New to board - probably get flamed

[SCSlave]

Your story is definately an SC story. These stories are the reason we come here. Just generally bitching about customers is a different story, and you shouldn't work retail if you have a general intolerance for everyone.

Anyway, reminds me of a story I have from when I worked the Cable Call center. (Yes, I have THOUSANDS of CC stories...although they're old--because I've since escaped) It was the 'Great Flood of 2004'. The worst flood this area has ever seen in 25 years. The city (parts of it) were under 4 feet of water. It was massive. It made travelling next to impossible...as a lot of the roads were, obviously, underwater.

So I'm working (I was unfortunate enough to have a clear path to my work -- no water between here and there (sigh)) and this guy calls in. "Where's my tech?? He left a message saying he wasn't coming!! I want to know WHY!!!' Um...did you not notice most of the city is underwater??? So I educated him on the flood. He said "Well I'm not flooded! My house is FINE!" I said "Yes, and that's great! However, the roads leading TO your house ARE flooded, making it impossible to get there." He would not listen at all. He just kept ranting about how horrible the customer service was, and that this is 'inexcusable'. I attempted several times to make that little light bulb go off in his head---*OHHHH so he just can't GET here because he can't DRIVE on the roads! I get it!*---but no, he never did get it. So, I decided to flip the light on for him. I said "Well, sir you could always drive here and get the cable box--they're really easy to install, and if you need help, we can walk you thru it." And you know what he said?

Guess....






"HOW THE HELL am I going to do that?? The ROADS are FLOODED!!!!"




"Yes, that's what I've been trying to explain....if you cant drive on flooded roads, neither can our techs'

"but that's their JOB!"

So then, he said "Just cut my cable off...I'm cancelling everything. Bet THAT gets them out here!'

"No, sir...they still can't drive on flooded roads. I can have a tech out there on Tuesday to disconnect your cable, providing the roads are not flooded"

He said 'Forget it...just reschedule my cable box install.' Grumbled some more, then hung up.

I wonder why SC's think employees have special powers?

[Mongo Skruddgemire]

And I have to disagree with your disagreement, in this sense: there are many good parents whose kids on occasion just get completely unruly. No kid is a saint or an angel, and I have seen the politest, best behaved kids in the world just completely lose it in public for no (outwardly apparent) reason. Even the best parents in the world have kids that sometimes just DO stupid obnoxious annoying shit. Like, say, banging on the produce scale.

To counter refute:

You are correct that even the most well behaved child can turn nasty especially if they are tired and/or hungry. But the job of the parent is to deal with the child and to end the bad behavior in the quickest means possible. Far too often they do not do that. They sit there and let the little darling run amok through the store smashing things because he didn't get a candy bar.

I was a normally well behaved child but even I got my butt swatted if I got too obnoxious.

M

[Lace Neil Singer]

Same here. We all knew that with Dad there was a line that if we crossed it, we'd get smacked. And running thru the store breaking things wasn't just crossing that line, it was falling over it.

[Arachne]

Welcome to the board!

Pretty much everyone else has said whatever it was I would say, but I'm gonna chime in anyway.

You talk about employee standards, and customers being trained. Yes, I have employee standards. My standard is "behave towards me using societally accepted standards of politeness and respect". Are customers "trained" to do this? Well, many aren't because they can't be bothered to care about politeness, but it's not like this "training" is hard to come by. All I (and I think most people on the board) ask for is not to be treated like trained monkeys.

On some occasions, posters will post stories where it's clear that employee rudeness was at fault, and if you look around, you'll start turning up threads where this happened, and people called them on it. We tend towards being sympathetic, because we've been there and we know how much it sucks, but if someone was out of line, we're not shy about saying so.

Now, as to specific points:

I read in one thread where a fast food employee doesn't want a customer to request an item directly from the frier. Imagine that, a customer requesting fresh food pisses an employee off.

Okay, first off. If this is the thread that I'm remembering, then you're leaving some important details out. As I recall, the employee in that thread was annoyed not because the customer requested fresh food, but because the customer tried to trick the employee into giving them fresh food by requesting fries without salt, and then requesting a packet of salt. I can't speak for the employee, but if it was me, I wouldn't have been annoyed by someone asking for food fresh from the fryer so much as by the fact that someone was essentially lying or trying to trick me in order to ninja their way into some fresh from the fryer food.

Granted, everyone has their hooks (ie, people eating while talking on the phone, talking on cell phones, etc). But that doesn't mean those customers suck when they do that.

I think that with things like this, it again has more to do with how the customer approaches their activities rather than the activities themselves. Someone who is unapologetically talking on their cell phone during a transaction with me is telegraphing 'you exist only as the person who will take my money and give me my stuff'. Again, they're not treating me politely. Would you be annoyed if you were having a conversation with someone and they answered their cell phone without a word of apology and proceeded to carry on a conversation in front of you, while still expecting you to wait for them to be done?

That having been said, I had a lady in the other day whose cell phone rang during a transaction. She checked it and then started apologizing profusely, saying she had to take the call. The whole time she was dealing with it, she kept shooting me these apologetic looks, and when she was done, she apologized AGAIN and explained that it was her alarm company, and the alarm in her house had gone off. (I'd guessed as much from her conversation and had hurried the transaction so that she could get out ASAP.) That lady wasn't rude -- she understood that answering her cell phone during a transaction was impolite, and behaved accordingly. In return, I took consideration on her once I realized what the situation was.

Same would go with eating on the phone. If it absolutely couldn't be avoided, then I'd expect the customer to apologize and explain that (for example) they had to make the call on their very brief lunch break, and they were very sorry for eating while talking to me. That's the level of consideration that most people ask for here.

Not all customers are knowledgable about computers - that's probably why many IT employees are employeed.

I admit that sometimes I get a little peeved at the people at Unsupportable for complaining about stupid customers. Some of their rants do seem to skew towards 'this person didn't know what they were doing', rather than 'this person was rude'. However, at the same time, I can understand the frustration. I see it a lot when I'm trying to teach people to knit -- some people get it in their heads that something is going to be hard, and they're DETERMINED to make it so. I've had people come in with problems and actually snatch the work out of my hands while I was trying to fix it, not because they'd normally do this, but because they're so worked up about the problem that they're not thinking. In person, I can usually soothe someone down to where they're not in a panic state anymore and are receptive to listening, but I can't do that over the phone. If I was only doing phone support, I'd probably get frustrated with this behavior, too.

So I let them rant, and just avoid those threads. Dealing with people who are so wound up that they're determined to make something hard can really wear you down fast.

Yes, small children will bang on the produce scale on the grocery store. It has happened for as long as I can remember and will continue to happen. If that pisses you off then you probably shouldn't work at a grocery store.

Everyone else has already addressed this. Small children banging on scales is not okay. Parents who permit this? Not okay. We have a fragile piece of equipment at my work, and the number of times that I've seen children messing with it and their parents standing RIGHT THERE next to the big FRAGILE sign, doing nothing... let's say that if I had a dollar for every time, I wouldn't need to work anymore. The damn thing is already so touchy that I'm one of the only people who can still make it work, and I can only do it while in a zenlike state of concentration.

Anyway, the parents of the kids who broke this equipment? The same parents of the same kids who bang on grocery store scales. It's totally not okay.

Anyway, welcome to the boards

[Spiffy McMoron]

I wonder why SC's think employees have special powers?

No, I think what that guy was thinking was:

"They can get to me! If they truly cared about my business, they would rent a chopper, land it on my front lawn, and fix my cable!"

Or something to that effect.