Poll: Look dude, I'm just doing my job...

[The_root_of_all_evil]

I actually remember this thread. My memories from 08 still serve. I didn't want to necro a thread.

Note* I've checked the last post...I didn't think that we had a post from this year!

Was a good thread, didn't want to overshadow yours but there's a lot of good posts from people no longer here.

 

[Jamboxdotcom]

Wanna know what's even worse? Having to do both customer service AND vendor relations. Especially since my boss (who is also my step-dad) can be downright unreasonable sometimes. Half the calls i have to make to our suppliers start off "Well, my boss wants me to tell you this...".

 

[Prof. Monkeypox]

Not sure why it's in the form of a yes/no question. Or rather, that that is the question being posed.

For me, the worst customers are the old guys that yell at you that things were so much cheaper "back in their day." I once had a guy demand a refund (due to cost) after he'd already opened and drunk part of the soda. He was blocking the line and I was the only one- so I let him have it, but I didn't want to.
He asked me if "I ever felt guilty for stealing so much of people's hard earned money." As if I set the price...

 

[Random Argument Man]

I actually remember this thread. My memories from 08 still serve. I didn't want to necro a thread.

Note* I've checked the last post...I didn't think that we had a post from this year!

Was a good thread, didn't want to overshadow yours but there's a lot of good posts from people no longer here.

Those were good times. I feel old now...

 

[Mike Laserbeam]

.....what on earth is a "Gazbar"?

Yeah seriously, what is Gaz and why are you selling it for 5 cents a litre...? I can only think that you might be talking about gasoline, but that would be an INSANE price to sell it for

 

[Dragonpit]

Working as a manager for a fast food place, I've seen pretty much every jackass in the book. I've had a gun pulled on me, I've had food thrown back in my face (literally), I've had people accuse me of being racist for trying to explain to them that we don't carry certain sandwiches anymore, I've had more than enough of the "Oh, she's here to serve me, I'll treat her like the trash she is" attitude...Ugh.

On a higher note, anyone else read Not Always Right? If you don't, go Google it. Now. You'll thank me in an hour or two when you're done laughing.

Higher note? Higher note!?

I did Google that, and found what is perhaps the very bane of humanity. I can understand stupid moments, sure, that happens to everyone. But really? How can someone's level of thought go that low? That's paradoxically something less than not thinking!

Now I understand why people lose faith in the human race.

It's cathartic for those of us who've put up with it ourselves. You know, the whole "I'm not the only one" feelings boost. And some of them are just so stupid they're impossible not to laugh at.

Unfortunately, Not Always Right does not cover the type of abuse employees suffer from customers on a regular basis. I worked for McDonalds for five years. Do you know how infuriating it is to have to bring out a manager because a customer is angry and wants to report me because I wouldn't sell him Shamrock Shakes in November? And don't get me started on the Breakfast Chicken Biscuits.

 

[BabyRaptor]

Unfortunately, Not Always Right does not cover the type of abuse employees suffer from customers on a regular basis. I worked for McDonalds for five years. Do you know how infuriating it is to have to bring out a manager because a customer is angry and wants to report me because I wouldn't sell him Shamrock Shakes in November? And don't get me started on the Breakfast Chicken Biscuits.

Yip, I know the feeling. I had a guy once cuss my cashier, then me and then the GM because we couldn't give him a vanilla Jamocha shake. (If you're familliar with Arbys, you'll get that. If you're not, suffice it to say that it's not possible.)

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Oh I feel for you dude, I really do. A few years back I used to work for Convergy's doing Internet tech support and damn it if some people aren't just fucking insane. It's like they've got the mentality of a 5 year-old and think that the whole Universe revolves around them.
People would get pissed at me when there was an Internet outage in their area or if I couldn't get them a service technician right when they wanted it.
It got to the point, often times, where I would actually hope that they'd ask to speak to my supervisor just so I wouldn't have to talk to them anymore.

 

[Smagmuck_]

When I broke my Collar Bone, I had to use the 411 service to get my mom's work number... And my impatience, coupled with pain and endorphins caused me to bite the operator's head off. I quickly apologized though, and spent four hours in the ER.

 

[Soxafloppin]

I can feel your pain dude, I'm a lifeguard, which means I'm obviously there to make sure that no one has a good time :|

 

[SoopaSte123]

That video made me feel all happy and good inside. Forget project rant, make "project rave", where you can have videos like this.

OT: I have always been nice to all service industry workers (something I picked up from my dad). After working at a grocery store cashier one summer, I am very glad I did. I have since tried to be the best customer I can be, wherever I go.

 

[philzibit]

Lemme tell you a story.

I work as a manager at Mc. Donald's. About a week ago, the midwest was having really bad weather. I live in the St. Louis area, and we got hit pretty hard. So, while I was working, the power went out...twice.

The first time, during a tornado warning, (which a tornado had a confirmed touchdown not 10 minutes from us) customers still wanted food. They were pissed at me because we couldn't serve them food while the power was out. They were pissed at me for Mc. Donald's having no power, even though, if you looked literally 50 yards away, you could see the glow of the power company trucks trying to bring the power back on.

Fun Fact: If the power goes out, Mc. Donald's can't serve food for, at least, a half hour.

Because I'm a manager, (and because my co-workers aren't good public speaking) for 45 minutes after the power came back, I had to wear a headset, while trying to remake food and figure out why the computer system doesn't wanna reboot. With that headset, I had to tell some 100 customers that "due to the power outage, we have to remake all of our food and wait for our registers to reboot, it's going to be about 20-30 minutes before we can start serving again."

You'd think that'd be straight forward enough. About half the customers couldn't understand that, and got pissed because I couldn't simply run back to the grill, and whip them up some 8 Mc. chicken. Because of this, I'm the fucking dickhead.

I hate people. I take solace in the fact that in a few years, when I'm out of college and I'm happily living my life, those fuck-bat customers will still be waiting in the drive thru, thinking they're important because they ordered a Mc. double.

 

[ultrapowerpie]

No, customers have no right whatsoever to be assholes, unless the company screwed them over somehow. Then they can be assholes to the dude in charge. Most of the time they "vent" on the poor guys down on teh bottom who don't have any control whatsoever over the incident.

Whoever invented the phrase "the customer is always right", was clearly a customer, not a buisness owner. Or if it was, it's a buisness owner who never had to deal with customers directly.

 

[Trivun]

My job isn't crap, I actually enjoy it surprisingly enough, considering it's working in a supermarket with most of my time spent reducing prices on short-life stock (and throwing the out-of-date stuff away). But there are some customers I get annoyed with easily. Most of the people I deal with are friendly and polite, and I'm happy to help them (and they usually thank me and are happy enough with the service received). I've even got a couple of customers who are regulars of our store, and usually have a bit of a chat with me while I'm working (that is, they do the talking, I listen and comment while focusing mainly on the job at hand). But then, it appears that our supermarket chain seems to attract decent people (I work at Waitrose, where most of the staff and customers are pretty good, whereas whenever I shop in, say, Tesco, the staff are incompetent or just don't give a flying fuck ).

Nevertheless, sometimes there's the odd customer who I hate dealing with. Once, near Christmas last year, I was reducing a load of meat, and we work by section - meaning I'd do, say, pork first, then move onto lamb, then fish, and so on. A woman came up to me asking if I was going to be reducing a load of sausages - I told her that we work by section, politely, and said that I may be doing the sausages but it would depend on what else needed doing and what my manager told me to do. So she walks away, and I carry on with the job. Before I get around to the sausages, my manager asked me to do another task, which meant I wouldn't have time to reduce any sausages before we closed - so right before closing time, the woman comes back (she'd literally hung around in the store for around an hour just walking around waiting for me to reduce the sausages for the next day's date, which would be maybe 50p off each pack ), and asks me if I'm reducing the sausages now. I politely explained that I couldn't as I hadn't the time, and I'd been asked to do a different job - so the woman starts getting all mouthy, complaining that I should have told her that an hour ago (bear in mind that I'd answered her original question, and had no way of knowing beforehand how long the job would take), and makes out that it was my fault for not telling her in the first place, even though I did.

Seriously, I wanted to give this woman a right good bollocking, which is an English slang term for basically having a go at her and calling her an idiot and whatnot, for you non-Brits out there. Sadly, I couldn't do that because if she'd made a complaint, she'd have the upper ground, and I would be liable (and there's no way in hell I'm going to lose my job willingly over something stupid like that). So I just apologised and proceeded to carry on with my job, ignoring her inane moaning. She never did get the reduced sausages from me, either xD.

Oh, and we also have a guy who comes in regularly, a pretty old Indian/Pakistani guy who can barely speak English and makes a habit of seeking me out to get things reduced. I'm not being racist here, just stating facts - I simply can't understand half of what he says. He makes a habit out of looking on the shelves, checking for stock that's going out of date today that we've missed in our 'gathering up', and bringing it to me and the rest of the Operations team to get it reduced. He then tries to dictate what we should reduce it to (usually along the lines of 10p for everything, no matter how much it originally costs). In the end I just got fed up enough to call him out on it, though I was careful with my choice of words so if he complained I wouldn't be liable for offending a customer... hell, I actually saw the guy near our other branch in my city, when I was doing some luxury item shopping - fortunately he didn't spot me. It's bad enough dealing with the guy at work, I don't want to deal with him on my days off as well...

 

[Zykon TheLich]

[quote="Genixma" post=

 

[pffh]

I can feel your pain dude, I'm a lifeguard, which means I'm obviously there to make sure that no one has a good time :|

Too true. I was a lifeguard for some time and the worst people are the parents that throw their small child into the pool and then go and pay no attention to them expecting me to nanny the kid while they were there and get pissed when I point out that it's their kid and they must bloody watch it. Never mind the fact that on a sunny day there might be over a hundred people, half of them with kids there and I'm only one man.

 

[Kopikatsu]

Excuse me if I offend people but as Yahtzee and Totalbiscuit have said Fanboys (WoW or otherwise) are entitled gits. And while not everyone is humble most people are dicks when costumers. And before you say "Well I'm nice to my server etc. etc." when was the last time you thanked the person at Starbucks for you coffee? When was the last time you said "May I please have a frappucino" or whatever. When was the last time you bid someone who worked at a taco bell or a grocery store a good day after they've serviced you?

Every single time.

Generally when they make a mistake when helping me, I pretty much just say 'It's fine, don't worry about it.'

This is because I've worked in the food industry, and GOD DAMN PEOPLE HATE YOU THERE.
I live in the US, and literally about 60% of our customers can't speak a single word of English, then get pissed when I can't understand them.

After serving this one guy, he decided that the food cost too much money, so he dug a few dollars out of the tip jar, dropped it on the counter, then walked out. I was like, The fuck?

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

Yeah, I hear you. And people shouldn't behave like that to people just doing their jobs.

Even so, I chose the third option, because there are the occasional groups of 'customer service' people, especially in large corporations who either genuinely don't care, are instructed not be helpful, or don't know what they're doing.

There's nothing as frustrating as calling tech support or sales or something at a company only to have the person tell you something that you know is just complete and utter bullshit which at best is explicitly designed to confuse you or be misleading.

It's very hard to remain calm and reasonable when a company is screwing you over, and the person supposed to 'help' with this doesn't even seem to understand what you're complaining about.

Granted, that seems to be the fault of the company more so than the person, but since they are the only means of contact...

Still, that's mostly an issue with huge corporations and their 'customer service' departments, who universally seem to be trained to be as aggravating as possible...

I'd imagine working those jobs must be pretty stressful considering what seems to be going on.

i fucking hate this job (my job, which is basically what you described) I'm actually very good at it and i know just about all there is to know, especially compared to the other 30 people in my department, but sometimes errors come up on our shitty systems and they will near explode with 20 errors coming across a customers account in which i can't do anything then, and i end up getting death threats over the phone just because i was going the extra mile of helping them then and there instead of sending them to the next person like we are told to do

 

[funguy2121]

If only ALL customers were like this....

Have you ever had a crappy job with shitty customers? Yes you did. If not, then you're one lucky ************. I had my first day for my summer job yesterday. I woke up at 5 A.M and took my bike, for a 15 minutes trip, to a Canadian Tire gazbar. My new boss told me to put up some cones. hold an exit sign and tell the customers to go the other entrance if they want gaz. (It was a 5 cents per litre special for the day and we didn't want to block the traffic. )

I'm standing there for about 9 hours with a hot sun, some dusty winds and feeling that it will be a long day. It was a busy day, but I told myself that the pay would be good and I would look good in front of my boss. Let me tell you something...I was not ready for the customers.

I've been standing there and telling people to go the other way, but some idiots do not want to listen. I've been called asshole, ************ and other insults all the day. My feet were hurting.
I almost got hit by 3 impatient customers.

They never thought about one thing: DUDE, I'm just doing my job. Why are you being an asshole with me? (I've never told them, but I've been thinking about it all day).

Have you ever had job that ended up like this? Do you have your own stories?

Please share them with us. It may make your day a little bit better.

Somebody should tell the youtube poster that that wasn't a rant. Very sweet, though. I hate when people are shitty to waiters. My reaction is normally something like "you're not a manager in real life, dude and when you're done being shitty to this clearly better person you're still going to go home alone."

I have a lot of stories from waiting tables. Maybe I'll post some later.

Never, ever, wait at a Denny's

 

[Coldster]

I work at a golf course and trust me on this: golfers are the snootiest people ever! I don't even know how to describe it but I thank my manager whenever he puts me on "cart" duty where I don't have to deal with those pricks.