Holiday Customer Service Hell.

[Jesus_marley]

I don't know the legality, but companies have to be pretty strict-- I worked retail in a department store and had gotten acquainted with the regular security job. He had witnessed a customer pocketing a pair of sunglasses and walking out, and stopped the customer. The customer claimed to have left the sunglasses on a different shelf. They checked the store, found the sunglasses, and the security guard was fired. They weren't allowed to make mistakes.

Unless you have overwhelming proof that a crime was committed, it's better to not do anything. Detaining someone against their will is a crime.

According to our local laws, you don't even have to leave the store with the merchandise to be nabbed for shoplifting.

As an example, if you were to take a pair of sunglasses off the rack and place them in your coat pocket, you could get nailed. "Removing from public view" or something IIRC. This happens only rarely however. 99% of the time a person won't be detained unless they leave the store without paying.

As for detaining, the person stopping the thief must either be a witness to the crime, or barring that, be acting in good faith on the word of another.

 

[Florian]

Same small town, same midnight shift, just up the road at Tim Hortons (for those who don't know, Tims is classic Canadiana...coffee and doughnuts).

I would kill a man if I could get Timbits out of it.

Well OK, maybe not for Timbits. But they're that good (to me).

Timbits + hockey = VERY happy Florian (of course, I have neither--so you can imagine how I feel right now).

 

[MrFilthyIke]

The tales I could tell about the 2 years I worked as a clerk at an Adult Bookstore... OY!

I worked at Fairvilla Adult Megastore in Orlando, Fl...I TOTALLY UNDERSTAND.

 

[eabha]

I would kill a man if I could get Timbits out of it.

I saw a lot of things working the night shift at Tims, but thankfully, never Timbit-provoked homocide .

 

[jollyninja]

I've worked for sears for over 3 years in various departments. they give me more money, i decide that selling things to old people is still worth slamming my head into a brick wall of technological disconnect. it's becoming reasonably lucrative but i've got some stories i think are good/bad.

a little old man comes into the store and buys a tv. the next day, he calls me nearly crying because his new tv is broken and his wife's favorite show is on 1/2 an hour begging me to get him a tv delivered in 1/2 and hour. problem, it's december 22, i have no tv's even remotely resembling his left so i agree to come to his house on my lunch break (1 hr into my shift) to see what i can do. i get there and ask a few questions and all it is is that he is trying to change the channel on his satalite dish with his tv remote because he has never owned a satalite dish before. i explain this to him and he goes off on me about how all salesmen are bastards and someone should have told him that ect....... and i agreed with him. i explained to him how to fix the problem, writing down step by step instructions, button by button, how to fix the problem if it ever happened again. my quota of one good deed per day so i can live with myself after a day of manipulating people into giving me more of their money being filled, i go back to work. 2 hours later he calls again, screaming at me that he still only get's one channel on his t.v. and i'm a liar ect..... so i explain it to him again button by button detail and tell him to use the satalite remote to change the channel. every day for a week (not christmas day of course) i got this phone call. finally the last day, i looked at my boss and said, we are taking this t.v. back and i'm never talking to this customer again, you can fire me if you want.

i put a man's $2500 refrigerator under his girlfriend's name because they lived together and it was being delivered at the same time as the range she had purchased. he notices and freaks on me. so i void the transaction and attempt to rering it on his visa. now it's a sunday. credit transactions often do not get completed the same day they are put through the till on a sunday and he does not have enough room on his visa for two refrigerators because he's building a house. now i screwed up so my tolerance level for being dressed down is pretty high and i'm a commision paid person, i don't want to lose the hundred bucks. for the next 45 minutes, i spoke to representatives of sears, visa, his bank, the visa vendor that handles western canadian sears transactions, the sears card people (trying to get him one, DENIED), all the while having this prick yell at me and tell me how stupid i am, tell me i'm lucky he doesn't get me fired and finally after 45 minutes tell me that he is sure that every day my parents get up and thank god their son was able to get the great job of selling appliances for a garbage rip off company like this one. i hung up the phone and looked at him with my eyebrow raised ever so slightly, knuckles white from trying to clench back the rage, not saying a word. he apologised, ensuring me that he was grateful for the work i had been doing and saying that he would come back the next day to straighten everything out and left.

living in a somewhat rural area, as in i talk to people who actually do communicate in grunts ccasionally, hygene is probably less prevailant here then most places (being a bit of an out of place metrosexual, i notice these things) so the guy who smells like three days of urine soaked overalls in the hot sun actually comes in often enough that this is how i refer to him to my colleagues and they know exactly who i'm talking about. even worse then him though is the old vacation man who has apparently lost his toothbrush or is using a dead animal to clog a hole in the top of his mouth that prevents his brain from falling out. he keeps changing skin so i suspect he's an alien wearing the decomposing skin of his elderly victims and asking me questions that make no sense while driving back and forth from texas to alaska.

oh well, someday, i'll snap and i have the phone number and address of every customer who has bought anything from me for three years because my employer makes me keep them. the day of reckoning comes. <insert siutably evil laughter>

 

[drakhe]

CEO's be clever people?!?

I was part of the On Site Support team for an international bank at the time.

Got a call from the helpdeks: URGENTLY to send sombody to hotel thisAndThat because the CEO of the Bank was giving a press-conference and the laptop he was supposed to use for his presentation (he is a funky young showoff CEO, doh) went completely black. We had 15 minutes to solve the problem because in 20 he would be on live broadcast.

We send sombody over: he walked into the room, took a glance at the laptop, tapped on the spacebar and left....

SCREENSAVER ...

Then the other day, we were asked to setup a BARCO beamer for another meeting. We send our guy out again, who ended up disturbing the board-meeting... The Secretary had failed to check her agenda, so she mist the board-meeting...

Or the misbehaving mouse...
We don't have a stock of new supplies, so if for instance sombody needs a keyboard or mouse replaced, we can only give them a used one.
So I go over to this lady who complains about a mouse that's very unresponsive. I explain her I have a replacement but that it's used. (btw our dept. had recently been outsourced, so after working 15 years for this bank, I now am an outside contractor.... BIG PAIN) She goes on about how we don't deliver any decent service, she was going to complain to everybody she knew, her colleague sitting at the desk accross argued we were overpayed for what we delivered... this went on for some minutes, I'm all the while trying to stay calm and diplomatic. She finaly she says, "I'll show you my good will, install that replacement mouse, you'll see it's no good" So I do, and yes, I just plugged it in when she allmost shouts "See it responds hardly at all!" So I ask her if I can check some settings on her PC (the supplies we keep maybe are used, but they are tested and this mouse passed the test, thus should be OK) and yes, lo and behold: MOUSE POINTER SPEED SET TO LOWEST! Set it to middle, ask her to test it again (had to insist, she didn't want anything to do with it anymore) and then witnessed the rising red of shame...

 

[Florian]

More from "Tales of a Stop-n-Rob":

This guy pulls up at Pump 5 and wants to pre-pay gas--he wants to fill his tank, and he has a $100. Now, I didn't have NEARLY enough cash in the register to make change for that, even if he got more than $20. So I asked him if he had any smaller bills and told him why, and he pitched a FIT. He started bitching that he wanted to fill his tank, he wasn't EVEN listening when I told him that I didn't have change for his bill, and then he said (get THIS), "Why you give me this problem? I'm not black!"--WHILE, I might add, there were black customers at the window (all regular customers of mine, too). I looked at this dumbass Russkie zeeb (he counted his $13 in singles in Russian and had a thick Russian accent, that's how I know he was Russian), and said "Mister, I don't care if you're green with red stripes--I don't have change in the register for this bill. If you're willing to wait, I'll put all $100 on the pump and you can pump your gas, and while you're doing that I'll help these other people and hopefully get enough money to make change for you."

So I prepaid $100 on Pump 5, and helped everyone else while this clownboat was pumping his gas. One dude asked me WTF the guy's problem was, and I just said "he thinks he's special." But I managed to get enough change for him when the gas he pumped came out to a whopping $21. I counted that $79 back to him--in Russian, I might add--and told him AGAIN that we don't keep change for Benjamins in the register, and that I tell everyone that regardless of the color of their skin.

Did he listen? No--but it did set him back a pace when I very carefully counted his change back to him in his native tongue. He asked me where I learned Russian, and I held up my textbook (which I've been taking to work with me so I can get back into practice) and just smiled.

He left rather quickly after that.

And then there are the usual allotment of drunks, which are always fun to deal with. North Carolina has a dram shop law, which basically states that if you know a customer is intoxicated you can't sell him (or her) alcohol. Trying to tell a drunk who speaks no English that he can't buy beer because he's had too much (when you don't know enough Spanish to tell him that he can't buy any beer from you because he's had too much) is always fun, but not as much fun as a drunk anglophone who thinks that just because he lives two blocks away, that means he can buy beer even when he's drunk.

Uhhh....no.

North Carolina also stops all alcohol sales after 2:00 AM, which makes it even more fun when somebody pulls up after 2:00 AM and thinks that I'll sell him beer--especially when he thinks that calling me everything but a Moon Pie and threatening my job will get me to "just give him a $BRAND".

Sorry, also no. But I get my fun with those types by pointing to the camera that's just over my shoulder and saying "By the way, you're being recorded right now. If you really want to complain about me, feel free--my manager comes in after 8:00 AM and she'll be happy to talk to you. She'll also be happy to laugh you out of the store when she goes back to look at the tape and see that 1) it's after 2:00 AM and 2) you tried to intimidate the least-intimidatable employee in the store into selling you a beer outside of the legal sales hours."

And yes, I've had a couple idiots come and complain. And yes, my manager not only laughed them out of the store but also told them "you'll have to get your beer elsewhere, because if any of my employees see you on our lot again they're going to call the cops and have you removed. Have a nice day."

 

[Wycen]

Well I started a temp job for some extra cash for the holidays, so I don't have much new stuff, but when I did tech support in a network operations center, one of my favorites was the lady calling up because she wanted access to her ftp files, which unfortunately were gone, due to the company being bought out and the old system simply being ignored. All customers should have been informed of this, but I'm sure that wasn't the case.

Looking through the files on her unix shell account I found her weblink and some attached files. She had a blank contract to be a slave. After finding that I would have liked to have helped get her ftp files back.

Then there was the regular caller who would travel alot and sometimes need me to read her email to her.

Then the wanker who calls complaining that the mail servers are slow and he's "losing millions of dollars and I'm going to ing bust somebody's head open" by the delay (5 days once). Yes, losing millioins using a DIAL UP ACCOUNT!

Then we had the real wanker using a satelite company's dial up connection which was $8.95 a month for unlimited access and gave you randomized login names like n000a56@network56.com. He couldn't access his email. That was because his inbox was filled with 300 megs of porn spam.

Then there was the old guy. When the new company bought the old, they changed the internet access options. This old guy didn't want the new stuff, he was happy with the old. He kept calling for about 2 weeks until finally during conversation he says, "I like my Apple 2e and I don't wanna to buy a new computer".

This leads me to the poor product manager for the dial up migration for our customers to the new company. She couldn't understand why people who were paying $21 a month for dial up, shell access and web space wouldn't want to "upgrade" to the $100 web space product. Apparently she or whoever she worked for had never heard of Xoom.com, geocities, yahoo or any of the other places providing small but free web space.

Which leads me to my current job, doing office admin. I'm basically the supervisor's bitch, doing whatever she needs, plus the goal of getting the filing setup for the new year plus phone receptioning. Yesterday I had to update an Excel file for her. She wanted to email the file to me, which would have been a trick because I don't have a company email and didn't want to give a personal, though I had already created a hotmail account just for these situations a year ago.

However I remembered I had been given a floppy disc earlier so I dug it out and presented it when she said she was ready. "Oh I don't know how to use that." I contained my dumbfoundedness and simply leaned over and copied the file to the floppy drive and left. This explained to me why anyone would still display one of those training certificates, FRAMED!, for learning basic Excel.

Today she told me to update the FAX machine phone list and I asked if there was a file and she said no, despite seeing the list which had to have been printed in Word or Excel, thanks to the font color and size.

 

[reanjr]

Well, I answer phones at one of the major airlines here in the good ole US of A...there are so many it's not funny.

The best one is:

Agent: "What cities were you wanting to travel between?"

Customer: "I want to go to New York"

Agent: "And where are you?"

Customer: "My kitchen"

This happens at least once a month in one way shape or form.

People can't understand what someone on the other end of a phone conversation is saying oftentimes. This especially happens with older people who hav lost the ability to tune out background noise. When a question isn't worded properly on the phone, it is hard to grasp the meaning of the question. By beginning the question with "What..." you have set their mind off on the wrong foot because you are really asking a "Where..." question. Try "I need to know where you are leaving from and where are you going to?" or something like that instead. I bet the problem wouldn't come up nearly as often.

(I've done technical support for an Internet Service Provider)

 

[reanjr]

You know, now that you mention it, those CD return policies are just stupid. I bought a CD (of Michael Torke's music, if you must know) from a Borders a couple of weeks ago. I got to the car, merrily ripped all that accursed plastic from the thing, and put it in my CD player. Every track on it was horribly scratchy and bad. In fact, I didn't even get out of the parking lot before I turned right around, and took it back into the store.

Of course, Border's policy is stupid, and unforgiving. I could only get store credit for the CD. I would have happily exchanged it for another of the same CD, but they didn't have two of them. I ended up finding another CD of equal value, but it wasn't nearly as good as what (at least what I could hear) the first one was.

But I mean, come on! I bought it TEN FREAKING MINUTES ago and you're telling me I can't get my money back? That's absurd.

If they did allow money back, you could easily go to your car, rip the CD and come back in in about 5 minutes, much less 10. That's a very sound policy. They probably should have offered to ship another copy free to your home, though. It's just bad customer service, not a bad return policy.