four! in a row! craziness!

Customer Service.
It's a difficult biz to get into. most people can't handle the stress of it. However, that doesn't mean that not every Sally, Dick and Jane can do it.
I personally think Customer Service is the easiest bloody job to take on, not really hard at all, requires about three brain cells, even my son could do it and he's only four.
I think that most retail/customer service/lackeys should at least have the common sense to know three important rules when working.
1. the customer is always right(until out of earshot)
2. Listen to the customer, don't try to guess(they'll usually tell you what they want)
3. do what you get paid to do, nothing more, nothing less.

These three rules will not only keep you in your job, but probably make life easier to handle in the long run. really.
example. This morning, I inadvertantly tested an employee of a certain bagel shop in above rules. I thought, gee wouldn't it be nice if I could make my own mocha? I could just use Coffee, chocolate milk, and a little cocoa and voila! impromptu yumminess!
So I asked for four things.
My lunch, a tasty lox and capers on a cream-cheesed bagel, which was made slowly, incorrectly(she made me egg salad) and with many interruptions, since the girl was talking to the thingy in her ear, which I can only assume was either an earbud to a radio, or one of those phone plug-in-thingys.
Some soup, which was forgotten about until we got to the cash register.
The coffee, extra large (which you pour yourself, they just give you a cup)
The Chocolate Milk (which was in the cooler behind the counter, not in front with the rest of the pop and cream cheese that you just grab yourself. guess it's more valuable or something.)(this was also forgotten completely.)
Now, I happened to be only carrying debit and not any cash, so when I got my reciept and noticed no chocolate milk and realized my morning caffiene/sugar rush was postponed due to lack of listening to the customer, needless to say I got a little upset. I pointed my ice blue daggers her way and spoke in just above a whisper( don't really have a voice first thing in the morning), 'umm, where's the milk?' to which I got one of those pointy up fingers that one does to show they want the other to hold on, they're busy. So I said, a little louder,'where's your manager?' to which she replied, 'I am the manager, just hold on a sec, I'm a little busy.' and continued her conversation with her ear. At this point in time, Her manager came out( aha!!! LIAR!) and asked if I had been helped, and I proceeded to rip the little ignorant bugger a new one, using such words as:
'girl can't take out her earbuds long enough to do her job',
'a little confused with my order since she made me egg salad when I obviously asked for lox and cream cheese',
'is she actually a manager, because in that case I'm not sure why I even bother to come in here in the first place if that's the kind of person you like to hire',
-and-
'forgot my chocolate milk, and I only have debit, and I can't make my perfect mocha',
all in a surprisingly whiny voice( I guess I'm not very witty first thing in the morning either, mostly just a big puss). In any case, the girl got a swift talking to, I got a free egg salad sandwich, got my coffee refunded, and subsequently went to Starbucks and got a big americano.
So in conclusion, this is my fourth post in a row, and already I have nothing to write except how much people piss me off first thing in the morning. shitty..




p.s. oh, yeah, forgot to mention I'm trying to do this everyday for a month, care of napomlobo? namoplobo? nope... just a sec... NaBloPoMo. That's it. That stands for National Blog Posting Month. so that's what I'm doing. cuz I have no life. that's all...

Creatures of Habits

I love crazy magazine lovin wierdos. I Really do.
Like the guys who match their coats and hats to the cover of their stealth-hunter magazines, or the little old british ladies who think they're part of the royal family just because they buy, well, Royalty magazines. But I sincerly want to put out a big HELLY-O and a thank-you to my favorite bunch: The Overbearing, man-panties-in-a-bunch, Tight-uncomfortable shoe wearing Businessman.
These Gentlemen, or, as some of them prefer to be called, Phat Cats, are true chameleons in the realm of the 'zine. They Can flit back and forth from Rap Mags, Porn rags, and Quilted fags like nobody's biz. ( sorry, I just had to find another ryhme-y word for that last one. Not to mention, it's true.) Now, the normal time of day to spot the P.C's (for those of you who are slow, that means Phat cats) is either 11ish in the am, or just after one in the pm. Basically anytime around the lunch period, but not quite, so they don't have to answer any uneasy questions to any associate/collegue who might also have a penchant for perusing the papers over lunch. You can tell a P.C apart from a normal business-person by the long black high-end looking dusters they prefer to wear no matter how tall or not they are, their tommy-curl hair that looks thoroughly shellacked, and the smell of Geriatric spice or Cowboy-CAN'T YOU TELL I AM A MAN- perfume Emanating from every pore on their person. These such people always elude me when they come in, sometimes, I think, just from the pendulum effect their coats have on me, and then I'm completely oblivious to the fact that there's a sub-human being under all that pizzaz. These P.C.'s always walk with a purpose, though they usually take 5-10 minutes( or whenever all the other customers have left) to purposefully stride to their glossy destination. Which is almost always one of the three sections I have mentioned earlier. However the Typical P.C. is careful not to let on that they are purchasing anything suspicious, so before making their final stop at the counter, they swish over to the News aisle and pick up whatever Market paper is available, ie. Barrons, Newyork times, wall street journal, western investor, etc. Then these crafty buggers hide their true purchase in the folds of a paper and return to the cash register looking lofty and pristine. I've learned to look in all papers that a business-person is carrying now just to make sure there isn't a hidden glossy somewhere, as most times they, as do all other customers, think that we retail personnel are experienced mind-readers and shouldn't need to be told that they are hiding dirty, dirty smut somewhere between the Housing and Stocks section. and hey, to give credit to them, it's not always smut. Sometimes a Real Man just has to loop a coupla Circle Shell Stitches to unwind, ya know?

-manly AND Complicated!

Anyway, they almost always pay with some form of Mastercard super-multi-platinum-double-gold-fingered card, just to let you know that they still are an imposing figure when it comes to using other peoples cash, and it' really surprises me that they don't use, you know, cash, cuz that would just make it impossible to trace, and so, not letting the entire banking world know that they bought a 'no-no'. I dunno. just thinkin aloud. through my fingers.

N-E-yways, after which, they throw a smoke bomb down on the floor, and with a swish of their coats, disappear into the smoke laced interior to the external life without leaving a trace! exept for, well, the door chime thingy going off as they make their escape. ;)

Chocolates with Extreme Dizzying qualities?

Don't get me wrong, I LOVVE chocolate. Dark chocolate, light chocolate, truffles, clusters, muffin and cake form, whatever. Chocolate is Guuuuddd. I do not love the people who organise the chocolate in my store. I don't care what looks better per shelf, I don't care that the regular size bars go on a higher shelf than the king size bars, in fact I don't even think that we should be having king size bars in my store, if not for the fact that the fat people love them so much. I happen to have the few representatives from each chocolate company that the rest of the world deemed 'too retarded to actually work in a real city' so they sent them to bellybutton Saskatchewan so they could run free and play. seriously. Mr Cadbury isn't past puberty yet, and stares at those bloody white chocolate bars like they're the creamiest thing he's gonna see, Mr Hershey is usually a no-show, although he usually does have the courtesy to book an appointment to come in so he has a certain time that he can NOT bother to show up for, and Ms Nestle? Picture Foreman's mom from That 70's show, skinny her up a bit, then ladle on some extra annoying. She's got that tasteful way of saying the most tactless thing in her honeyed voice, then following it up with a little twitter and an 'okaaaaayyyyy....'. I want to slaughter her with the sharp edge of a Skor Bar.

Ms Nestle came in to my store today, rearranged everything whilst I did my damnedest to ignore her, proceeded to take 'before' and 'after' shots with her new for-work-only digital camera, and in the midst of her in-home candy renovation, tried to talk to me about my life like she actually spent more than 10 minutes every 3-4 months in my store wiping the dust off of old product before replacing it. I have to admit that I might have given her some of the ammo to work with, but the rest she managed to pull out of her own a**. or at least out of someone else's life.

So she comes in with her BINDER OF ALL IMPORTANCE, her LABELS OF DESTINY, and her BOX CUTTER OF JUSTICE, and tries to butter me up with a free smarties box. Now I've said I lurve chocolate, but smarties doesn't really contain a whole lotta chocolate. just so you know. In fact if you look at the Label, the first ingredient is Milk Chocolate, which then has a brackets bar naming about 9 ingredients, 5 of which Ms Nestle herself couldn't even pronounce, and about four or five ingredients down in the sub-ingredients listing is unsweetened chocolate, but diluted by chemicals and 'Modified milk ingredients' so it can't really be considered chocolate) (I could be just making this shit up, but Ms Nestle should saw the backlash coming.) ANYWAYS, she gives me smarties, I say I don't like 'em, she looks like a puppy I just booted, so I try to comprimise and pull a little kindness out of a rarely used orifice and say that I could probably give them to my son, he'd like them. (which is true, I do bribe him when teaching him the alphabet, see 'By the power of Leapfrog') She lit up at this, and I thought all was well. Too well, it turned out. I was rearranging books in the small section we have that carries various romance titles and such (for the little old ladies, I just love them and their constant perfum of toilet cleaner and kitty litter) and she starts asking me about 'my little girl'. I corrected her once or twice, but she seemed set that my kid was Not born with the barnacles of manhood, so I went with it. what the hell. Then she started asking me about my husband and his Dad's business. So apparently now I'm married to my bosses non-exsistent son, which is kinda... different... anywho, this went on with her making shit up, and myself grunting the odd acknowledgment until she aquired how my pa-in-law was coping with the loss of his wife. a little caught off gaurd I was since my boss is a step father to a coupla daughters, and vice versa his healthy wife. I can only keep up with a made up a story so far, then I kinda lose point of what my goal was in the original making of the story, which was to keep this woman happy with the least possible amount of participation on my part, and mess with her head a little. I was wondering if she wasn't doing this to me. she didn't do a very good job tho, cuz I wasn't really happy with her. I think she sensed my pause of discomfort as a 'it's too personal, don't really wanna talk about it' kinda thing, at which point she did her finest Foreman's mom and Nasally twittered into the ackward feeling silence and 'okaaaaayyyy....'. Then she left. I don't know if she was actually done, or if she just wanted to leave the scene of the crime, although I'm not exactly sure who's crime it was, or what it was for that matter. I'm still all of a tizzy trying to figure it out myself. ..

weird.

Willy wonka and the Cancer factory

I officially hate wednesdays.

So far today I have managed to yell at a customer on the phone, not once, but three times and counting(apparently can't take the hang up hint AT ALL), dropped all of my daily newspapers that come into my store(about 15 different titles, 5-20 apiece), then barked at a customer wanting to help.And these papers didn't just go in an up-down motion. oh no. I did the full version of the 'I got it! I Got it!' dance, and there was news every where.. and that nice, naive customer held the door open for a full 4 minutes while I did the 'mumbly-don't help me- I said I got it' stretches. all this going on, while behind me, and so unbeknownst to me, a good crowd of 4 or 5 people had gathered, either apparently too scared to pass the messy News-explosion into the helpfully opened door, or trying to keep their laughs down to a reasonably silent snorting session. yeah I heard it. helpful.

and it's not even 10:30.

ok now it is.

And enter- Oompa Loompa! Well. Not quite. He's a bit surlier than your average oompa. But he's short! And cancer-peely Orange! Someone should send that man to the tanning nazis. NO MORE GLOOP FOR YOU! ick. As always, he, like every other regular schmuck in my store, expects my mind-reading capabilities to kick in before lunch, or at least my third cuppa. So I'm behind the counter, vaguely aware that he likes to top off his carcinogenic routine with cigars, but I'll be a surgeon generals left t** if I can remember which kind. And so I start from the left of the display and move on, while he's making jokes about the intelligence level of retail employees in this day and age. I imagine the slow painful death he's made for himself, and picture him wheezing and purple, and somehow the comments bounce off . Not bad for 10:30. in the a.m. After I finally get the amount of and the kind(get this, a carton of bandi cigars, five to a pack , five packs a carton, twice a week. I hope he shares.) Oompa gets on his cell phone. Guess my converstional skills were no match to his lackey who can get him starbucks at his whim. So I'm standing there while he makes his order, still waiting for a form of payment. And the little bugger starts wandering around the store, visually picking out artery-clog inducing pastry! Hello! I want you to get the f out of my store! If you're not out in 30 seconds, your lackey better be bringing ME a venti-smooth-hot-something else-blahblah-water-more fake italian-latte, AND a muffin! I don't care which kind. not picky. haha... So , he finally comes back, and then tries to leave without paying. yeah. Saw That coming from a mile away, even in my caffiene-free coma. So we argue for a little minute, then I , in my graceful, refined and patient glory, say 'I have a video camera that's been watching you SIR! Why don't you have a look to jog your memory, cuz I am QUITE SURE that you didn't leave any fu**in money.' whoops. First rule,big one, no swearing at customers, the customer is always right. well I happen to know that most of the customers I serve don't know right from their own toes, so I guess that makes me a shitty manager. Whatever. So, wisely, he shuts his mouth, we go to the camera and rewind , he looks at himself going through the coffee summons, while I look on(thank god my back was to the camera, I'm pretty shure that I said many more unsavory things while watching his communicative ordeal.) (hah! big words! not even sure if they fit or make sense, but surprisingly they're the only words coming to mind)

And all he says is 'huh. so I guess I didn't pay ya.' and gets out his wallet. . kay best part. so he pays, says 'see ya next week, you know you don't have to let these things get to ya, don't let the world get ya down.' or something to that extent. then-'umm, I looked kind of orange in the camera... you might want to fix your contrast.'

priceless.

Change of Pace

K, so this blog isn't really working out to the best, so I've decided to change the pace. this blog will now be dedicated to certain meanderings, song pieces, and songs. and to start things off right, I'll put up a song that my friend and I wrote together, just out of a blue-hazy-disarronno laced fog.

Some Random Guy
It's nine o clock, Tuesday night
the bar is as dead as the air
a singular gentleman walks up to the stage
to take up his place on the chair
slowly he turns on the microphone
and picks up a ratty guitar
his cheap-gin infused voice floats over the speakers,
and slowly it fills up the bar

And he sings about moonlight, He sings about love
to the twenty-some people there
and He sings about life, and He sings about loss,
but no one seems to care
He's just some random guy on a chair

Now he knows that he's got half an hour
to lay out his soul tarred and bare
so he strums his first chord, to the audience who's bored,
and he sings about people who dare
to fight to the death for their loved ones,
or drink a mickey of gin when they leave
and the sad part is that this is where the man's at
when he sings his heart out on his sleeve,

And He sings about moonlight, He sings about love
to the twenty-some people there
And He sings about life and He sings about loss,
But no one seems to care
He's just some random guy on a chair

It's ten o clock, Tuesday night
the Bar is as dead as the air "