#work anecdotes

Played "I'm Your Super Friend" for a bunch of seven year olds. One of them thought Kara and Barry were proposing, I almost laughed and had to explain they were friend.

Today we had a lovely man come in about 15 minutes before close asking about fountain pens, my coworker comes to grab me to see if I can help since I know more than she does in this area, and I come out to the front to see the guy has opened a bottle of our ink and is already making a mess.

He asks me for my name and then for a tissue and if I can't please explain what all of these contraptions and pieces of the pens are? And maybe is there something that can get ink off of his hands?

Added to this every time he wants to see something or try something he OPENS THE PACKAGING AND STARTS ACTIVELY USING IT ON A ~$150 PEN HE HAS NOT PURCHASED.

He assures me, "I really want a nice pen, but I want to know how to use it, and figure it out while someone who knows what they're doing can help me. I WILL buy this stuff!"

I bring him a bottle of pen cleaner? Immediately opens it to pour a little on his hands to see if he can get the ink off.

Asks me how to insert and use a converter? Immediately opens the bottle of ink to dip the pen in and suck ink up w the converter.

Cartridge? Has me pop the converter out (ink all over MY hands now lmao) so he can try the cartridge. Oh. Hm. Not a fan of cartridges, he says. No thanks on the cartridges. I will later note "lightly used cartridge x1" on the box so I can let my manager know about it tomorrow.

Tells me he wants another bottle of pen cleaner. Just in case.

He then mentions, after I go fetch the second bottle, that he'd actually like a pen that makes a thicker line? What is this one? Extra Fine? Oh, no, please, maybe medium? There's a medium pen?! PERFECT! He then proceeds to immediately take the converter OUT of the EF pen, tear open the plastic on the brand new M pen, and pop it right in, and draw up more ink.

🥲

One more bottle of pen cleaner, actually.

All 3 of my bottles of pen cleaner are going to this man. I need to order more.

And then... and then, he puts the pen in his shirt pocket, and tells me he's ready to check out.

Buys all the stuff (except the EF pen and the cartridges) and is very excited to use his new high quality fountain pen. He looks ecstatic, honestly. Despite all the chaos and some mess and a pen I'll have to clean tomorrow and my other manager being very confused about this whole incident, he was a pleasant customer. Fantastic energy. Polite. Patient. Listened to my advice.

And then he discovers we have notebooks too! And leaves around 2 minutes before closing, after selecting a perfect notebook. Of course.

What a guy.

The last job I worked at was a call center job. It was a nightmare, I'm still messed up from being constantly screamed at for ten years, but one thing I remember is the time we got brought in to watch one of those corporate training videos.

It was called "Give 'em the Pickle" or something like that. It took the form of a lengthy rant by the founder of a regional ice cream parlor chain (from a different region, no one had heard of it) about customer service.

The people showing it to us talked about the many thousands of dollars the company spent getting the rights to show this to us, so we should pay attention. Having not gotten a raise in the entire time I was there at that point despite them being promised annually at the time of hiring, my self control in that moment was saintlike.

The main thrust of the video was around an anecdote of a customer that came into the restaurant and wanted a second pickle with their burger. The waitress old them a side of pickles for 75 cents. There was an escalation, and the result from the owner was "just give 'em the pickle!"

Now, first off, it was immediately obvious to me that the waitress was just trying to do their job, and that had they just 'given them the pickle' before the escalation they would have had good reason to expect they'd get a chewing out for it.

After a few more anecdotes applicable only to retail and food service, the overpriced video ended, and we were encouraged to apply this in our on-phone work.

To which my immediate question was "what pickles are we supposed to give them, exactly?"

No phone agent had been empowered to provide any kind of incentive or consolation prizes to the customers. We didn't deal with money, there was no way to issue account credits, there were no products to send extras of, and there was no way to expedite service. In fact, all of our other training was around finding any means possible to deny service at every turn, as it was extended service plan administration.

My job was literally to be a pain-sponge absorbing the rage of customers who didn't read their contracts and were lied to by in-store salespeople and to keep those people from being able to talk to people who had the authority to help them. Only managers could do anything for customers, and if we escalated to a manager too often, you 'weren't doing your job'.

So, sometime back in the Early Cretaceous period (maybe 2003 or so?), I briefly worked at a Blockbuster. Seriously briefly—it was a minimum wage, high-stress job, especially in the days before streaming and especially-especially on weekends in a small town with few other entertainment options.

This particular shift was pretty chill, as it was during the day on a Friday. I was the only person behind the counter, busily checking in a stack of DVDs, when two people approached at roughly the same time: a young Alaska Native man and a middle-aged white woman. The young man gestured for the woman to go ahead, but she demurred, saying, "No, you go ahead. You were here first."

The dude blinks for a moment, then, completely matter-of-factly, just drops this utter banger of a line:

"Damn. I wish Columbus had said that."

he presents the check. the teller and i look at the check. we look at the signature. we peer, confusedly, at the account. the man is not affiliated with the account in any way. i say, very politely, "excuse me, sir, but i'm afraid we can't cash this check because you do not have the authority to write checks off this account."

the guy absolutely looses his shit. "of course i can cash this check," he says. "there's no reason i can't." imagine, here, that i opened my mouth to say, well, but it IS check fraud though? it is the literal dictionary definition of check fraud, and then shut it again. "i'm going to pull all of my money RIGHT NOW and close my accounts." okay, sir, you can feel free to do that. "no one's ever had a problem with this except for you, so i'm going to go to [redacted local bank] to get away from YOU." weirdly strong reaction, but okay. "i want to speak to a manager." and then he storms away towards a banker's office loudly proclaiming, "the only reason there's a problem is because this CLOWN is making it a problem."