Quick, someone tell me all people aren't this stupid!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Why are there so many people in the world who just refuse to listen to good solic logic, choosing instead to throw a fit of pure stubborn arrogance?

I work in a video store. Video stores are places that make money by renting movies. If the movies are returned on time, they are rented again for further profit. If not, profit is lost, and a late fee is charged to make up for it.

Now, the computers in this, and every other video store, are completely and totally accurate. If it says you’re late, you were late. I’m a reasonable person, and I’m willing to accept the idea that you were told an incorrect return due date, or maybe you turned it in just barely after it was due. Maybe you even forgot it was sitting on top of your VCR. It’s understandable, and I’ll void your fees.

Now, I play the customer service game, why don’t the fucking customers? My example from today:

A woman rented 3 movies. She kept them all for 6 days. She had fees on them when she came in today, and she payed them. Afterwards, she realized that she had never seen one of the movies in question. Instead of being reasonable and thinking “Maybe someone in my family rented it. Maybe I just forgot to watch it. Maybe I didn’t have enough time,” She insisted to have only rented 2 movies (also, the rental date was a month ago. That’s a pretty sharp memory all of a sudden) When it was explained to her that she rented the 3 at the exact same time, in the SAME TRANSACTION, and returned them all AT THE SAME TIME, she didn’t stop to think that maybe she had made an error. Instead, she stormed out and commanded her husband never to rent from us again.

I just want some reassurance that more people are like me, willing to think, gather information, analyze and draw conclusions, and not like those customers who assume they are right (when they are actually wrong) and will argue it to the death out of sheer arrogance. Please?

2

Boy, are you in for some bad news, Ooner…

jayjay

3

I hate to be rude, and I don’t know the specifics of this particular situation, but don’t you think it’s a bit naive to think that since a computer tells you something, it must necessarily be correct?

4

I know this has nothing to do with it, but what was the movie that she was so adamant about seeing?

5

What color shoes was she wearing?

Did her name have an “R” in it?

Hey…these questions are as good as gadgetgirl’s!

6

While it sounds as if this lady may have been a bit off the beam, I must gently take exception with the idea of the information on the computers being correct.

What’s displayed on the screen is only as accurate as the person putting the data in.

More than once I’ve been told that I have a late fee when that wasn’t the case. Returning things on time is one of the few things I’m anal about. According to the computer, the tape isn’t returned when it’s brought back to the store, it’s returned when the clerk at the store scans it back into the system.

Another time I was told that I couldn’t rent because I still had an outstanding movie which I hadn’t returned. I politely pointed out to the clerk that this was an error, as I never rented the mentioned title, nor would I have any interest in doing so. After a half hour of computer investigation by the store manager, it was discovered that the title in question had not even been available for rent at that location for over a year.

The resulting apologetic freebies applied to my account were a nice perq.

7

No, I don’t think it’s naive at all. This is a simple computer program used in several thousand stores nationwide, that runs a very simple procedure. Money is paid, the movie is rented to a particular account. The movie is scanned back in, and it is returned, checked off the account. Each action is marked with a time, and unless we just happened to accidentally check out a movie to the woman, keep it, wait 6 days, and accidentally check it in just as the others were returned…

Computers programs, especially those used in businesses such as these, rarely fail, and I’d be willing to bet they NEVER just randomly change dates to make your movies late… or check them out to you… and back in again…

You’re right, it doesn’t matter, but she claimed never to have rented/seen Bounce.

8

I am completely and totally understanding about human error. I have made mistakes like that before, and the whole placed-back-on-the-shelf-without-being-checked-in thing happens more than it should, BUT this woman never denied being late. She never denied renting the movies on that day. I give more refunds, free rentals, and fee voids that anyone else there, but only if there’s the possibility of human error by the employees, or even innocent mistakes by customers. I considered that, but it was obvious the woman had made a mistake, and was just unwilling to even consider it as a possibility. I just can’t bring myself to do favors for those people.

As far as computer error goes, I just meant to say that if the computer says a movie was scanned out on your account, it was scanned out on your account. If it says the movie was returned at a certain time, it was checked in at that time. Logic.

9

Very often customers are aholes but sometimes machines have quirks and sometimes employees are aholes themselves.

Some years ago I went to use the ATM at my bank. Put my card in, ask for $50… the ATM spits a receipt saying it had given me $50 but no money … and keeps my card!

So I go to the manager and tell him the story. His response: IMPOSSIBLE! (in a tone which clearly accused me of lying). He looks at the slip of paper and says “your card is of a different type, the four first digits on this card indicate this is a different card than yours”.

I insisted, I don’t know anything about that but I can assure you, I put in my card, asked for $50, got this slip and did not get my card back. He did not call me a liar but he was implying it quite clearly.

I was getting annoyed and agitated… The security guard comes over and starts listening in… after about a minute this guy (way more intelligent than the manager) says “wait a minute, I think I know what happened: that receipt belongs to the lady who used the ATM before you, it seems the machine is messed up and probably just froze and never completed your transaction”.

That is exactly what happened, but the manager never considered any possibility other than I was lying. He never said, “let me check your account to see if the $50 were charged”…

The security guard had the ability to handle customers way better than the manager who was a total jerk.

After a while the manager tells me they cannot retrieve the card and I need to return another day to get it. I said, no thanks, I don’t need it, I’m cancelling the card right now and my account as soon as I arrange it.

10

Trying to find stupid people? Drop by the local high school.

11

I’d bet they fail more often than you’d think. But that’s not the point I was making, and I certainly didn’t mean to imply that the program would just randomly change dates or something like that. What I was talking about was assuming that what a computer says is correct, not that it hasn’t made a mistake. Just goes back to the possibility of human error.

And go immediately to the faculty lounge. :slight_smile:

12

Whoo! Thank you BlackKnight! Finally someone realizes that not all adults are geniuses and not all kids are morons!

13

Looks good in print, huh? You must work in the only infallible video rental store in the universe.

I’m not defending the woman who can’t accept that she may have made a mistake, but I must take issue with your computers=zero errors position.
I recently went to a video store we frequent, and was told I had a late rental which was due back over 5 months ago - $11+ in late fees. Yeesh!
Oddly, we had indeed rented the video in question, returned it, along with a few others (on time) and gone on to rent videos maybe a half dozen times between then and now. Doesn’t seem likely that they would keep extending us rental privileges with a delinquency like that does it? That charge was not on my account a month ago. The manager promptly removed it, and apologized.
Tell me, then Ooner, where did that charge come from?
Computers empower humans to make mistakes at around a million times a second.

14

Ooner, care to send my your social security number, bank account #, or driver’s license #? It’s OK, I’m only going to put them into a computer…

OK, my point is, there’s a lot more than just a program here. There’s procedures, practices, inputs, outputs, and so on that make up any computer system. When all of these were designed well, things work well. Poor designs don’t work so well. Don’t have a blind faith and trust that a computer or a program or a system will work well - you may find out the hard way that they can, and do fail.

I remember once when we were trying to implement a system from a large vendor. The code was so buggy it wouldn’t even compile sometimes, much less run. There were so many errors, we started having contests to see who could find the most errors each week. Some people found 10-20 a week, routinely. The vendor’s responses and fixes were so mind-bogglingly slow, we even started suggesting fixes when we sent in the error reports, in hopes that they would just apply them and turn them around faster.

Need another answer? Remember NASA’s recent Mars probe? It failed because one system spoke metric, the other understood only English units. And as an aside, I heard the other day that NASA won’t convert the whole organization to use the metric system because only one unit refuses to change. It’s the Public Affairs unit - they think us uneducated Americans can’t understand it!

Now - having said all of that - my guess is that you had a customer that made a mistake, and either didn’t realize it, or was so upset when she realized she wasn’t infallable that she projected all the blame on your store, rather than admit she was wrong.

15

The customer-oriented solution is to give her that movie for a day. It doesn’t matter whether she’s wrong, she’s the one with the money, and you’re the one with the movies.

It’s probably helpful to your business that she’s stupid – have you seen the movies that are popular today? (Don’t be insulted when you realize that’s a rhetorical question :))

16

I have to agree with this. One of the employees at my local video store is a really nice girl, but she screws things up almost every time she checks out my videos. The store has the odd-but-wonderful policy that any movie rented on a Tuesday is 50 cents. New-new releases ie “over-night” are due by pm Wed. Sort of new movies are due back Friday at 10am. Old releases are due back the following Tuesday by 10am. There are no exceptions to this, and you can get a handout explaining the due dates if you wish, so imagine our surprise when we got a late fee for a movie due back Thursday. No movie rented on a Tuesday can be due TH, it’d have to be Wed or Fri. She regularly screws up between the dates for sort of new and old movies too. Like I said, she’s a nice girl, but if I go to her register, I check the slip!

17

But maybe she was diabetic, and was low on sugar, and…

18

BlackKnight your my hero :wink:
heh, sorry Ooner, there are too many stupid people in this world. There are still a few smart, logical people out there, for now.