Record-breaking SCs

[Rapscallion]

I personally take offense to you going off like this.

That's where the report button comes in handy. It's already been used by someone else, so I'm here.

Whatever happened to the board I signed up for? Where you could post anything remotely sucky or annoying so you could get it off your chest.

That board's still here. There's nothing in the site rules to determine what level of suck is acceptable for a tale. If there is ever a culture swing towards saying that every customer is a saint and taking everything to pieces, then I'd be looking at quitting as owner. However, I'll be buggered sideways with twenty pitchforks before we go down the route of 'every customer is blatantly wrong'.

I don't mind a small amount of reasonable questioning of a tale. We had a poster who once complained that customers were buying bread she'd just put out, which was plainly ridiculous. We've just had a really bizarre tale we had to take to pieces due to it's attempts to bullshit the members, and even I wanted to hear more at first. What I don't want to see is a wholesale attempt to attack each other.

It's a fine line. If you fancy debating the way the forum is run, feel free to post something in 'Bugs and site suggestions'.

Rapscallion

[Ill_Used_Heroine]

Hey, it might not be sucky to everyone else, but so what? It was definitely sucky to the OP. We shouldn't have to qualify/justify the suckiness we deal with ... and that's why we come here. To get it off our chests, cause where else can we go?

I get tons of SCs at the library that are definitely sucky to me, but other people might not consider their behavior sucky. Most of the time, their suckiness equates to their laziness, like people who place their own requests at home on their own computers, but can't be bothered to go online to check and see if their items came in, which, you would think, would be much easier and faster than hauling ass down to the library and be disappointed when there's nothing there to pick up and then complaining to me that it's taking too long and the drove ALL THE WAY to the library for nothing. And when I tell them they can always call us, they're like, "Huh? I can call you guys to find out?!?"

Anyway, sucky is sucky is sucky. In all the years I've been lurking (and my few posts), I don't think I've ever read anything and thought to myself, hey, that's not sucky at all. There's always enough suck in every post for me. BTW, thanks to all of you who do post, cause you always make me feel better. This board is the best stress reliever out there.

[katie kaboom]

Hey, it might not be sucky to everyone else, but so what? It was definitely sucky to the OP. We shouldn't have to qualify/justify the suckiness we deal with ... and that's why we come here. To get it off our chests, cause where else can we go?

I completely agree with this statement. It's not for us to judge. We all have things that bug us and people need to respect that.

[Ree]

For what I am about to say, I should probably take off my "mod hat" lest I insult someone while I am under the role of a mod, or should I come across as exhibiting a double standard as a mod, but I am really good and ticked, and I feel I have to say something.


Even if a customer is mildly irritating, a lot of those can add up over time and tick the hell out of a person.

I have worked in retail for 30 years, and I could count on one hand the number of times I have had such mind-blowingly sucky customers as some members have posted about, yet, when I first found this place all those years ago, it was like a gift from heaven. I was about to burst with frustration at the whole 'customer' mindest, and this was where I could finally get it all off my chest.

I am really irritated at the sudden shift in behaviour on this site. We have suddenly gone from being a place where customer service workers can come to find some kinship and sympathy about the annoyances and crap they deal with, to a place where we have to justify our posting and make sure the story's "good and sucky" should someone decide to criticize and find fault, telling us that it's our job and the customer was annoying at best, and not really sucky.

You know what? I don't give a flying fart if my "sucky" experience doesn't measure up in someone's book. It's my sucky experience and bothered me enough to post about it, so the least a person can do is keep that negative opinion to one's self.

Granted, we have had a lot of members over the years, who had no business being in customer service. They are, in fact, the people who give all retail workers a bad name.

It's great if we have a chance to educate them on how their own behaviour has contributed to a situation, or how their handling of a conflict caused it to escalate, but there's a difference in offering advice and criticizing.
To start nitpicking every member's threads and saying, "Oh, that wasn't sucky. That's your job, you're just being petty" starts to grate on me after a while.

If you have an issue with a story not being sucky, either keep it to yourself, take it to PM, or report it as being in the wrong thread.

Ideally, for me, the solution would be for you to take your opinions to a forum that supports the customer, no matter what, and leave us to vent our frustrations in peace.

[walking with scissors]

As a forum, though, don't you open yourself up to any sort of questions when you post? I like hearing other sides of a story, as it helps me keep things in perspective. We all have different levels of what we would consider to be "sucky." The thing I like most about this forum, is that it's not just rant blurbs posted for people to read. We can have conversations about the topics posted.

[Rapscallion]

There's a significant difference between perspective and nitpicking. Quite a bit of the difference is in how someone presents their comments.

Rapscallion

[walking with scissors]

I understand. I do think that whatever people have to say, they should do so respectfully.

[Gabrielle Proctor]

I like hearing other sides of a story, as it helps me keep things in perspective.

Agreed.

I'm pretty much with the OP on this one though. It was annoying and therefore sucky. I don't think that their suckiness was below par or ridiculous.

[walking with scissors]

Sometimes the way events happen, jobs just suck sometimes. Some of her customers seemed sucky to me and some didn't. I guess I just saw this one as more of a sucky job than sucky customer thing. Your mileage may vary, of course.

[katie kaboom]

I guess I just saw this one as more of a sucky job than sucky customer thing.

Sucky job or sucky customer, people should still be able to vent without being judged so harshly.

[Ghel]

Wow. It's so cool to have a post that actually starts a healthy debate. All your comments make me realize that, if this is the worst my customers get, I'm really lucky. (They do get worse sometimes, but it's rare.)

The original post was brief because I didn't want to bore you to tears with all the details.

#3: Wasn't asking the wrong person. But he was requesting information that he already had, if he had bothered to read the notice we sent him. And he was making other customers wait while he was asking it. Then he continued to make small talk for about 10 minutes after, while I'm trying to give polite clues that I've got other customers waiting and other work that needs to get done.

#4: FDIC insurance is never a simple yes-or-no question unless you have less than $100K on deposit. It can get very complicated very quickly. And since these customers have no children to add as beneficiaries on their accounts, it would be very difficult to title their accounts in such a way as to have full FDIC insurance. The simple answer, of course, would be to withdraw a portion of their money and deposit it at a different bank, but I would never turn away business in that manner. We have a product called CDARS, wherein we sell a portion of their CD to another bank (and in return buy a portion of a CD from a different bank). That would solve their FDIC insurance problems, but it's needlessly complicated. And, while I was trying to explain how FDIC insurance works and what their options were, I was getting the "deer in the headlights" stare. So I was kind of relieved when they gave me the easy way out of "what would you do?", even though I'm not comfortable with having given them an incomplete answer.

#5: Probably is trying to get the most out of his money. He makes his IRA contribution to avoid paying taxes on it. And, yes, I suppose we're convenient for making the deposit before tax time. As long as we report the transactions to the IRS correctly, then there's no way he (or anyone else) could launder money through an IRA. You couldn't launder much, either, since the maximum contribution allowed per person per year is $5000.

[marasbaras]

Ghel,

Thanks for the clarifications and taking my comments as they were intended.

I have no doubt that many jobs here suck ... the multitudes of minor annoyances add up to grind one's soul down to something less than fine dust. All while getting paid less than what it takes to feed a small rodent ... and getting the same amount of respect.

I think what I'm trying to say is this: as individuals, these folks didn't suck (except #2, STFU braggart) ... but, the combination most certainly did.

[Madhatter_67_85]

Ok I'm going to throw my 2 cents in here. Having worked in a bank for seven years before I can relate with Ghel. If you split hairs and took all of these situations apart one by one some may suck, some may not. However, consider the fact that this all happened pretty quickly after opening. Combining all these people together at once it can get pretty frustrating because you get to where you feel like you are being piled on with no room to breathe and it just builds up until you feel like you just want to take a baseball bat and walk out into the lobby and start clubbing people like a fisherman clubbing a seal. But seeing how you can't do that without legal ramifications the logical step is to be able to come here and let things off your chest and vent. Nothing wrong with that whatsoever.

Working in a bank can be really frustrating. You have people who either have a lot of money or think they do and believe that everyone in the bank should bow down, cater to them, wipe their asses, etc everytime they call or set foot in the place. Then you have the older generation who lived through the depression and many bank failures so they have a general distrust of banks in the first place. These people present a whole different set of problems and issues. I see nothing wrong with what Ghel did.

Was it all sucky? Maybe not to everyone. But having been in the line of fire like Ghel was I can fully relate and getting hit all at once like that ain't a whole lot of fun. Personally for me it would have been more frustrating that it just built up to complete suckiness.