CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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The Most Mean-Spirited Customer I Have Ever Dealt With

Thursday, August 30, 2007

this entry brought to you by cold war kids, "hang me up to dry"


I used to work at Sears, and I worked there for a dreadfully long time. I have always worked at bad jobs for way longer than I wanted to, because I loathe the act of getting a new job, to the point where I find that just sticking with a bad job is easier. My particular job at Sears was Merchandise Pick-Up. Whenever you buy something that you won't just carry out to your car, either because it's too big, or because the merchandise itself is located in the warehouse, which was located in the basement floor and would need to be taken up to the ground floor, it was our job to find it and take it out to your car to load it.

Unfortunately, this is the kind of job that is back breaking but is absolutely thankless. There is no way to do this job fast enough, there is no way to do it painlessly, and there is no way to do it with 100% satisfaction. And when you do a good job it's what you do all day so people aren't grateful for it. Worse, I'm going to go ahead and say that one out of three customers serviced bought something too big for their vehicle. And this isn't an exaggeration. If you bought a 48-inch screen TV, you brought a small car to pick it up. If you bought a treadmill, you brought an SUV to pick it up. The problem with these vehicles is rarely volume. There is usually physically enough room inside the car to fit things, but the openings into the vehicles are never wide enough to allow it. For example, doors don't open at 90-degree angles, it's really more of a 75-degree angle, and so boxes that reach a certain size simply will not go in. The problem with everyone's precious SUVs is that the backdoor, the hatch, whatever you want to tall it, the opening isn't a perfect square, it's more of a trapezoid, and it would be wide enough on the bottom for some things, but not wide enough on top.

And because this is a thankless job, everyone insisted that it would work anyway, despite the fact that all we did for eight hours a day was try and fit things that were too big into openings that were too small, and if you were going to listen to anyone's opinion on whether it will fit or not, a reasonable person would say that you would listen to the guy that does it all day, but this isn't the case in reality. We knew for a fact approaching a vehicle that things wouldn't fit. The customer would say "Well the back seat goes down." Wow, your back seat goes down???! Holy shit! What an innovation! But you see, the trunk opening physically isn't big enough, so the amazing miracle of back seat going down wouldn't help matters at all. And then they'd ask us to try taking it out of the box. When this didn't work, they'd ask if we could try it at an angle. And then after trying fruitlessly for ten minutes or so to fit someone's oversized merchandise in an very undersized hole, you would be surprised how often the person would announce they'd be back with a truck. Why didn't you just bring the truck anyway, you fucking asshole?

So obviously I have a million stories about horrible people who didn't understand when things weren't our fault, and would take it out on us anyway. But there was one particular woman who comes to mind when I think of hideous, horrible people who don't deserve to be on this planet with the rest of us humans. This one woman bought a bicycle, and I remember it was near Christmas so it was cold outside and a monstrously long line of people waiting for their stuff went out the door. If I remember correctly I'm going to venture to say that there were thirty people there, and what really infuriated us was that the screen that told you how long you would be waiting and what the queue was always insisted a guarantee that you'd get your merchandise in five minutes or less-- in a three story building, this would be physically impossible, no matter how many guys we had working, because people could show up outside to get their things before any human being could physically get to the merchandise and bring it to them. When you factor in the fact that people would pick up things that weighed over 800 pounds that would often be stacked to the ceiling of a warehouse that would require multiple people to get, and you find that this five minute wait was a vicious joke specifically put there to make people more upset at how long they were waiting, and make us look bad.

I walked out with this bicycle, already assembled, and called out the name. A woman approached me, very tall, very thin, and I remember she was wearing this coat and scarf combo. I was in a hurry because of the huge line and very aware that every time any of us walked out to give people their stuff they all had this horrible, burning glare because what we were delivering wasn't their stuff. I walked out to the woman's car-- thank god that she was parked close, and I immediately knew this wasn't going to work. I'd delivered many a bike to many a car, and for most people's cars it works, but for certain cars, it just won't happen. You wouldn't think this would be a problem, but as I mentioned, the stumbling block is almost never how much volume the car had inside, but the fact that far doors do not open at 90 degree angles. And I told her this-- informing people ahead of time almost never worked, in fact it seems to fill people with more enthusiasm that it will work, but we always tried our best to talk them out of it on the off chance that they say "Yeah, you're right", which they sometimes, though rarely, did. But by telling her this, she somehow got this idea in her head that I was trying to get out of doing my job. She objected immediately, saying in an incredibly offended voice, "What do you mean it won't go in?" as if to say that I was shirking responsibilities, not thinking that by taking this thing all the way out to her car already, it would be much easier to just throw the thing in her backseat and be done with it-- if I could, anyway.

I told her that it wasn't going into her car, that I'd tried this before with this kind of car, that the handlebars were too long, that the car door wouldn't open wide enough. She insisted I try, as if I was crazy. Of course it didn't work. She insisted that I was doing it wrong. We tried it several different ways, none of which worked. I told her the only way to do this was to take the handlebars off, which got a response that there was no way she was going to take the handlebars off because then she wouldn't know if she could get it back on, and it was a Christmas present, which was fine because there was no way I was going to take the handlebars off anyway-- we weren't allowed to disassemble things for people anyway; we could take them out of the box but that was it, and also, there were way too many people in line and I was wasting way too much time on this increasingly infuriated woman, who really had no reason to be so mad at me. I then told her that the only other way to get the bike in the car would be to take the door off the car.

After around 10 minutes of this and getting abuse from this woman, I eventually said look, I have got a lot of people who have been waiting a really long time, there's nothing more I can do, I really have got to go. She threw up her arms in a disgusted fashion and said "Fine, just go! I don't care anyway! Asshole!"

I shook my head and walked back.

In Merchandise Pick-Up there was a lobby where people waited, and there was a smaller room separated for us to sit in and wait. This was on the ground floor and everything was down in the warehouse, so we had to wait for it to come up on the elevator. This door connected to the outside lobby eventually got an electronic lock on it that could only be opened from the inside, and at first it annoyed us because the button to press for the door to open wasn't as close as you would think, and with extremely heavy items we needed help getting out, but with time we grew to love it, for reasons like the following.

A few minutes had passed, when suddenly the woman burst inside and, with a horribly snarled look on her face, hissed "I just want you to know that some nice man helped me get the bike in my car, and he didn't have to take the handlebars off."

I calmly, though visibly flustered, said that I was glad that she could get it in her car, but I really hadn't had the time to take to help her properly. She stormed off anyway, and I thought that would be that. To be truthful, I didn't give a shit that somebody had helped her get it in her car; I had wasted 10 minutes of my time to get a 10 pound bike in a car while dozens of people seethed that we weren't getting their stuff out to them fast enough, so as long as she did it on her own time, I didn't care how the bike got in her car.

The next person I helped out was a man, and as we walked out to his car he said, "I'm the guy that helped that lady out with her bike. I had to take the handlebars off. I don't know why in the hell she said that to you."

I was flabbergasted. Up to this point I thought she was just a woman who had issues with placing her anger on the right thing, but as much as I hated her, hell, people were like that, and it wasn't like I didn't have a dozen customers on a day like this that were exactly like her, ridiculously unhappy with the only service I could provide and not knowing how to direct her anger. But she specifically came back to spite me-- with a lie. And the thing is, it would've been much easier just to get in her car and leave the whole messy ordeal behind her. She walked all the way back to merchandise pick-up just to prove she was right. Even when she wasn't right. Out of all the unpleasant people I've ever had to deal with on an employee-to-customer basis, she sticks out as easily being the most egregious. I mean, this wasn't just a bitch who needed to chill the fuck out. This lady was a bad person.
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with love from CRS @ 10:04 AM 

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