What do your customers do that annoy you?

The BBQ Pit
61

I hate people who get pissy because we can’t treat/examine their animals for free and accuse us of just being in it for the money. Yeah, you can tell how much we make by all the Beamers and Benzes in the back parking lot. :rolleyes: If an animal is clearly suffering, we’ll euthanize it for free without doing an exam, but we don’t know what’s wrong with it or if it’s fixable. What’s even worse, though, is the subset of these people who refuse the free euthanasia and tell you all about how they’re going to dispatch the animal themselves. There was this one guy with a Dane who was possibly bloating for the third time in four months, sometimes I still dream about the things he said he was going to do to that poor animal.

I also hate the people who get all pissy because we have the temerity to have :gasp: conversations while waiting for their bloodwork to run or their films to develop, or for the doctor to make a treatment plan or estimate. The most recent one was a woman who drove past our road five times, and I finally had to get in the car and go out to find her and lead her in. Her dog was perfectly stable, and she knew her dog was stable. We were just waiting for a bit of bloodwork before scripting out some pain meds. Bloodwork takes a bare minimum of twenty minutes from draw to results, because you’ve got to wait for the blood to clot thoroughly, put it in the centrifuge for 5-10 minutes, and then wait for the test to run. It was dead (that’s why I had time to go out and lead this woman in), treatments were done, and we had nothing else to do but wait for this bloodwork. So we were standing around talking about our plans for the week, and evidently she heard us, because when we went to talk to her about the bloodwork, she reamed us for “standing around talking and laughing instead of taking care of her dog, and what did we think this place was, [insert name of area human hospital]?” Oy.

The ones I hate most of all, though, are the people who work in human medicine and think that makes them knowledgeable about veterinary medicine. Yes, to a certain point, a mammal is a mammal is a mammal, but that only hold true for the very basics of anatomy and physiology. Dog and cat livers do not secrete the exact same enzymes as human livers, so they can’t break down things like, oh say, Tylenol. It’s not a happy thing when kitty’s body temp is 98.6, no matter how normal that might be for one of your patients. No matter how much you know about humans, most of that knowlege is simply not applicable to your pet, so please shut the hell up.

62

I work in a drs’ office. I do all the billing, the insurance , the ARs, the posting, etc. for three drs , a sonographer, and 2 NPs.
My BIGGEST peeve is the annual exam dance.
Pt calls and makes appt for annual gyn exam. Pt comes, signs form that they are having annual gyn exam. Nurse asks pt if they are there for annual exam. Pt has annual gyn exam. I bill insurance for annual gyn exam. Pt gets bill because insurance does not cover annual gyn exam.

Pt calls me:“You billed this wrong!! I was not there for an annual exam!!”

Me: " Well, ma’am, the appt you scheduled was for an annual, you signed the form stating it was an annual, the dr indicated in the chart it was an annual , and you werent having any problems"

Pt: " YES I WAS! I had pains in my breasts!! "

ME: " Well, ma’am you had a pap smear and a pelvic exam, correct?"

Pt:“Yeah, so?”

Me; “If you had come in for breast pain we wouldn’t have done a pap smear or pelvic”

PT " Can’t you change the codes so the insurance will pay?"

Me: " no Ma’am- thats insurance fraud. "

Pt " Well, I ain’t paying it no one told me my insurance doesn’t cover annual exams!!"

Me: " I am sure it explains this in your policy. Unfortunatley, we see over 200 patients a day, and I simply cannot call and get the detailss of everyone’s policy before they come in."

Pt: " Well I aint paying it!"

sigh

63

I love consignors that do this. The look on their faces when I chirp out, “Sure thing. Now, we’ve got some things here that haven’t sold, so I’ll just pull them off the shelves and give them back to you…” It’s classic. It works best if you keep escalating the cheerfulness as you go and send them off with a sunshiney “Have a nice day!”

ARGH! I hate that! It makes me want to abuse italics!!!

64

Currently? This…

Me: Thank you for calling blah blah blah, how can I help you?

Caller: I blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah and blah blah blah…

Finally a break! The caller has to finally take a deep breath and I take advantage of that (I was taught it is rude to interrupt).

Me: Ok, can I get your name and blah number?
Caller: Blah and blah number.
Me: Ok, thank you Blah. I see that blah needed to be set for you. I have taken care of that for you. Anything else I can help you with today?
Caller: No, that was all. Thank you for taking care of that so quickly.
Me: Thank you. Have a good morning/afternoon/ evening/weekend/holiday.
Caller: Thanks, you too.
Yes I understand sometimes the caller just needs to vent/talk/explain but a big part of my job performance is the length of the call. If my average call length is too long I can be terminated…sigh…

65

Ditto to those posts above on the “if you know better than me what’s wrong with your system why did you even call me?” thing.

Then there’s the “we have rigid change control and cannot patch our servers or change any settings on it” thing. So how would you you like me to fix your problem then?

And my all-time favourite “look I know this is not a problem with your product but Brand X’s product, but I rang you 'cause you give better support”. If we do, it’s no thanks to you.

A close relative to this is “you have to prove that the problem is not your product before we call Brand X, 'cause we have a contract with you we’ve already paid for whereas we’d have to pay them for the call”. Yeah, having a contract with us totally invalidates the initial diagnosis that it’s extremely unlikely to be our product, plus none of our other customers get this problem. And we don’t mind that you blame us for the delay this caused in getting your problem solved.

And finally there’s the 4:55pm call that comes every Friday before a long weekend “we’re planning some work over the weekend, have you got anyone who can do standby?”. No. You knew this two weeks ago, that train has long gone now, mate.

66

Fat fingers
:stuck_out_tongue:

67

I used to work in a pet store back in high school for 3 years. That experience scarred me for life from retail.

People who would leave their kids in the store and go grocery shopping. We finally put up a sign that said, “Do not leave children under 13 unattended – we are not babysitters!”

People who would let their kids run wild in the store like it was a public zoo. We didn’t sell any cats or dogs, thank goodness, but most people didn’t think twice about letting their little Mackenzie or Braden pound on the glass of the Savannah Monitor cage, open up the top of fish tanks and spit their gum or candy into it, or stick fingers into the African Gray cage, a testy bird who wouldn’t have thought twice about having a little finger snack.

People who walked in 5 minutes to close on a weeknight and spent 20 minutes just “looking” (at 9:30 on a Tuesday evening) while we noisily vacuumed and cleaned snake cages around them.

Customers waiting outside the door for the store to open. Nothing put me in a bad mood more quickly than seeing these assholes watching me open the register and try to get the store ready to open while they pretended to be impatient and in a huge hurry to buy goldfish food outside the front door.

Customers would pound on the outside glass 20 minutes after we had closed, insisting that we sell them birdseed or their bird would surely starve, THEN act like a 3-year old brat when we said the register was closed, the entire till was already deposited, and the security alarm for the front door was already set, please come back tomorrow. Any knowledgeable bird owner would know that you can give birds a cup of fruit, vegetables, cheerios, etc. for a day and they’re perfectly fine. My boss always gave in and gave them a free bag of birdseed :rolleyes:

68

BubbaDog, you will be pleased to know that I told our wedding DJ to let me know if anyone was harassing him, and that he was free to tell them that he was taking requests only from the bride and groom. We also made sure he got a plate of food and drinks. He offered us a discount on any anniversary party in the future. :smiley:

69

My personal favorites are the bat-shit crazy conspiracy theorists. Everything we do, there’s some dark sinister reason, probably involving a scheme to take their money. The only thing we do at work is sit in dark board rooms cackling maniacally and waxing our moustaches and think of ways to cheat people. I can’t really give out details of where I work, but I can say that it’s in the pet industry. Pets. Fluffy. Animals. Family oriented events. Oooh, that’s really evil. :rolleyes:

70

In a nutshell, they think we are omnipotent and never sleep.

“Why can’t you unlock my ID on such-and-such?” Because this department doesn’t administer that application. “But it’s on the computer! Why can’t you do it?” You probably have a stuffed Garfield and a photo of the grandkids on your computer, and we don’t support those either.

One of the real estate loan systems here has very clear instructions on how to get login help - send an email to <them> - just click the “them” on the login page and an email automagically opens up for them to type in their request for help and send it off. It even opens up with the subject line “Login assistance needed for <system>” Rather nifty, actually. Naturally, people don’t believe for a minute that this is how they get help for this thing, so they call us. “But I don’t want to *wait * for an eee-mail!” they wail. “Can’t *you * do it?” I wish my phone had a “smite” button on it. How did these fools even find our phone number? There are no phone numbers whatsoever on this login page, but they still badger us for help with acronyms we can’t even spell, much less log into and help with.

And don’t get me started on the people that page for trivial stuff. We make it abundantly clear in the after-hours message that the pager support is for dire, horrible stuff that will put the bank out of business if it’s not fixed. You know, stuff like all ATMs in California and Nevada being offline, or all teller terminals across the country displaying incorrect data because an overnight data load didn’t happen. Inability to look up an auto loan customer’s phone number is not an emergency, and if you page me at 3AM, I will make that abundantly clear.

71

I work in a college mailroom.

If a person receives a package, we put their name on it in big letters, stick it on an alphabetized shelf, and put a slip in their mailbox telling them they have a package and to come to the window. It bothers me when people come to the window and ask me if they have a package when they do not have a package slip. “It was supposed to come today!” the person whines. “Well, sorry, it’s not here,” I continue to explain, but some people get really antsy. When I calmly tell the person that no, they do not have a package, they start to lean into the window and look behind me, as if I am hiding their package from them on purpose. :rolleyes:

72

I had another one of this type today: They need to get on the computer, so I walk them through the prepayment system and put them on one of the machines, and they ask me how to get online, so I show them, and I tell them that they need to type the web site address into the bar, and they say “Where should I go? I need to do such and such.” To which I reply “I’m sorry, but if you don’t know where you need to go, I don’t know either.”

Another really annoying thing is when I get somebody set up on the copiers and they seem to understand and I say “Great, just let me know if you have any trouble, alright?” and start to go to the next person who is waiting for my help, and the customer I was with GRABS ME BY THE ARM AND YELLS “DON’T YOU LEAVE ME NOW!!!” Goddammit, you are not the only person on the face of the earth. You do not need me to fucking babysit you while you put a paper down, hit the print button, put a paper down, hit the print button. If something goes wrong just TELL me and I’ll come back and help you, but I will NOT stand over you and watch you do everything.

73

There are 2 types of clients I hate the most:

Those who want to divorce and act like children on the issues and point fingers and disagree with their ex-spouses for the sake of disagreeing, and the other, a more serious one-

Those whose spouses beat the shit out of them, come begging for a restraining order and a divorce, and then refuse to show up for their own TRO(temporary restraining order) hearings.

Unfortunately, this firm is just full-up with these two types of client right now. :rolleyes:

Sam

74

I’m a Seattlite and I understand your pain. Especially since when I worked with Canadian tourists not a single one asked if our prices were in Canadian dollars. You must breed 'em smarter up North. However, we did have a little card that converted Canadian dollars into American. Beats having to run it through a calculator.

75

Conversely, I am getting truly sick of clients calling the help desk and asking “Is the network down?” when the network is, in fact, down. Due to various problems with the Notes upgrade we are currently doing, the network and/or the Notes servers have been going down at least once a day for about two weeks now, so this is not an uncommon occurrence, so please stop calling us and asking if the network is down when past experience shows it is indeed down and if you leave us alone to work on the problem it will come back in a few minutes! Geez, go get a cup of coffee or something. It won’t kill you to be without network access for 2 minutes.

76

I guess I’m pretty lucky on the customer front compared to you poor retail people. Since I work in a hospital lab my customers are doctors, nurses, and clerks and pretty sharp… usually.
There was that one time we had the ER patient with the sky-high glucose. He was admitted and later the floor clerk called down about adding on some test to his previously drawn specimen. We do that all the time but she asked about getting another glucose. I told her that test had already been run and there was no point in doing it again. She said the doctor had written for glucose checks every thirty minutes and surely we didn’t expect the patient to get stuck for each one! Well, yeah, that’s kind of the point of running the tests to see if his glucose was coming down.
I also can’t remember how many times I’ve had to explain that if you draw a blood specimen on a patient above the intravenous site the blood is going to be diluted with i.v. fluid and useless for any testing. One nurse told me that it was ok, the i.v. was only running saline.

My biggest annoyance though concerns the fact that my hospital is loosely affiliated with the local university hospital so I constantly have to hear “But that’s not the way university hospital does it!” Well, fabulous. But see we’re not university hospital, we’re a completely different federal institution with it’s very own set of rules and policies. If university hospital fell into a smoking hole in the ground tomorrow we’d still be here. And so would our policies.

77

I work for the TSA at a major international airport; my job I, basically, to see that no prohibited items are allowed on the airplane, simple. I did not create the list of prohibited items, I may not even agree with all of them, nonetheless my job is to see that they do not pass through the checkpoint. Telling me that (other airport) let your Swiss army knife through is not going to make me change our policies and let it through here. Trying to rush my search of your bag will only arouse my suspicions and make me go slower, and be more thorough. Do not tell me you were standing in line for an hour when we know the longest wait time is running under fifteen minuets at this point (yes, we regularly monitor this), true, it may seem like an hour standing there, but it wasn’t. And I can’t do anything about the fact that your flight leaves in ten minutes, you were told to be here two hours before departure, and had you followed our recommendations we would not be going through all this. Most of the people are great, many are a lot of fun, but at the end of the day, after about 5-6 thousand people pass through our lanes, there are two or three that really stand out.

78

I just had a few gems that I thought I might share. The most recent one was a guy that asked me how much I make, and if I could break federal laws if he “threw enough money in my face”, he’s not a millionaire you know.

The other guy kept saying “well, I sent it to you last week” and I kept saying “we haven’t received it yet, we can’t legally do anything until we get it”. This went on for almost 10 minutes. Then he asked for someone who spoke Spanish, so I started speaking to him in Spanish. He spoke great English, but apparently wasn’t able to believe anything not spoken in his native language.

Strangely though, I hate it when people don’t talk to me long enough. In my line of work there are certain things that I have to address/offer when certain situations arise. This is federally mandated stuff, and peole could lose licenses for such infractions.

People never seem to realize that talking is an exchange of statements/thoughts. Sometimes people just want to talk at you and not listen to what you have to say, even though they have no clue as to the reality of the situation. At least they fuck things up quickly. :rolleyes:

79

Someone mentioned something to this effect already. It drives me nuts when I’m helping a customer and just as I’ve determined what I need to get for them from the stock room and begin to head towards such, another customer manages to catch my eye and ask me to help them with something on the floor. There’s no way to not rudely say “excuse me I’m busy with someone else, I don’t want to make them wait because you don’t know what to pick from your niece’s registry.” And it’s never “oh I just need this blender” and I can get that from stock. Invariably I need to hold their hand while they pick out linens or wine glasses or something.

I’m with you all on the cell phone thing. At my previous job it didn’t bother me as much because I could just ring them up, take the money/card and bag their goods. The register had a screen that let them see the total from their side of the counter, so no biggie. However in my current job we ask each customer for their zip code. If you’re blabbing away on your phone, I can’t ask you for this information, which means we’ve slowed down the transaction process. I suppose I could just put in the default # for a zip code (like if a person doesn’t want to give it), but it’s a part of the process. Bleh.

80

I had the Best Customer today.

We’re running a sale, buy 3, get the 4th free. The customer wanted to know if she had to buy all four together, or is she could, you know, pick one today and another next week and when she gets to four, it’ll be free. She told me buying them all at once was just too expensive.