, $20, $50, and $100 in notes, if a customer purchased $13.12 worth of goods, and tendered a $100 note, I’d use the “round up” principle. Scooping currency out of the till, I’d be mentally saying to myself, “1c makes #13.13, 2c $13.15, 5c is $13.20, 10c $13.30, 20 is $13.50, 50c for fourteen bucks, and a dollar coin makes fifteen dollars even. $5 for $20, $10 to $30, $20 for fifty dollars, and a fifty dollar note for a hundred.” It looks complicated, but it actually takes a matter of seconds, and the beauty is the cashier hasn’t done any math! Well, almost none. In fact, the cashier wouldn’t know how much change he had given - but it would be correct. And a good cashier, would verbally repeat the process to the customer, as the coins and notes are placed one by one into the customer’s hand: “…aaaand fifty makes a hundred. Thank you sir.” Unfortunately, only the old timers do that these days, but it definitely cut back potential disagreement.

The “amount tendered” button makes things harder, if anything. The very worst, though, is that I suspect these days the registers not only have an “amount tendered” button, but a “denomination tendered” one. I recently bought a six-pack of beer for eleven dollars, and handed the cashier a $50 note. As he was pressing buttons, I realised I had a $1 coin i my pocket, and asked him if he’d like that, so he could give me $40 even in change. He said, “Sorry, but I’ve already entered $50, and it’s too late to enter $51”. In my day, we’d only get our butts kicked if the till was over or under. I suspect this guy had a machine which also told his boss the exact denominations which should be in the drawer. And that is overkill, IMHO.

44

The post so nice, I LMAO twice!

Thanks, 'cats.

45

Cashier checking in. I almost always mention the amount you’re giving me, because after standing in one place and doing the same thing 500 times over eight hours, I might easily see your 20 and mistake it for a 10 for no other reason than that I’m tired and on autopilot. Repeating it back to you gives you a chance to correct me, as I am, indeed, only human. Or people will take the opportunity to stop me and say, “No, don’t put it in yet, I first plan to spend five minutes digging around for coins so that my change can come out to whatever obscure amount might please me this day.”

Also, you might be the finest customer ever to have graced any retail establishment, having never made a mistake or been unclear for even a moment. But sadly, most customers aren’t like you. I might get two singles and a five, say “Out of seven,” and only then does the customer realize they want to keep their five and meant to give me three singles. Clearing this up before I hit those buttons on my register is faster and easier than trying to figure out the transaction after my drawer is already open.

Of course, this habit becomes so ingrained that I ring up a soda for 93 cents, get handed a single, and still pause and say “Out of one” before putting it in. I suppose the lesson is, everyone has a braindead moment or two when they’re doing an endlessly repetitive job that’ll probably belong to a computer in a scant few years. Everything becomes routine, and it’s not worth it to break from the pattern for one specific transaction even if it does make you sound a little dim for a moment.

46

Our favorite brain-dead clerk is one we actually liked. His name was Juan. He worked at a Blockbuster in suburban Maryland. (I won’t say which one in case he’s still there.) He clearly had other good employee characteristics – like punctuality, courtesy, or whatever; certainly not brainpower or language skills – because he was still working there a couple of years later.

It’s hard to describe why Juan was such an outstanding example of the breed. I’ll try, though. My son at that time was a regular renter of video games, and you’d take the empty box up for the clerk to put the actual game in it as you checked out. Juan would put the wrong game in the case at least half the time, and even when you would stand there and say, “Look, it’s the first one in the right-hand stack in your drawer,” he would start at the leftmost stack and go through each game one at a time, pulling it out and looking at it, before finally finding yours. If he ever found it. On more than one occasion we gave up entirely and left empty-handed because we could not persuade him that the game we could clearly see was the one that went into the box he was holding in his hand.

And yet…he was so incredibly dumb that we kept going back time after time, and making sure he was the one waiting on us if there were multiple clerks working, just to see if it could by any chance be an aberration.

Nope. That was Juan. He never changed, just got more entertaining as time passed.

I hope he’s still mixing up the games for other customers who are as amused by it as we were!

47

You forgot the story of the Stupidest Clerk Ever, dear.

So I shall tell it:
One fine afternoon, racinchikki and I were out about town, and decided to stop for lunch. We went to the Burger King drive-through, and were informed that our meal would have to be cooked, and they’d bring it out to us if we’d park; not an uncommon occurence when you get the chicken tenders. So we waited, and after a delay quite a bit longer than usual, the SCE brought out our order and that of the person that had been behind us in line. Alas, they switched the bags, and gave ours to the other person. The other person drove off, and the SCE realized her mistake as she came to our window. She gave us the other person’s bag (completely different items from what we’d ordered), mumbled something along the lines of “Sorry, I gave her yours. Take this.” and went back inside.

racinchikki and I stared at each other in disbelief.

Then we marched back inside, and demanded justice. They managed to get it wrong again. We finally got what we’d ordered and left, vowing to write a nasty letter to the corporate office and never go back to that particular franchise.

I can understand mixing up the orders (despite having desriptions of the vehicles the bags went to – “red car” and “green truck” – written on the bags), but just handing it to us knowing it was the wrong one and making no attempt to correct it? That takes a stupendous feat of brain-deadness, IMO.

48

At a drive-in window a month or so back, I innocently asked the clerk for a Mars bar.

“Sure!” she replied and, sure enough, brought me a plastic cup full of water.

“No… uhh. A Mars bar?” I said.

“Oh, I’m sorry!” she said. “I thought you asked for a glass of water.”

“Nope, pretty sure I didn’t.” I replied.

So she gave me a Mars bar.

I didn’t say it was an interesting story.

49

Big. Fat. Word. Tons of customers also… well, not tons, but a notable amount of customers will argue because they will give you one bundle of bills and think they gave you another. Vocal confirmation is always helpful.

50

I too have been the brain-dead clerk, asking someone if they wanted “room for cream” as I was stuffing their sole item on order,a cheese danish, into a bag.

But recently, I had a run-in with McDonald’s which was very strange. My Dad likes a “double bacon cheeseburger plain.” I wait in line fifteen minutes (being the third person in line at the start of timing) and explain to the clerk that I would like a double cheeseburger plain and blah, blah, blah.
“Plain?”
“Yes, just the bacon, the patties, and the cheese. No sauce, no ketchup, no mustard, nothing but meat and cheese.”
We actually went through this a couple times, with him notifying the sandwich maker of the particulars of this special order, although he spoke in Spanish doing this and as we were at the airport and the loudspeaker was going off about white zones and such (remember Airplane, where the intercoms get into an argument over abortion? This may have been where our minds were.) so I didn’t bother to really listen to what he was telling the other guy.

Anyway, I bring the burger to my Dad, who is haggling for his freedom with the new TSA, and discover that it contains nothing but three strips of bacon between two buns.

The mind boggled, I mean, really. What kind of weirdo orders two buns and bacon as “double bacon cheeseburger plain?”
Me, apparently. I had to wonder if I looked that damn deranged, like someone who would order something so strange in such a strange way.
My Dad ate it anyway, 'cause the man loves bacon.

51

I had a terrible meal the first (and only) time I went into an Olive Garden franchise. They mentioned a comment form for feedback on the menu, so I asked for one. He got me a comic book.

52

Better than expecting change along with your bills and getting only the bills. This has happened to me every single time I’ve used a drive-thru window at a fast food establishment in Arundel County, Maryland. Near the base, near BWI, Hanover, Linthicum, wherever. Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, doesn’t matter. I figure that this is a perk of working drive thru that management must know about and turn the other way from, because it’s too widespread for it to just be a simple scam that a few fastfooders figured out.

Now, not getting my 37 cents is not going to break me. But I figure, cheat every car out of a dime or so, throughout a shift, and you can pocket $100 a month tax free by ripping people off in increments so small that questioning would make them feel petty.

I guess that’s not quite braindead, though, is it?

53

danceswithcats lives in Bloom County?

54

I think this is the reason fast food joints in Kalamazoo have an led readout with your total and phone number to call in case your change doesn’t match up.

The few times I’ve had to take a cab around here, the drivers always tried to do this to me.

55

My cash registers don’t have an “open drawer” button, you have to type in what the customer gives you. WHich is fine and dandy, unless they hand you a bill that more than covers the cost, wait until you’ve rung it up, and then decide to give you loose change on top of it. But not exact change.

I’ve gotten pretty good atfiguring out the change even then (I’m horrible at money math), but every now and then I just get stuck.

56

This one wasn’t braindead so much as just plain, how shall I say it, “not customer-service oriented.” My friends and I, during a roadtrip, decided to make a stop at a place in Wisconsin that had advertised via billboard for MILES about their fabulous milkshakes and homemade candy. I mean, how could we pass that up? They make milkshakes with their own candies mixed in! Yum!

Everyone else orders, and then she gets to me.
ME: “I’d like a chocolate milkshake with peppermint candy.”
WAITRESS: “Are you sure?”
ME: “Yes.”
WAITRESS: “That one’s, like, really hard to make. Do you want something else?”
ME: “I’ve really been looking forward to that one.”
WAITRESS: (sighing hugely and angrily) “FINE.”

The shake came after 45 minutes. It was plain chocolate with a peppermint stick stuck in the middle.

57

No, but some mornings I wake up feeling like Bill the Cat.

:wink: ack

58

This is a two or three parter Wal-mart idiots story…started with my own mistake but snowballed into a major screwup.
My dad wanted a battery recharger for his cell phone. I found one at walmart- it was a seperate station from the cell phone station right next to it. I waited there for awhile, but the person in front of me took forever, so I thought I’d see if I could just check out at the main registers.

Went to the front, clerk tried to scan the phone, but it wouldn’t scan. I figured she’d know what to do- send me back if I needed to buy it back at the cell phone station or call a manager, whatever. Instead, she hand inputted the cell phone recharger and price, I paid her and took it home. Well, it was the wrong one for my dad so I took it back to return it.

Went to the Customer Service desk- I have a receipt showing I bought it from Wal-Mart. I want my money back or the right charger. The girl realizes the first clerks mistake- but instead of just ringing up the return and giving the charger back to the cell phone station- she tells me that she can’t help me with the return, I’ll have to go to the lady in the cell phone station to get my money back. I say “but I gave WAL MART the money, not the cell phone company”- she says I still have to go see the cell phone station. Fine.

Get to the cell phone station, explain the situation to the lady there. She becomes VERY rude- says she can’t give me the return money because I paid it to Wal Mart (duh) and insists I give her the charger- which is in, her words “stolen property”. WHOAAA… I did NOT steal it, I paid for it. I tell her I am not giving up the property I paid for until a return is processed. She says I’ll have to talk to a Wal Mart Customer Service Manager. I say fine, you go get one. She tells me no- she won’t go get one, its not her job! I tell her tough- I’m not giving her her “stolen property” until she goes to get a manager to resolve it. So she picks up her intercom and calls for one (why was that so hard?)Finally got a halfway intelligent person who took me back to the front (with my “stolen” merchandise") and chewed out the first girl who sent me back there and promised to talk to the other lady about calling me a thief. After I get the money back (seemed easier solution than a replacement), I go back to the other lady and ask her if she has a charger that fits the model of phone my dad had. She just looks at me and says “I don’t know”.

Needless to say, I went to Best Buy- where I got a nice clerk who found me exactly what I needed.

59

Years ago a woman in some sort of fancy-ass dress place in Los Angeles was selling my father a dress item for my sister’s wedding, and when she finished ringing it up she said, “Do you wanna box for that?”

My father, loopy perhaps from wedding prep, said, “No, I’d prefer to take it peaceably.”

She stared at him with the blankness of interrupted mental routine for 8.8 seconds, then broke into gales of laughter that knocked her off her feet and made her cling to the counter. She said, “I’ve said that a thousand times, and I’ve never thought of that before.”

And I presume she always did, again.

60

SULTANA, I have a similar story:

I was at the mall and bought something from Nordstrom and held out my parking ticket and asked the clerk, “Could you validate me?” Without batting an eye he grinned and replied, “You’re a very nice person.” :slight_smile:

Took me a minute to figure it out but then I laughed my ass off.