Thanks, featherlou, you hit it right on the money. Also, ForumBot seems to have skipped over the part where I said that 90% of my customers are good and I’m happy to serve them.
Well, some days it would put me out of my misery.
Seriously, if I jumped the gun, I apologize to you as I did to featherlou. As I said, I’m just tired of that one particular joke. Oh, and its cousin, “You look lonely.” Heard that three times yesterday.
And thanks to Malacandra, at least the joke was original. Sorta.
I think we can be friends, and you don’t look lonely.
Hooray! :buys brownie55 and featherlou the alcoholic (or non) drink of their choice:
–grouchy old man–
This is The Pit. Stop being so goddamned nice to one another !!
/ --grouchy old man–
To those people on these boards who get an attitude with a poster who is in some sort of retail/customer service job and bitches about it, FUCK YOU. If you can bitch about your job, so can we! If you haven’t ever worked on a retail floor you have no idea how stressful it can be what with your managers dumping crap on you and the customers doing the same.
And I do my best to provide damn good customer service, even when the customer is an asshole. Yet I am somehow not allowed to come onto the board later and bitch about the asshole at my job just because said asshole is not in the cubicle down the hall, but on the other side of the counter from me? Fuck that.
I used to love when that happened because I’d get to do my favorite retail exchange:
Customer: Well, I guess it must be free!
Me: No, that just means it’s not for sale. I’m sorry but you’ll have to pick something else out instead.
Then I sit there for a tick with my poker-face on, and just as they start to think I’m serious I tell them I’m kidding.
Everybody wins; I feel better for making them feel a little dumber, and they don’t get to have me shove something uncomfortable somewhere unpleasant.
I love you guys. Except for Cartooniverse. 
In a thoroughly depressing and infuriating chain of events, I find it’s much cheaper to buy and ship a cookbook that I want from the US of A than it is to buy it over here.
And that’s taking into account the exchange rate AND shipping. I’ve worked out I can get the book for $41-43 depending on what our money’s worth at the time if I ship it over, but if I buy it locally then the least I’ll pay (unless I’m lucky enough to find it on sale) is $59.95.
I’ve never worked for the public, but I’ve certainly worked with the public. It’s never stressful.
Do you know what is stressful, though? Making >$100k a year as a corporate middle manager working with people who are plotting and building relationships around you up until the day when one of your bosses goes golfing with one of your subordinates only to find out that he’s been promoted to manager and is no longer on your team. Then finding out that he hasn’t done a thing on any of his projects because he’s spent his entire time scheming and schmoozing. He has lied the entire time about their status.
So, now, you’re equal with this complete frat-boy fuckwit – in fact, you find out he’s actually making a better salary than you – and you have to do all his undone work AND yours before the fiscal year ends in 2 months. All this, and the company has announced that they will be “right-sizing” shortly after the new fiscal year begins, and you know, because of the recent developments that your name is on the scratch list.
Not to mention, that in addition to this latest development, you have to deal with an entitled 25 year princess taking random days off, and you can’t do anything about it because she’s boning some VP twice her age. She does nothing but talk on the phone, do her nails and bitch about everything. You’re responsible for her workload too.
Also, that 22 year old dimwitted Gen Y’er, who couldn’t find California on a map if he was a cross between Ferdinand Magellan and Jeff Spicoli, that you had to hire because his brother is some pushy dickhead in another department. He hasn’t been able to complete an entry-level task since he walked in the door. You’ve been doing his work for three years now.
To sum up, you’re a crappy corporate middle manager making a decent salary, doing the work of 4 people. And you’d better get it done or you’re gone (probably gone anyway). You have no marketable skills because you got into management too early in your career. You don’t have many contacts because you have a good work ethic and kept to yourself doing morons’ work. All for naught.
THAT’s work stress. Thank God it’s not me, but it’s someone I know.
And wait until his bitchy wife, who’s been happily spending his $100k salary on seasonal ornaments, Mary Kay Cosmetics, and WeightWatchers meals (yet she hasn’t lost a pound), gets wind of him probably losing his job…
So you have to deal with a few old people telling lame jokes. Boo-fucking-hoo.
You said it.
Oops, sorry. I’ll knock it off at once. Hmm, looks like I already did.
I suppose that deserves a mini-rant about mini-rants:
This is not a pissing contest. There are no rulers against which to measure your E-Dick. It’s not about the plight of Darfur vs. the war in Iraq vs. your asshole neighbour who keeps mowing over your azaleas in his ripped Fruit of the Looms at 6:30am on a Saturday. You will not be given points based on the gravity of that which pisses you off. Door number 2 contains a goat. So do doors 1 and 3. And anyway, Monty didn’t call your name. It works like this: There are things that piss people off. Different things piss different people off. It could be an asshole driver trying to have buttsecks with you car. It might be a lame joke told for the thirty-second thousandth time from yet another customer who naively thinks they’re being terribly witty, hurrrr. It could even be something remarkably boneheaded that you did that you’re pissed off at yourself for. Whether you’re middle management, a supermarket checker, a Wal-Mart greeter, a gas station attendant, a lawyer, a brain surgeon, or you work out of home – or even retired, something probably pisses you off and you’d like to rant about it. Except it’s just too petty or too lame for its own pit thread. And whaddya know – there’s a thread where you can do just that!
So siddown, shaddap, and rant on, brothas and sistas.
I guess you didn’t read the whole thing. It wasn’t whining. It wasn’t even about me.
I simply do not understand on a very fundamental level how a stranger’s attempt at being nice and so greatly bother you. At the very most just shrug it off.
God I hate the managers of entry level jobs. I mean, fuck!
Ok, we’ve all had to endure a McJob at some point. Whether it is in food service or retail, we’ve all been there. We put our time in until a ‘career’ job comes along and then move along.
But incompetent people don’t. They make a career of those entry level jobs. And guess what happens when they stick around for about 8 years in that position: Yep, they are now manager! I mean seriously, I know I’ve only been here 8 months, but do I really have to take orders from the guy who dropped out of high school after drinking draino just for the hell of it? I have a bachelor’s degree and 4 years prior experience, yet just because this dolt managed to keep showing up he gets paid twice as much.
It bothers me when the low ranked employees are the competent ones.
You, sir, are a damn liar.
I did. The first hundred times. You seem to be not understanding that aspect.
Let me put it this way…if such a thing doesn’t bother you, then surely you wouldn’t mind me coming over and flicking your ear two or three times a day, every working day.
You could shrug it off.
A bad comedian might just want to make his audience happy. But that doesn’t mean he’s not irritating.
Mindfield and featherlou already made my rebuttal for me (and very well, I might add). But I will add that Dudley seems like the sort of self-important, arrogant prick that takes his frustrations out on checkers and waiters and anyone else in the service industry precisely because he knows they can’t fight back.
Oh, and I’d glady take all the corporate crap if I could also have the salary that goes with it.
I want some of the drugs he’s on.
You are not a fucking lesbian trapped in a fucking man’s fucking body. That has never been funny. It stopped being even snrk-level amusing in 1998. I’m looking at you, Dad.
If you have a bill that’s due on the same day of the same month every year, is it too much to ask for you to remember that? To have an Outlook event a week prior: Don’t forget to pay bill? To put a sticky note on your monitor?
If you can’t be bothered to remember, can you be bothered to keep your contact information up to date? All we really need is an email address and a credit card number. Assuming they both work we really will leave you alone for the most part.
I’m looking at you, now, Local Business. I realize you are bringing us a lot of business and the clients you’ve sent to us will probably be profitable. That said, it was really shitty of you to agree to an annual subscription for a dedicated server after requiring our senior sales rep AND our vice president to come down and basically say the same damn thing that’s on our website and the same damn thing they’d say on the phone; i.e., here are our rates, here’s what’s available, now do you want it or not, you call up two hours later and say no, you don’t want to pay annually, you want to pay monthly. That went from being several hundred dollars worth of commission to maybe $20 for the poor schmuck who had to drive an hour into town and an hour back for your privileged asses.
And THEN, after INSISTING that you only have to pay monthly (which is more expensive and you have the money so why the hell do you do it like this?), you can’t even bother to pay on time? I realize that it takes you a week to cut a check. Maybe, then, you should have one of your highly paid accountants set a GODDAMN CALENDAR EVENT to SEND THE GODDAMN CHECK BEFORE IT’S FUCKING DUE. If you insist on paying late every month then you are going to have to call in every month and tell us so. Otherwise, you will get shut down. Just like everyone else. No, we can’t stop that happening. It’s automatic. No, I am not going to just set an event on my own calendar and automatically grace you because A) I have no proof that you are actually going to pay us, B) I AM NOT YOUR FUCKING ACCOUNTANT. How the HELL do you people actually run businesses?!
Yes, sir. I’m sorry your email was down. As soon as you alerted tech support to the problem, we started working on getting it back up. No, it was just one of those things. It won’t happen again. No, we are not going to give you a thousand dollars worth of possibly lost revenue. You can threaten to sue us all day and night but your novelty suspender company is not doing a thousand dollars of business a day. It’s not. And even if it was, you have no proof that the people who would have contacted you on that day didn’t try again tomorrow. We will credit you for the amount stated in our Service Level Agreement. If you are a prick, we will not credit you for more than that. If you are nice, we might want to keep you.
Realize that the person you’re calling has control over whether your account works or not. And while we will not break the rules to screw you over (we like being employed), we will not bend the rules in your favor if you are being a shitheel.
You know our policy is to cancel your account no more than 30 days prior to its renewal date. You think you might be deployed to Iraq in late September. Your account is up in early August. That means you want to submit your cancellation at the beginning of July. I realize that the prep time for being deployed is crazy. That doesn’t mean you don’t have five minutes to spare almost three months before you get sent off to fill out a damn form. And DO NOT try to invoke the Soldiers and Sailors act. That’s to keep Little Timmy’s oxygen going while you’re Over There. It is not to keep your hosting account from going into collections because you couldn’t be bothered to cancel it.
When we send you a half dozen emails requesting that you please change your DNS to your new server so you can use all that lovely new space you requested and we finally call you to ask what the heck is going on, do not say “Oh yes, I got those emails, I just didn’t know what they meant so I ignored them” unless you want to hear my head explode. YOU DIDN’T EVEN REPLY TO THE EMAILS TO SAY “Huh?”
Do not call me up to lie to me. I realize I work in billing and this is my job – to be lied to – but please, don’t bother. I’ve heard it. I know you’re lying. I know because you are a shitty liar. It’s amazing how you didn’t get any of the emails I personally sent you until you got the one stating you were being put into collections. No, I’m not waiving the fee. Because you LIED, that’s why. Be straight with me: say “I’m sorry, I blew off the emails, it’s been an expensive month for me, can we work something out?” Because we can and we are a lot more willing to do so with someone who can manage basic honesty.
Please do not offer to fix me up with a very manly man who would like to meet a woman with such a lovely voice. Please do not play the accordion at me. Please do not ask me my sign. You are memorable, but you are creepy.
When I ask you to read “exactly what it says in that email” do not respond “It says something about… billing…” I know it does. I want to know exactly what the email says. EXACTLY. I will suffer through you reading the subject line if you will just get to the part where it tells you why you got this email. I realize you haven’t actually read the email and this phone call is the result of an atavistic response to seeing numbers and letters all jammed together in confusing patterns.
If you don’t know how to assemble a website, use our tools or contact a web designer. We are not your web designer. When your web designer screws up, do not try to sue us. Do not tell us that we should refund the money you paid us because they never got your website working. Get your website built, THEN host it. If for some reason that won’t work, then don’t whine that you’ve had to “pay for nothing all this time”. You haven’t. You have paid for server space and bandwidth. If you don’t drive your car for a month you aren’t refunded your payments on it.
Gosh, that sounds like a technical problem. You called billing. Why? I’ve checked everything that could be related to billing. You’re paid up. Thank you. Your domain is registered through 2012. Your account is not suspended for any reason I can see. So why are you talking to us again? Oh, there’s a phone queue in tech support. I’m sorry to hear that. You’re going back into it. No, you aren’t getting to the front of the line. If you hadn’t wasted my time, you’d be that much closer to getting a tech. No, I’m not going to connect you directly to a tech. That would involve disconnecting them from the person they’re helping right now, and you’re not more important than them (and if you were, I’d connect you to the VP, but you aren’t). No, I’m not going to knock people off the line so you can get ahead of them. How do you behave when you go to the bank?
I see, ma’am. You did not realize that your account would automatically renew. This is interesting, since I hear the sales spiel every day behind me and it never changes. Also, you requested we keep your credit card on file. You knew it was on file. We sent you an email to this address – oh, you don’t check that email address. You might get a spam virus? Did I hear you right? Well, email is our primary form of communication. Why didn’t we call you? Because your credit card went through. When you do not have a balance owing, we tend to assume there isn’t a problem. Oh, we should have called you to make sure you wanted to keep hosting with us? You do realize we have thousands of accounts, right? Some of them renew monthly? How big do you think this department is? And now you’re going to call up and bitch and moan and whine and complain and be UTTERLY SURPRISED every time we tell you the same thing over and over again: yes, you will receive the unused portion of your hosting back. No, that does not include the month you didn’t bother checking your email. If you don’t go to the mailbox and get your electric bill you STILL OWE THE BILL. Even if you don’t turn the lights on hardly at all. And if you do not pay it they will shut you down and chances are they will not call you.
It’s funny how it’s not a priority for you to update your billing information until something goes wrong. “That card? That card is ancient!” Really. You should have let us know, then.
No, your bank does not call us when you get a new card with a new expiration date.
Really.
We are a very small office. Everyone in billing sits in a square about fourteen feet on a side, except for the supervisor who sits across the aisle. I can hear the other two girls on the phone. I know you just got off the phone with C. I know what she told you. Why are you so surprised when I tell you the same thing? The rules haven’t fucking changed.
You have the nerve to ignore your bill for a month until it goes into collections then threaten to cancel? Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out. The last thing we motherfucking need is a whiny bitch who won’t pay his bills. Why would we want you to stay? Your cheapest-plan-on-the-rack is REALLY going to cut into our annual profits.
Coworker rants:
You know who you are. You kept asking for days off in your first 90 days, calling in sick on Monday mornings – our busiest time – because you were hung over. When you make mistakes? You laugh them off and make them again. We’re talking serious mistakes here. You never ask how to do anything, you just go and do it and screw it up and I have to clean up after your stupid, stupid ass. I just know there’s all sorts of festering chunks of redigested Taco Bell rat-meat lurking in those billing systems, waiting for me to blunder into it. I know this because it keeps happening. I call you on it and you just stare blankly and say “Oh… I thought it worked like blah.” No, you dripping cunt, it doesn’t work like that anywhere else, why would it work like that here? It is so patently obvious that you don’t give a shit about doing your job well that I almost wish they’d fire you, except we need a warm body in that seat.
For another month and no more, hopefully. There’s so much crap in your file after not even three months that you’re history if you sneeze wrong when we’re caught up.
Higher-ups: do you even care anymore? Seriously. Because we don’t. We went from being an on top of everything department to just full of exhausted biddies who want the month to be over. We were go-get-'em, we were meticulous and thorough, we did our best. And we still try, but every tool you give us doesn’t work. It’s not just understandable errors, it’s the sort of thing that if you’d thought about it for five minutes you would have realized was STUPID. How hard do you expect us to work when you can’t be arsed?
Owners: Please buy us some more coffee or we will keep nicking it from the front room. All we have left is the green tea and it tastes like fresh mown grass. There is also Folger’s. We will not talk about the Folger’s. We want coffee, we want it without flavor crystals, and we want it now.
Self: Finish learning how to program, already, and get your semi-paid job experience. After a year you can get a real job. True, a new job might not be less stressful. It might still be full of stupid people. But it will pay you ever so much more.
No, I get it. I dealt with it, too. I can understand being upset at the social convention that you have to pretend to think the joke is still funny, but I can’t understand taking that frustration out on the person who’s really just trying to do you a favor.
If there were a spot on my ear that looked like a spider and five hundred different people flicked my ear trying to help me out, I wouldn’t be mad at them. But yeah, if you specifically did it every day repeatedly for no good reason, I would get mad at you.
Still, different strokes, different folks. Agree to disagree and all that.