You...Order
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Understood...NEXT!
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Understood...order complete. Returning to kitchen to place order. Salads forthcoming.
Is it really so bad that you can’t spare five seconds out of your day to hear someone say,
“Hello, welcome to [business], I’m [name.] How are you today?”
And for you to respond with a generic,
“I’m fine, and you?”
Well it seems like a lot of anti-social people in this thread would love that idea.
“Human contact!? Good lord, no! I just need to get my burrito and go home, back to the blessed internet where I can interact with a screen, instead of real people.”
It’s also used as a check on credit cards. The idea is that if you’re using a stolen credit card you’re probably not going to know where the correct billing address is.
Hell, I’d love it if it were that quick, and even remotely sincere. Instead, I get:
“Hello, and thank you for choosing Red Lobster! My name is Batsheba and I’ll be your hostess today. What makes Red Lobster special is that all of our fish is served fresh, all the time! Your server today will be Persephone, and she is a certified seafood expert! She’ll tell you all about our daily specials, which are also on your menu here. There is also a drink and dessert menu…”
And on and on it goes, until I get another speech from the freakin’ waitress. But what’s worse is, I then have to hear the hostess give the EXACT SAME SPEECH to everybody who sits down in the place!
This does not make me feel welcome. I find it insulting, and embarrassing to have to watch over and over again. I don’t go there anymore.
That isn’t human contact. It’s a script designed to remove as much human contact from the interaction as possible in the interest of upping sales a decimal point or two. Which in my case didn’t work because I won’t give them any more money because of this nonsense.
I make an effort to patronize businesses that allow their employees to behave like actual human beings.
No, it is a script designed to facilitate human contact and limit excesses, if only because there are servers and service people on either end of the scale who will do anything from walk up to your table and grunt at you for your order, to talking non-stop, telling you their life story and interrupting your evening with your friends. So they expect the server to walk up and say a set script as to avoid the extremes and cover the basics.
That’s the thing. Individual people may find many of these business practices annoying. However, large companies are pretty good at research what does and does not have an effect on people. They don’t come up with this crap out of the blue.
No, Oracle, I don’t want to download the fucking Bing toolbar, I just want to download the Java update to close the latest round of security holes you missed in testing.
I understand the problem that the business has, which you outline. However, at least in my case, scripts of this type do not fulfil their design of “facilitating human contact” because they are so obviously plastic and insincere that they just irritate me severely.
So the businesses that use these scripts have:
missed the opportunity of allowing its truly personable but not over friendly staff to really make the human contact enjoyable;
avoided the minor problem that its less adept staff may be over friendly (a problem I would have blamed on the staffmember not the business); and
substituted a management mandated dumbshow that definitely irritates me (and which I blame on the business, not their staff).
However, I know that businesses do research which shows that this sort of crap works more often than not and that grumpy bastards like me are just acceptable collateral damage, and they may well be right.
Oh God, I totally agree with Princhester on this. Red Lobster is terrible in that regard. Even places with simple robotic lists the waitresses read off or the plastic greeting you get are worse than nothing at all when they are said with complete indifference because the waiters/people behind the counter all look like they want to kill themselves from having repeated it so many times that day.
Want to see the personification of depression? Go to a Subway at lunchtime. Every time someone enters the store at the one down the street from me, the staff has to say “Welcome to Subway!”. When they are making a sandwich, they don’t bother to look up when they say it and just respond reactively to the ‘ding’ on the door when someone opens it. The real hilarity comes during lunch when they are really busy and the door is dinging near non-stop from people going in and out. They are so busy making sandwiches and staring down, that half the time they are greeting people who are actually leaving the store. Then the drone becomes near zombie like “welcome to Subway…welcome to Subway…welcome to Subway…did you want pickles?..welcome to Subway…welcome to Subway…onions?..welcome to Subway…”
Right now I’m frothing up an uber-hate for those businesses in shopping centres that insist on getting a little speaker out the front and having some schmo announce ad-lib pitches for crap. “That’s right folks! Come into EZ Buy and get four bottles of shampoo for only 99c! Only 99c for four bottles of shampoo!” It’s intrusive, irritating and does not work. And once one shop in the mall does it, everyone seems to think they have to do it too.
It is an example of the principle that says that the first guy to think of some marketing idea was an original visionary. But everyone who copies it? Complete tools.
My second frothing hatred is reserved for people pushing virtuous products who think they can use crappy techniques to do it. I got hit up by some bloke using vile time-share sales techniques the other day. He rushed up to me in the street, thrust out his hand for a handshake and said “Hi, I’m Mike!” with all the faux cheerfulness of a used-car salesman with a lime green open-necked bodyshirt and chest medallions. Clearly he was trying to force me to shake his hand and then listen to his pitch by exploiting my innate courtesy.
People who wish to exploit my courtesy get none from me.
Trouble is, he was trying to get donations for UNICEF. And I have seen this time and again. Save the seals/whales/chocolate frog, Greenies, Amnesty. For some reason, their front line pitchpeople seem to think that having what they think is a good cause is a licence to use the bottom of the barrell sales techniques. Makes me seethe.
Whenever I’m asked for my phone number, I say “ohh no thanks” like they offered me something. It might be just me, but I can see them internally cringing when they ask because the clerk knows it’s a stupid question.
However, if they do ask for my ZIP, I do give them that. For one how would they annoy me later with just a generic number like that, and two; my mom gave her ZIP once and got a discount for simply being local.
To be fair, half the time teh stoopids is on the other side of the discussion. Every time I hear someone at the next table over ask the waiter “So what is good ?” or “Is the fish fresh ?” I want to shake them. What do you think the waiter’s going to answer, numbskull ? “Nah, it’s actually five days old and the chef dropped it on the floor yesterday, but fuck it man we just drown it in sauce and feed it to you anyway” ?
Ah yeah, these. There are two kinds of street charity solicitations that irritate the crap out of me.
Sadly, this first one would have actually worked (well, in a limited fashion) had it not turned out to be a bait and switch. One weekend I was leaving the subway on my way to some event; there were a bunch of people at the top of the stairs calling out “Plant some seeds!” and handing out little paper packets that looked pretty much like seed packets. It was spring, I had a (tiny) backyard for the first time in ages, so yeah, I would have happily accepted a packet of free seeds. I assumed it was a promotion for something-or-other, but still, I would have been happy to take what I thought would be a packet of a few mixed wildflower seeds to plant.
So, the whole interaction goes:
He: Plant some seeds! [offers packet] Me: Seeds! Cool! [takes packet] Me: [looks at packet in my hand, sees it’s a religious tract and there are no actual seeds anywhere] Hey, these aren’t seeds! Me: [throws tract into the trash can two steps behind He]
Had there actually been seeds, I would have kept it to plant them. (Not that I would have converted or read the literature for anything other than humor value.) But because he misled me about what he was handing out, he pissed me off and I held onto it just long enough to get to a trash bin. I’m pretty sure I crumpled it and made sure he saw me throw it away, too.
So, you know, attempting to convince me you’re the better religion by lying to me is not really an effective technique.
The other method that I hate is back when it was popular for charities to solicit by (basically) playing in traffic. Every red light, they’d run into the street and try to solicit you through your car window. I didn’t exactly appreciate their potentially putting me at liability risk should one of them lag behind when the light changes and dash in front of my car as I start moving. That method was guaranteed to ensure my non-cooperation. I even at one point tried to explain to one worker how their methods were counter-productive in an attempt to be helpful; her response was “We’re not using any methods.” The stupid literally stunned me into silence, so I just rolled up my window and drove away.
I worked for an aquarium for a few months once- one of the managers had so many of these weird beliefs. Part of my job was to give talks, and she decided that we had to do them regardless whether or not any visitors were actually present. Yep, not just ‘had to be there even if we thought no-one was in’, which would have been fair enough, sometimes people would come back in through the shop to hear a talk they missed earlier, but we had to give a talk to an empty room. She’d actually listen behind a staff door, and I got in trouble for waiting until someone was actually, y’know, there before talking to them. Most of the other staff did, and sometimes some visitors would walk in midway through…
Come to think of it though I don’t think she actually in any way thought this would be a plus for visitors, she was one of those people who just likes throwing their weight around for the power kick.
I agree the second question is stupid, and I wouldn’t have phrased the first one like that, but asking for recomendations sometimes gets you a list of specials which hadn’t previously been mentioned, or advice on a good combo (“we’d like to try some typical meals from this area, what would you recommend?” gets local dishes and local wines pointed out) or which is the chef’s specialty - yes, there are ten meat dishes in the list and all are good, but the Specialty of the House is the ribs.
Heh. Although our agency’s guidelines specify that the main phone line be answered, “Good morning, Safety Board,” some receptionists, despite specific instructions, insist on answering, “Good morning, this is the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, my name is <idiot>, how can I help you today?”
I try to conceal my amusement when callers just give up and start talking partway through the spiel, and the receptionist has to lapse into silence.
This is pretty bad in Ireland, but in my experience it’s even worse in the US:
Somewhere along the way, some genius decided that in winter, I the shopper want the shop to be kept at a minumum temperature of four thousand degrees, while in summer, I want it to be sub-zero. The same goes for buses.
WTF???!! In winter, I’m wearing layers and scarves and coats and hats and all the rest of it, and I have to peel them all off the second I get into the shopping centre or I will die of heat exhaustion. If it were July, you would be frantically running the air conditioning because God forbid customers should have to put up with this kind of wretched heat, but because it’s December, somehow it’s just fine. Then, in summer, when I’m wearing my strappy little camisole or whatever, I shiver my way through your arcticated shop, which you would be frantically trying to heat up if it were this temperature in December.
Either way, I’m getting out of here as fast as I possibly can, which I have to figure wasn’t your intention. And you are wasting disgusting amounts of energy.
Related to that, something which comes up frequently in my current job, where people can post “suggestions” and they will be answered publically. The thermostats are set at 25ºC, always, because some study somewhere deemed that the bestest temperature to do office work at and that’s it.
But people do not wear the same clothes when we have mins of 34ºC and when the max is 15ºC - so people keep posting “could we have the thermostats set at a higher temp in the summer (just use it to keep people from melting, without setting a 20ºC differential which the poor system can’t reach and which keeps a/c vents blowing all day long) and at a lower one in the winter (when we all have jackets anyway and wear our thick trousers)?”
But no, someone did a study and deemed 25ºC the perfect temperature and the one at which people are most comfortable, so 25ºC it shall be.
