The people I wish I hadn't met - The Empoyees

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Inspired, of course, by the hilarious thread started by Nacho4Sara entitled “The people I know part 1 : the customers.” : this is the other side of the coin.

Like most people I’ve had to deal with customers, in addition to being one myself, and usually the customers tend to be the idiots, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a hell of a lot of employees that make my blood boil.

For example :

**Mr Service Agreement : **
I bought a laptop at Circuit City last week. I knew exactly what I wanted and made life easy on the salesman by pretty much just walking up to him and saying “Hey, this is what I want. Ring it up for me.” The first words out of his mouth when he gets to the cash register are :
“This model comes with a one-year warranty, but I recommed you get our three-year extended warranty for only $250.”

I choke back a laugh. “Uh, no thanks,” I politely say.

“May I ask why?” he replies.

WTF?! I said I didn’t want it. Leave it at that!

“Because I don’t want to spend $250. If I had an extra $250 I would have spent it on a laptop with an active matrix disply.”

Can he leave it at that? Of course not :
“Well, we like to offer the warranty because these laptops are integrated packages and blah, blah, blah, blah.”

“LOOK,” I say, getting frustrated, “you’re not going to talk me into the warranty so you might as well just give up right now.”

He finally gets the message. No telling how long he would have gone on with this crap if I hadn’t been so blunt. I realize these guys are just doing what they’re trained to do, but GOD DAMN, that’s friggin’ RUDE!
**Mr Social Hour : ** This is the guy who’s standing around talking to his fellow salesmen while I’m staring at the computers, trying to look like I’m ready to buy something, occasionally making eye contact, etc. Mr Social Hour doesn’t get the message. He has important things to talk about and he’ll be damned if you want him to gasp do his job!

**Miss I’m Too Good for a Fast Food Job, So I’m Going to Take My Frustration out on the Customer : ** In addition to having an extremely long name, this bitch makes frequenting McDonald’s a living hell. When I pull up to the speaker at the drive-through, I get nothing but dead silence. No “I’ll be right with you,” or anything. Just silence until about two seconds before I drive away.

After ordering, I wait several minutes (somtimes up to 15-20 minutes!) for my food even though there’s only two cars in front of me. When I pull up to the window, she offers no apologies about her astoundingly slow service. In fact she doesn’t say much of anything at all, except the total price of my meal, and it seems to pain her to say that much. She then thrusts the bag of cold, half-empty fries and burger out the window without offering condiments. (If you do ask for them, she’ll treat you as if you personally insulted her, then give you a single packet of ketchup.)

She never, ever, ever says thank you. If you say thank you to her, she’ll ignore you and close the window in your face.

When you go back 5 minutes later to complain about the cold, half-empty fries, you get no apology and she grudginly gets you a box of fries that’s 3/4 full and only slightly warmer than the first batch.

2

As the guy who got fired from a CrapUSA for being smarter than 75% of the morons they hired, I can understand. Of course, we all know the real money is made on those “Service Agreements”. Most of them are never needed, so that makes up for the few that are.

My favorite was Car Salesmen who had NO CLUE about the products they were selling. Like asking one guy about Turbocharging, and he just stood there like “huh?”

sigh

3

Great post, **neutron.

I wait with bated breath your skewering of the “Moronic Postal Worker” and the “Checkout Girl Who Can’t Count Change.”

4

My favorite is my local Blockbuster. I’ve had bad service there so often that I no longer even try to be polite about it. The place is run by high school students, all of which exhibit the Mr. Social Hour syndrome.

A typical movie rental goes like this. I walk in, find my movie, stand in line. There’s 2 people ahead of me in line, and 2-3 more quickly line up behind me. There’s 4 employees behind the desk. One is actually helping customers AND answering the phone at the same time. The other three are doing things like sloooowly checking in the returned movies, or dusting the boxes while they talk and laugh. Very fun & social. Meanwhile, the line grows, and the one employee that is actually producing revenue for the store by helping customers is trying hard to keep up.

At this point, I usually start to make loud comments. Like “Good thing there’s 4 employees here. Somebody has to tell the latest jokes.” etc. Once I get going, the other people standing in line usually join in. Soon enough, the “manager” (another 17 year old) will open up another checkout.

This happens probably 3 out of 4 times I go there. If there was another movie rental store close to my house, I’d never go to Blockbuster. Unfortunately, the Blockbuster put the local store out of business (it was a shitty local store to begin with, but at least there I dealt with a lack of movies, and the employees were always helpful and prompt.)

5

I hate the Fast Food Teenage Robots.

For example, you go into a place like KFC, where all of the counter staff are high school kids. They all look the same because of the uniform. The worst part is when they take your order. They repeat your entire order back at you, as if you need to check it for errors. They are programmed to say to every customer “do you want any drinks or salads?” They never listen critically to your order, so that when you ask for fries only, they are compelled to check if you didn’t really want something else as well. They never use common sense, so you are forever being asked “eat in or takeaway?”, despite your uniform and the rather large emergency vehicle parked outside the front door, in direct view of the counter.

My WAG is that they are all wired, and that some arsehole spends all day playing back tapes to make sure the script was followed on every occasion.

It’s a nice change to be occasionally served by someone who is not afraid to be an individual.

6

Checkout people who can’t count change drive me NUTS! I spent a few years waitressing and bartending, and I determine the order total and change in my head all night, every night. To this day, I still calculate the change while someone is ringing through my stuff.

My personal story was a few weeks ago, when I was at 7-11. They rang something in wrong, and had to spend a minute at the calculator figuring how how much to ring in to correct it. It took me 2 seconds to figure it out in my head, and I kept saying “$37.20. Excuse me, $37.20. Ummm… guys. $37.20.”. After a minute with the calculator, they turn back towards me and say “$37.20”. Uh… gee, I never would have guessed.

My friend worked briefly at a grocery store, and some of the people there were SO stupid. One girl rang up the order, and when it came time to punch in the amount that the customer gave her, she accidently punched in $50 in instead of the $20 he gave her. She actually had to call over the manager to ask if she should give him change for the $20 or for $50. Sheesh.

7

Oh, I forgot the I’ve Never Eaten Anything That Didn’t Come In Styrofoam grocery store checkout clerks. There was a small grocery store near me a few years back, and the people behind the counter were invariably the type to whom a non-potato vegetable was a foreign and frightening thing. I’d buy come to the counter with fresh veggies, and they’d always have to ask me what each and every one of them was (except the potatoes, of course.)

I once told the dimwitted checkout girl that an avacado was a green potato, and she spent a good minute or two looking through her little flip book of veggie codes before I 'fessed up and told her it was an avacado. I had visions of paying 39 cents/pound for avacados, normally priced at $1.99 each, but I just couldn’t go through with it.

8

and I had to stop for a ner Harley t-shirt. A storm had just knocked out the power, but the shop was still open. Greeting at the door was “Can’t help ya much, the power is out”
I replied, “Just need a T-shirt and I have cash”. So I go inside and tell the woman at the counter, “Just show me where the x-large pocket T’s with your logo are, please.” They only had one style, so I grabbed one and as I go to the counter, she said “I don’t know how to figure the tax” . I askher what it was, she said 9.5%, so I said “just make it 10%…$23.00 for the shirt, $2.30 for the tax, $25.30 total.” I handed her $30 and she still had to us the calculator to make change. Whew! But I did get my shirt.
later, Tom

9

Fast food around here seems to be pretty courteous, and they only mess up orders when you order something unusual, like my dumbass roomate who can’t order anything straight off the menu. Then, the taco bell down the street pays more than the opening level job here (and I do tech support. Be afraid should that little box break).

10

The lady at the checkout counter holds up a produce bag, looks quizzically at me, and grins.

“What’s the matter?”

“What is it?”

“Oh. It’s an artichoke.”

“Anarta – what?”

“Artichoke.”

“O-T-T …?”

“A-R-T-I-C-H-O-K-E.”

Sheesh.

11

Not intended to be a hijack even though it has potential, but, I wanna talk about WALMART.
Oh, God how I hate these people.I have seen the face of true idiocy; she is checking people out on isle 19.No, she can’t make change on a calculator or in her head.Yes, she exhibits the fear of veggies,
“Endive? I dont have a code for that…”
“You say that’s supposed to be leeks?Looks like giant green onions…You’re sure its leeks?” No, I’m just trying to rip you off somehow.
And God help you if you should try to purchase something without a tag, and most things I want seem to never have them.The only solution is to send someone to find where I got the product and come back and report the price,though they rarely come back.I think they make a mad dash for freedom the moment they are out of sight of the CSM’s and bolt for the door. I usually just tell them to forget it.
Paint.Wal mart paint sucks, but its cheap so I can deal with it.What I can’t handle is that NO ONE knows how to mix paint.I know how to mix paint, fercryinoutloud! I know for a fact that everyone except the cartpushers has to learn to mix paint during orientation.But if I need some paint mixed, all I can get out of them are blank stares and mumblings about “…not authorised to mix paint…”.Authorised?!!What the hell, do you have to have a special security clearance?
Same thing goes for getting fabric cut.Scissors are, apparently, a highly specialised tool requiring what must be years of training to operate properly.
I don’t know but it seems to me that while ,yes, I could go somewhere else - why should I have to?Has it truly gotten to the point where WallyWorld knows it will always get some of my business so there’s no use improving service to get all of my business?

Grrrr…