Thursday, July 27, 2006
Customers Suck
After several years of handling corporate accounts (basically customer service over the phone) I have traded in my desk for a name tag and have joined the thousands toiling away in retail stores across the country. It's amazing how much of a buffer is provided by a phone.
Now I'm lucky; I'm not working a fry-o-later or helping 40-year-old men pick out the one shirt that just might hide their 20-year-old beer gut enough so that their 22-year-old secretary might finally agree to sleep with them on the conference room table. No, nothing like that. I merely sell books to idiots.
And though my friends believe that my job allows me nothing but time and space to read to my heart's content with an occasional moment of serving the customers who patronize the store, they are sorely sorely mistaken.
Most of my day is spent helping the helpless.
Not "helpless" as in those who ride the short bus or have prosthetic testicles, you know people who are actually helpless. I use the term helpless to refer to those who have full usage of their limbs and faculties and yet are ostensibly incapable of doing anything for themselves. Not only can they never figure out the layout of a store that is almost the same no matter which branch you visit anywhere in the country, they cannot manage to remember the name of the author or of the book that they are looking for. I mean, Jesus Tapdancing Christ, they cannot even figure out where the bathroom is. People - the store is 2 goddamn stories, common sense dictates that it's gotta be against one of them, right? So venture a guess and assume it'll be against one of the walls and take a stroll. It'll be an adventure...like the Goonies looking for One Eyed Willie's pirate treasure...except you'll be looking for a magical stall not a pirate ship and instead of chests of doubloons, a urinal cake.
Ahem.
Back to the point at hand.
I help the helpless locate books, magazines, and assorted other items. This is not rocket science, brain surgery, or creating peace in the Middle East. There is no reason for frustration or angst to enter into it on a daily basis. And yet. Every single goddamned day I encounter some jackass who manages to destroy my sangfroid and enrage me above and beyond. The most typical request that angers the blood is "I am looking for a book. I don't know the name of the book or the author, but I think the book is blue. Oh and I'm not sure if it's a novel or a biography. Or maybe it's a history book? You know what I'm talking about right? It was reviewed in the New York Times maybe six months ago."
When I can't find the book after 20 minutes of searching the computer and the shelves for something as locatable as the Holy Grail, it is some sort of moral failure on my part. If the customer had anything to do about it, I'd feel so ashamed, I'd commit seppuku just to right the universe. My inability to locate their title-less, author-less, section-less book is a slight against me personally, the store and all who work there, my relatives (both living and deceased), and an act of treason against these glorious United States.
Guess I'm lucky the customer has nothing to do with.
Lord, I hate them.
Now I'm lucky; I'm not working a fry-o-later or helping 40-year-old men pick out the one shirt that just might hide their 20-year-old beer gut enough so that their 22-year-old secretary might finally agree to sleep with them on the conference room table. No, nothing like that. I merely sell books to idiots.
And though my friends believe that my job allows me nothing but time and space to read to my heart's content with an occasional moment of serving the customers who patronize the store, they are sorely sorely mistaken.
Most of my day is spent helping the helpless.
Not "helpless" as in those who ride the short bus or have prosthetic testicles, you know people who are actually helpless. I use the term helpless to refer to those who have full usage of their limbs and faculties and yet are ostensibly incapable of doing anything for themselves. Not only can they never figure out the layout of a store that is almost the same no matter which branch you visit anywhere in the country, they cannot manage to remember the name of the author or of the book that they are looking for. I mean, Jesus Tapdancing Christ, they cannot even figure out where the bathroom is. People - the store is 2 goddamn stories, common sense dictates that it's gotta be against one of them, right? So venture a guess and assume it'll be against one of the walls and take a stroll. It'll be an adventure...like the Goonies looking for One Eyed Willie's pirate treasure...except you'll be looking for a magical stall not a pirate ship and instead of chests of doubloons, a urinal cake.
Ahem.
Back to the point at hand.
I help the helpless locate books, magazines, and assorted other items. This is not rocket science, brain surgery, or creating peace in the Middle East. There is no reason for frustration or angst to enter into it on a daily basis. And yet. Every single goddamned day I encounter some jackass who manages to destroy my sangfroid and enrage me above and beyond. The most typical request that angers the blood is "I am looking for a book. I don't know the name of the book or the author, but I think the book is blue. Oh and I'm not sure if it's a novel or a biography. Or maybe it's a history book? You know what I'm talking about right? It was reviewed in the New York Times maybe six months ago."
When I can't find the book after 20 minutes of searching the computer and the shelves for something as locatable as the Holy Grail, it is some sort of moral failure on my part. If the customer had anything to do about it, I'd feel so ashamed, I'd commit seppuku just to right the universe. My inability to locate their title-less, author-less, section-less book is a slight against me personally, the store and all who work there, my relatives (both living and deceased), and an act of treason against these glorious United States.
Guess I'm lucky the customer has nothing to do with.
Lord, I hate them.
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