I once saw a 5 year old child take a dump on the floor at a Big Lots store. The child actually had the grace to be embarassed. I had heard the piping little voice begging to go to the bathroom before I entered the aisle, and apparently, the kid just couldn’t hold back any longer. “Mommy, I went poopy,” the kids whimpered, tears in her eyes. “I see that,” the mother replied mildly, and wandered away.
I thanked God I did not work there.
It’s always amazed me how disgusting people are.
When I worked at the hotel, I think I saw the worst of humanity. Once, a well-dressed couple rented a room, but left after only a few hours. The next morning, the housekeeper assigned to clean the room, ran out gagging. The couple had smeared feces all over the walls, bed, and furniture.
It was actuallycommon to find used condoms laying on the bedside table, with a trash can not three feet away, used tampons lying on the bathroom floor, and to find all manner of bodily fluids smeared on the telephone, and TV. There were people that used towels as toilet paper, and people that would poop on the floor in the lobby bathroom.
Mind you, this was not a “cheap” hotel. Rooms were around $100 a night. Our turnover in housekeepers was constant.
I’d qualify that: there’s even a difference between being demanding because you have some idea what you want but need help in working out the details, and being demanding because you have no freaking clue what you want and expect the clerk to be a mind-reader or a genius. I’m thinking of a particular customer here. She presented her problem this way: she was going to take her toddler to their mountain cabin, which had a large table with a flat stone top. She was concerned about the kid hitting her forehead on the sharp edges of the table. She expected me to come up with a solution that would stick to the table, would look good, and would not permanently damage the stone top. I have no idea what she expected us to have, and neither did she. My suggestion was to glue velcro to the table and sew some sort of velcro-backed cushion to fit. She rejected that right away. Didn’t we have felt, she asked. Sure, we had two thick kinds of felt, one for stiffening valances and one for padding under tablecloths, and I showed them to her. Those weren’t what she was looking for, either. But when I suggested a baby equipment shop or even a hardware store might be a better place to ask than a curtain shop, she bawled me out for not being helpful!
Other times a customer looking at the ready-made curtains - which are mostly self-service - asked for help. Often this was a reasonable question and I don’t mind them, even though we got certain ones over and over. (How long are these, Can I return them if the colors don’t match, etc.) Or they’d looked and couldn’t find the curtains they’d chosen from the display rack. But others just wanted a clerk to find the curtains on the shelves for them and save them the trouble of looking, or to stand there and hold the curtains they’d chosen for the bedroom while they looked for curtains for the guest room. Or they’d say “I need curtains for my living room. The walls are kind of white, but not exactly white, you know? And the sofa is greenish. And the rug is lots of colors but I guess it’s mostly blue. Which would you recommend?” :smack:
Those of you who can do this as a career, I salute you.
Another veteran of the small, locally owned pet store, here. We were generally exotic pets only – birds, fish, reptiles, some small animals, but no dogs or cats. It amazed me the number of parents who just “dropped off” their kids while they shopped elsewhere and then complained that we had no cute little puppies or kitties for them to play with, just big scary lizards and birds with sharp beaks. Kids were the worst in my store – spitting or dropping ice cream cones in the fish tanks (damn Baskin Robbins next door), reaching into the hamster and mouse cages, banging on the glass reptile cages. Parents didn’t give a hoot about it either, they let them run around like animals themselves. We eventually had to post signs saying "Do Not Leave Children Unattended – We Are NOT Babysitters!"
We also had the usual flow of ingrates that do things you can’t even believe. People who wanted us to come to their house to help look for their missing iguana, someone who wanted free bird food because he ran out and we didn’t specify how long a can lasts, people who came in smoking cigarettes like we were a bar and got pissy when we told them to take the cigarette outside. People who would come in 5 minutes to closing to “just get one quick thing” and spend 20 minutes meandering around, sticking their fingers in the parrot cage, looking at each and every item and asking 100 questions, then leaving with nothing.
My newest favorite: I work in a small Rite Aid. Tiny. We have a pharmacy and five small aisles of a few eesentials, and even essentials are hit and miss. (No we don’t have telephones, but we carry three kinds of blenders!)
My favorite coworker has been there for 17 years and takes no shit from anyone. (We recently got a new DM, she sent him a letter detailing her working conditions. He thanked her. She’s awesome.) A woman came in and started throwing a fit at Lue because “everytime she came in [our] copy machine didn’t work!” she began unpacking a bag to show examples of documents that our copy machine had supposedly ruined.
We don’t have a copy machine. We’ve never had a copy machine. Not Ever. After the woman finally left calling Lue a lying c**t, Lue turns to me and we just laugh and laugh…
In tune with the Acts of Gord, I’d like to point out that libraries are experiencing the same problem. I remember reading about one child who was left all day who was three years old. IIRC, they had the cops waiting for the mother when she finally returned at closing time.