Yes, they should know better, but when they don’t have a curfew, and don’t have any rules on dating, and don’t have anyone telling them “Pull up your pants!” before heading out the door, it shouldn’t be too surprising that a restaurant sans cheeseburgers and chicken fingers might be a little “high concept,” much less not showing your ass in public (figuratively) when you don’t get your way.
XMas dinner out with them since (when I actually feel like inviting them) has been Denny’s.
yeah food hates me, I cook about 90% of my own food, lots of veggies and meat dishes with spices I pick as opposed to a nice tasty something from the store. that and a hell of a lot of corn chips and goat cheese.
its not all bad, I can look forward to some really really great home cooked meals…but since I cooked them there isnt much in the way of a surprise.
(I have a seal a meal vacuum sealer thing so I make large batches and freeze)
A few more words on the grilled cheese thing…
At some high-end restaurants, if you do not want what is offered on the menu, you can just order anything you like.
Chef Trotter told me if they want fried chicken we would send some one out to get a chicken and fry it for them. It will still cost $135.00 the same as the regular menu.
If I ran the restaurant I would use that approach.
“Can’t you send someone out to get some white bread?”
Yes I can. It will be $10 each way in a cab plus the usual mark up for a special order. Your grilled cheese will be ready in about an hour and cost will be $35.00. Are you sure you do not want to look at kid’s menu?
Cheeseburgers, maybe, but one could have absolutely delicious hamburgers sandwiched between pan-seared rice patties instead of bread. :)
I worked at a video store for quite some time, and from that experience I learned that maybe around 1/3 of people are too dumb to understand how to rent a video. FWIW, this was in an upscale neighborhood where the women had designer bags and then men had lots of letters after their names. Didn’t make a difference. Renting videos was just too big of an intellectual challenge for a large chunk of them
One of my favorite interactions:
“Good evening! Can I see your membership card?”
“Oh, no. We don’t have one of those.”
“No problem! To sign up, you just this form and a piece of ID. It will only take five minutes and doesn’t cost anything”
“No, you don’t understand. We don’t want a membership. We just want to rent this movie.”
“Uhhh. I’m sorry, I can’t rent this out to you without a membership. We need some kind of record of who we have rented our stuff to”
“This is ridiculous. I can’t believe it. The store down the street doesn’t make me have a membership. Just scan the freaking movies.”
“I’m sorry, sir. If you don’t have a membership, you can’t rent movies here”
Man crumples up membership form and throws it at me
“THIS bullshit is why I don’t rent at these places.”
"Actually, sir, it is.
I once had some lady ask me if she could return her gas, as her lawnmower didn’t take it all.
I told her no, and suggested she put the gas in her car, or save it for the next time she wanted to cut the grass.
Like even sven, I’ve done my time at a video store. A certain financially-beleaguered international chain that is, despite nomenclature, more family-friendly than that other large US chain.
Like any good CSR, when I wasn’t restocking shelves, processing returns, manning the register, or checking inventory, I was fielding calls from our beloved customer base. One such call that came up more often than I would like:
Seo: Hello, thank you for calling <soulless subsidiary of soulless megacorp>, how may I help you?
Customer: Hi, I’m wondering if you sell DVD rewinders.
Seo: No, we don’t sell DVD rewinders. You don’t need to rewind DVDs. They don’t work that way.
Customer: But I can’t figure out how to rewind it with my VCR. I don’t want to get a fine for not rewinding the DVD.
Seo: DVD’s cannot be rewound. There is no need to rewind them. Even if there were such a need, we do not charge a rewinding fee. Not even for VHS tapes. While we prefer that VHS tapes be returned rewound, it is not <soulless subsidiary>'s policy to charge for rewinding servce.
Customer: Oh, but, I’d still like to rewind the DVD. I don’t want to return it without rewinding it.
Seo: Ma’am/Sir, it is impossible to rewind a DVD. They don’t work like that. It’s kind of like a vinyl record or a CD.
Customer: Oh… Well, can you teach me how to rewind them? I don’t want to pay a rewinding fee.
:smack:
If those calls were cranks, they were incredibly convincing ones. The ignorance was so potent I could smell it through the phone.
I remember when VHS rentals first started, not only did you need to sign up for a membership, you had to PAY like $75 for the privledge.
In between jobs, Iworked the garden shop at HD for a few months. One laugh after another: customer calls in :
“I wanna build a patio”!
(Me): Very good sir, what style of paving blocks do you wish to use"
-(Customer); “Weell, I dunno yet”
(Me); We have 6 styles, and also have belgian blocks and bricks. What will the area be?
(Customer); “area”?
(Me); yes, sir, what will the lenght and width be?
(Customer): “Ahh dunno”
(me); Well sir, I suggest you drive over, and take a look -then you can decide what style you like.
(Customer); “Wait a minnit…i asked you a question!”-“I wann speak to your boss!”
(me) : Click!:smack:
What is something you’ve never heard, but would like to? Next time I have a particularly good waitron, I want to make their day.
In Customer’s defense, my DVD player does work an awful lot like a VCR. If I stop a movie in the middle, and even turn off the player, when I come back and press play it starts up right where I left it. I know that that memory exists within the player and not the disk, but I can see how someone would think otherwise if they didn’t know how it worked.
sedoa, next time this happens, tell the customer that all DVD players have an automatic rewinder built into them which prevents the DVd from being ejected until it has been completely rewound.
An old guy spray painted the floor to see the color of the cans of paint, which have caps the color of the paint. The floor had to be stripped and redone to remove the paint which is time consuming and not fun.
A customer sprayed furniture polish in the air to smell it. Nothing is slicker than a waxed floor with a coating of furniture spray wax on top. We had use stripper on the floor in the middle of the day to remove the wax for customer safety, because nothing else made it less than slick as wet ice.
Somebody tried to return a barn radio clock that due to the style had to be 15 to twenty years old. It’s covered in typical barn grime, the barn lime paint, fly poop and some cow splatter of decades thickness. Yah sure we’ll do a exchange for a new one.
A farmer brings back a pair of leather boots with a receipt that dates them at a year old. He has wore them in cow manure the entire time and the leather is rotted. Leather soaked in manure rots, this is why they used wooden shoes in the animal pens people. Later they used rubber overshoes. The best part is they are covered in day old cow manure to almost the top. The shoe manager had to take them back, but she at least told him that they would only be refunded after he took them home and cleaned them off. She had to keep these returns for up to 6 months before disposal by her regional manager. Those shoes got sealed in a garbage bag and put in a box that was then sealed.
A guy wants a refund for an apple tree he says died. He has the guarantee with the receipt that says they have to bring back the tree for a refund. I tell him no refund without the tree, and point it out on the guarantee he has. He comes back during the middle of the day, when I’m so busy I can’t be everyplace I’m needed at once. I get called up to the front customer service to OK the same guy’s refund and he has a 6 foot branch from a mature Oak tree. I told the employee that it was the branch off an oak tree, and I was done with this customer. He has to talk to the store manager now.
A lady bought a potted rose. I know this lady and exactly where she lives, although she doesn’t know me. I used to have a super memory and could remembers details like who bought what years later. She asked if it could be kept in the pot and be OK. I told her no it had to be planted, because if it dried out even once it would die and we had to water them 3 times a day while we had them or they died. She said she understood and would plant it. I pass her house for the next couple months and the rose never gets planted. it is dead about a month after she bought it. It showed up at the store and she wanted a refund. She insists that she planted it. I informed her I knew where she lived , and that I saw it for the last couple months setting potted on her front step where I notice it finally died. I told the employee at the service desk the manager had to be called to get a refund.
Do you see the trend? Lie to me and I don’t let you walk all over me like I’m an idiot.
I could often identify a group of plants I sold somebody at one time and know where they live. Yah I saw your house the plants look nice. The customers I dealt with would sometimes wait an hour to talk to me when it was their turn on a busy day, so I know they mostly liked me.
The district manager wanted pictures to show the other district managers what a nice garden center we had. They had areas of about five states each.
Well, that policy (not you) is stupid. I’ve been refused a return because there were slight creases in boots.
“I’m sorry, but these are not in resellable condition. Check your receipt. Oh, you don’t have one after all this time. Well, that’s what it said.” Why does this store not do this?
She would have really liked to have done that, but she couldn’t. Shoes were a separate entity from the main store, and had there own rules. None of the employees thought the shoe division had a reasonable return policy. People would bring back shoes after the kids wore them for a year because they didn’t fit and get their money back. They took back shoes a couple years old that wore out.
The main store didn’t have the insane returns policy.
Oh, I know, I’m more amazed that, after explaining over and over again that DVDs do not need to be rewound and, in fact, cannot physically be rewound, the customer still insisted on rewinding them. The same goes for the fact that I would have to explain multiple times that <soulless subsidiary> doesn’t charge rewind fees and hadn’t for years.
I’m hoping I never have an opportunity to use your advice. I never want to go back to waged employment world.
I got lucky after moving coast-to-coast in the '90’s, and parlayed a dancing-bear-at-a-mall-kiosk job into a management position in a branch office at a local startup ISP. I just walked up and they hired me. My commission checks were great, as well as getting regular paychecks. I was doing well, but it was a very busy job. We also did custom computer builds. This was in the Washington DC metro area. They have now since closed.
Our customer base was quite diverse, given the locale. One day, a Japanese woman and her “assistant” came in to buy her husband a laptop, loaded to the nines and with a 3 year internet access account. (This was before home internet access was commonplace, and way before wireless.) Wife didn’t speak english well, therefore the assistant. Her husband had recently been given a promotion at wherever he worked, but he was, as assistant translated for wife, a very prominent and important man. It took about 90 minutes but we managed to get a custom build laptop and set up her account. Detailed pre-printed instructions on connections to phone lines, power cords, mouse blah blah blah. Instructions are understood by both wife and assistant and we even went over to the floor models and unplugged everything and wife understood how to put it back. (Not hard, they’re all color coded, but still good.) Delivery at her home would be guaranteed one day before husband’s birthday. All was good.
As the Japanese are, wife was very grateful and expressive in her gratitude for being able to grant her wishes. They leave happy.
The day after the confirmed delivery (company emails confirmed shipments and returns for inventory reasons), very important and prominent husband comes in ANGRY and TOTALLY PISSED, rapidly switching between Japanese curses and english phrases threatening to sue for fraud.
Eventually, assistant calms everybody down and we figure out that the husband is mad because not only did they have no internet access, but the laptop would not work at all. More curses and threats ensue.
Assistant calms everybody down again. When husband finally gets his whole story together, he explains his actions of unwrapping the gift and attempting to use it. It does not work. Assistant relays description of how he is soooo angry about this fly-by-night company to cheat his wife that he leaves the party in progress to drive over here to complain.
I make my best attempts at apologies and try to get assistant to have him answer questions. After much gesturing and communication attempts, I {gently} take the laptop out of his hands. Holding it in my left hand, I start to make a large circular motion around the laptop with my right. “SIR, you do not have the power cord, phone line, or even the mouse plugged into this computer. The battery is still in the box. It will not work unless you plug it in or charge the battery.”
Assistant hears this and takes a few seconds to translate. She starts to make a face because she understands how messed up the whole misunderstanding is. I turn to her and say “Could you please ask the gentleman over to the floor models and I will show him how to operate his gift?”
Assistant says something quite lengthy, and then husband looks all smug. Seems like I’m his personal guru for the next 10 minutes to prove his computer and account work great. When we’re done, he gets up, shakes my hand, and walks out without a word. Assistant gets the laptop and box and gives me a wink.
I deal cards. Just this week some lady asked “How many do I have?” I look down…she’s got a 10 and a 2. :smack:
Would that be blackjack you’re dealing?
Yes. I can understand when a casual player is sitting there looking at A2AA362, but 10+2!!! Oh, I could write a novel…