The Customer Is Always Wrong

[LionsFist]

My own contribution.

Been working at a pub in the Newcastle region, NSW, Australia.

Was clearing up some glasses from a table one day, already had approximately 8-9 Schooner glasses in a stack in my arms, and I approached the next table that had a group of 5 guys sitting around them. They're all about mid 30's, by no means drunk, but probably slightly tipsy. It's about 3ish in the afternoon and they've been there maybe an hour tops.

As I reach and grab the glasses from the table, one of the guys (obviously the smart ass of the group) turns around and to show off infront of his mates, says "Aren't you a pretty young lass."

Now, just to clarify, I'm a guy. I look completely like a guy, and I don't appreciate this sort of talk. I'm used to all the talk that you get from idiots that are drinking, and even worse, idiots that are trying to show off in front of their mates. But the thing he did next really shocked me.

He turned around and grabbed me square in the nuts and took a squeeze.

Well the next sound was, me dropping my whole stack of glasses, smashing them all over the floor, followed swiftly by me throwing him into an arm lock as I knocked the bar stool out from under him (god that must of hurt, all his weight on his shoulder) and walked/dragged him over to the door, where my manager was already standing holding open the doors

My manager said to him on the way out "You're lucky it's him. If that was me I would have smashed the glasses square in your face."

 

[Xhumed]

My own contribution.

Been working at a pub in the Newcastle region, NSW, Australia.

Was clearing up some glasses from a table one day, already had approximately 8-9 Schooner glasses in a stack in my arms, and I approached the next table that had a group of 5 guys sitting around them. They're all about mid 30's, by no means drunk, but probably slightly tipsy. It's about 3ish in the afternoon and they've been there maybe an hour tops.

As I reach and grab the glasses from the table, one of the guys (obviously the smart ass of the group) turns around and to show off infront of his mates, says "Aren't you a pretty young lass."

Now, just to clarify, I'm a guy. I look completely like a guy, and I don't appreciate this sort of talk. I'm used to all the talk that you get from idiots that are drinking, and even worse, idiots that are trying to show off in front of their mates. But the thing he did next really shocked me.

He turned around and grabbed me square in the nuts and took a squeeze.

Well the next sound was, me dropping my whole stack of glasses, smashing them all over the floor, followed swiftly by me throwing him into an arm lock as I knocked the bar stool out from under him (god that must of hurt, all his weight on his shoulder) and walked/dragged him over to the door, where my manager was already standing holding open the doors

My manager said to him on the way out "You're lucky it's him. If that was me I would have smashed the glasses square in your face."

Hmm, some people seem to think bar-staff are fair game for sexual harassment (either gender.) I lost count the number of times I was groped and bum-slapped by drunk middle-age women, women's hockey teams, hen nights, one elderly male customer...

I had a woman try to return a 12 drawer trolley the other day because she had failed to count the number of parts properly, as well as having failed to look at the (very clear) instructions. She kept insisting it was faulty, I practically had to build the damn thing for her to show it was fine. What made it even more ludicrous is that she'd taken a bus from Campsie to Five Dock to try to return a perfectly functioning item. Luckily it was very quiet for a Saturday.

 

[GeneralDefiance]

I think whatever job you go into your going to take a bit of crap, most of it unimportant manageable crap. Ive worked in bars, nightclubs,building sites,retail, call centre sales...and there was always something or someone to deal with and in nearly all of them ive been verbally abused by someone drunk or high on all sorts.

 

[Twistedx_99]

Please don't let this thread die! I need it to avoid doing school work!

 

[Reep]

But I was feeling a bit evil that day so I went round to the escalators and nodded at big man and wished him a nice day then nodded to one of my co workers down stairs which really makes him nervous so he takes the bag close to his chest and walks really quickly down the stairs. Now our security guards thought I was nodding at them and they saw the man speed up so you can guess how they react. They walk over to big man stop him, he doesn't like that so he tries to brush by, our guards are hard to move so he stayed where he was. The guards asked to see his bag he handed it over and we found not only socks but some cheap boxer shorts he didn't pay for. He was taken to the security room with me laughing back to the tills. I get a thanks and I got back to work.

Oh that is as diabolical as it is hilarious, gave me a good laugh.

Ive recently started at Target and been there for about 3 months, most people ive met who actually have a problem or anything seem to be pretty understanding.

I must be so damn lucky...

 

[Xhumed]

But I was feeling a bit evil that day so I went round to the escalators and nodded at big man and wished him a nice day then nodded to one of my co workers down stairs which really makes him nervous so he takes the bag close to his chest and walks really quickly down the stairs. Now our security guards thought I was nodding at them and they saw the man speed up so you can guess how they react. They walk over to big man stop him, he doesn't like that so he tries to brush by, our guards are hard to move so he stayed where he was. The guards asked to see his bag he handed it over and we found not only socks but some cheap boxer shorts he didn't pay for. He was taken to the security room with me laughing back to the tills. I get a thanks and I got back to work.

Oh that is as diabolical as it is hilarious, gave me a good laugh.

Ive recently started at Target and been there for about 3 months, most people ive met who actually have a problem or anything seem to be pretty understanding.

I must be so damn lucky...

You've jinxed it now. That rumbling sound you hear is all the local fuckwits stampeding towards you to make bullshit complaints and fail to understand anything you say...

 

[dantheman931]

I think whatever job you go into your going to take a bit of crap, most of it unimportant manageable crap. Ive worked in bars, nightclubs,building sites,retail, call centre sales...and there was always something or someone to deal with and in nearly all of them ive been verbally abused by someone drunk or high on all sorts.

You can get drunk / high on allsorts? [http://fineartamerica.com/images-medium/liquorice-allsorts-simon-fairless.jpg] Man, good thing I don't like licorice...

 

[GeneralDefiance]

I think whatever job you go into your going to take a bit of crap, most of it unimportant manageable crap. Ive worked in bars, nightclubs,building sites,retail, call centre sales...and there was always something or someone to deal with and in nearly all of them ive been verbally abused by someone drunk or high on all sorts.

You can get drunk / high on allsorts? [http://fineartamerica.com/images-medium/liquorice-allsorts-simon-fairless.jpg] Man, good thing I don't like licorice...

its the sherbert loonies that worry me....

 

[dantheman931]

I think whatever job you go into your going to take a bit of crap, most of it unimportant manageable crap. Ive worked in bars, nightclubs,building sites,retail, call centre sales...and there was always something or someone to deal with and in nearly all of them ive been verbally abused by someone drunk or high on all sorts.

You can get drunk / high on allsorts? [http://fineartamerica.com/images-medium/liquorice-allsorts-simon-fairless.jpg] Man, good thing I don't like licorice...

its the sherbert loonies that worry me....

*badum-tssh*

Incidentally, this blog [http://www.thatsmyboss.com/] is about bosses, not customers, but it's still good reading. Try here [http://notalwaysright.com/] for (painfully) amusing customer stories.

 

[team star pug]

I actually created an account here just because of this thread.
These stories are great, and oh so familiar.

I work in a Coles supermarket in AUS, I don't have much in the way of memorable customers, it's more a number of small annoyances possessed by almost every person I serve.

The number of people who press the wrong button on the EFTPOS pinpad is just staggering, they somehow confuse the blue arrow-shaped button pointing at the word "credit", with the bright red button that says "cancel".

I did have one customer that stuck in my mind.
Cust: Can I pay some of the bill in cash and some on my card?
Me: Yes that's fine.
Cust:Great, then I'll pay $80 in cash (hands me $50,$20,$10), and the rest on card.
Me:OK, the card needs to go through first.

I run through her bank card, then...

Cust:Can I withdraw some money from my account?
MeLooking at the three notes in my hand) Yes, but it would be easier to simply keep this cash and pay more on the card.
Custlooking confused) Oh no, I want to withdraw a specific amount.
MeGiving in) OK how much would you like?
Cust: $20
Me:...

I hand her the $20 note she just gave me

Me:Here you go.

It took a few seconds to sink in, but the look on her face when she realized was priceless.


Just today I had one of the newer employees ask me how long I'd been working here, when I told him I'd been here just over two years he asked how I hadn't been driven mad yet, the only answer I could give was that I was mad before I started.

wouldyou mindrunning that by me again? why was she making a face

 

[Reep]

Bumping this thread with one pretty recent story, i was working at Target and an elderly couple come to buy two bikes, one male and the other female. I go out the back, find a pile of female bikes and grab the price barcodes off the boxes, i give them the barcode, tell them to go to the registers to purchase the female bike and to check if there's any male bikes in stock.

30 minutes later they turn up at the loading zone ready to pick up their bikes, we load the female bike into their car, check the reciept and turns out they bought two female bikes instead of checking for a male bike. Luckily my shift ended just then so i don't know how they ended up.

Pretty bad story but i needed some content to bump this epic thread with.

 

[tmujir955]

"dont worry, guy was a tool you told him countless times about it being green, he even said it himself, video evidence shows all, dont worry about it, take a free drink for you troubles"

Simply awesome. I love it when higher ups actually give a damn.

 

[AceDefective]

The Day Undead nightmare came out I went to blockbuster to get a Microsoft point card to buy it.
What would have taken 5 minutes took 2 hours as I was stuck behind a group of adults demanding a refund because they didn't like the movie they rented.

 

[The Seldom Seen Kid]

This is one when I worked at Subways. This kid comes in and has to use the bathroom. I doesn't matter that he isn't buying anything, so I tell him, "Go ahead." He is in there for about 20 minutes, then he runs out of the store and leaves a strange smudge on the front door. I look at this brown smudge on the door and realize that it's shit, so I run into the bathroom. Turns out that this kid decided to fingerpaint with his own shit. It took me an hour to clean up his "masterpiece."

Faith in human decency = lost.

 

[CaptainKoala]

Me: "Thank you for calling Computer Renaissance, my name is Cory how can I help you?"
Customer: "Is this computer Renaissance?"
Me: "Yes."
Customer: "And who am I talking to?"

Happens at least once a day.

 

[CaptainKoala]

One extremely rainy day, while working at Best Buy, we had this teenage guy come in. He was pretty obviously stealing stuff, but it wasn't on camera, and my managers might have been lazy. Several of us are watching this kid walk out of the store with stolen merchandise (we didn't really care), but after walking to his car in the pouring rain, he realized he locked his keys inside. Moron had to walk back into our store with the stolen stuff to use our phone.

Jump ahead two years. I'm working at Jack-In-The-Box, and I'm miserable. The job started out kind of fun, but went downhill in a hurry. One night, I'm completely stressed out and exhausted because we were getting slammed, and it was just me and my manager. I hear the bell that someone pulled up in the drive-through.
Me:"Welcome to Jack-In-The-Box, may I take your order?"
...Silence...
I repeat myself twice, and still silence remains. Finally, I hear him speak in his extremely slow, stoned out of his mind voice, "I don't have enough money." I'm already frustrated from the night, and he's been wasting a few minutes sitting in the drive-through not responding. So I say, "OK, so get out of the drive-through." He flips shit. "Hey! You know what! Fuck you man!" Extremely frustrated, I reply, "Fuck you, too." His madness escalates. He starts screaming all this tough shit at me like "Come out here and say that!" and "You know who the fuck I am?" He eventually pulls around to the window and starts banging on it. Dude's in his boxers, going crazy, and my manager finally threatens to call the cops. He left after the threat, but not before counter-threatening to come back and kill me. I quit a few days after that.

Not my experience, but a marvelous story nonetheless: My cousin, Matt, worked at a small grocery store that just opened up just outside of Chicago. Their big pull was that they delivered all their groceries to people. Their policy was, for obvious reasons, that all drivers were supposed to do was set the bags on the floor in the kitchen and have the customer sign the receipt. Matt gets to one house and rings the doorbell. The whoriest old lady opens the door. The woman was of completely unknown age, but she was covered in make-up like she was looking to turn some tricks. She's holding a cig and blowing the smoke in my cousin's face. She asks him to come inside to the kitchen. The woman starts to order Matt to help her put the groceries away. There was even a turkey, still in its Styrofoam tray and plastic wrap, she tells him to put straight into the oven, ignoring the obvious hazards. After he finishes, already freaked out, Matt asks her to sign the receipt. She points to a poorly lit hallway and says, "My husband'll sign for it." Matt thought he was going to get killed at this point. The hallway she pointed to had two doors on the left and two on the right. Matt looks in the first door on the right...Nothing...He looks in first door on the left...Nothing...He gets to the second door on the right, and there is a full sized manikin sitting upright in a chair with a person's face printed out on a piece of paper and glued to its head. Utterly horrified, thinking she believes this doll to be her husband, and that he was about to get axe-murdered, he turns around. The second door on the left had the actual husband, sitting at his desk pretending to do work to avoid his wife. He angrily signed the paper and grumbled obscenities at Matt. My cousin bolted the hell out of there like there was no tomorrow.

HAHAHA! That's one of the funniest things that's ever been my pleasure to read in a very long time.

 

[v3n0mat3]

I was a temp at a Honeybaked Ham Co. for Christmas 2010. Oh yeah. Here's the worst story I have.

60-some year old lady comes in, wanting a ham. I give her the usual questions ("how many are you feeding?", "any leftovers?") to help her along. We have a few hams (around 6 or so) left for that size. So, I begin by giving her an appropriate-sized ham. I open the ham to show her what it looks like. "This looks like it has too much fat on it, and I don't want that." No big deal, just grab another. "This looks too small, got another one a little bigger?" Keep in mind, I grabbed a ham that was .3 lbs smaller than the last. It really doesn't make a damn bit of difference in appearance. I showed her most the hams at that size we had left (until we got new hams glazed, which takes about 5-10 mins.) I've brought another employee helping me pull and present hams at this point. She's basically poo-pooing every ham I show her, and every ham I show has marginal differences in size color (I kid you not), fat content, etc., and there was nothing pleasing her. All the while, giving me this sob story about having to drive all the way out to White Bear and back here to get a ham. In my head: "I don't care. You want a ham or not? You're clogging up the fucking line." My mouth: "It'll be a few until we get new hams, I apologize." I look over and I notice the line was getting longer. So, without a choice, I leave the poor kid to help her, as I help other customers with their order. I breeze through the line and as soon as I'm done with the last customer in my queue, the new hams arrive from the backroom. She gives me this condescending look and points over to the ham rack and says "look". In my head: "Good. Now we can take care of this old *****'s order." She picks up the first one the kid presented, bought it, and left. Ugh.

 

[The Human Torch]

Okay, so I used to work for Dutch train-company at Amsterdam Central. My job was to sell tickets, give travel advice and help people get around the station, it was a simple job and it paid well, but the people you deal with...

I can give you a few thousand stories about how people are never able to find the platforms they need to be at, or how they missed an announcement that a train was changing platform, and thusly, it's all my fault, but there is one story that sticks out to me.

I was sitting in a service desk in the middle of the main hallway, along with a female, white co-worker (you will get why I am mentioning her ethnicy in a moment). I was helping the people in line, when suddenly this Turkish guy stands to the side of my service desk, plops down a huge portion of fries with mayonaise on my counter and starts eating it, about 20 centimeters away from me. I ask him to please take his food somewhere else and stand in line if he wants to have some information. He says "no, I don't want to stand in line and you need to tell me where the next train to Utrecht (big city nearby Amsterdam) leaves".

Again, I tell him to stand in line like the other people and to take his food away. He repeats his point and I repeat mine about 3 more times. My co-worker hears it all, and tells the guy in a less than polite tone to get the hell away from us. He then goes on a tirade on how he will not listen to white woman, how she is the devil and he will only talk to men because women aren't worth jack.

So, I call in security, they come and try to escort him away. To my amazement, they fail horrendously, no matter how they talk into him, no matter how they try to grab him, he slithers and slides and keeps asking me where the train leaves to Utrecht (in the same tone of voice all the time, very calm, almost creepy).

Out of sheer frustration (because this has been going on for almost 15 minutes) I tell him that he should go to platform 5 where his train will leave in 10 minutes. He actually thanks me, says that it's not my fault and that I am a very good employee, but that my co-worker is the devil and that I should get rid of her.

Never before have I witnessed such an event, it even kept me awake the following night.

 

[redisforever]

Come on! Let's keep it going, I need entertainment after exams!

 

[wrightguy0]

I used to work at a call center, jack of all trades for a a certain dog related canadian cell phone company.

my first week of on the floor training, actually my first day taking calls, I get this call from a woman having trouble with her iPhone and iTunes. Now, i thought it was just an installation issue, so i go over it with her, all the steps to install iTunes, turns out that's not the problem, she doesn't know how to download music onto the iPhone. After all was said and done i turned to the guy i was training with (we were assigned a partner and we alternated calls) and said (laughing, of course).."that was totally something my mother would have done if she was having a simple issue with technology"

Then there was the time i had this one customer who wanted to talk to the head boss about expanding our brand....into africa...now as a canadian company i don't think we can do that, but i directed him to our HQ's contact info on the site, just to be nice, he was so happy i was helpful he offered to give me tickets to a leaf's game, one of the best days at work ever, because later my system glitched and didn't send me calls for the remaining 6 hours of an eight hour shift, and i had talked to that guy for nearly an hour.

then there were the callers you just wanted to kill....

One of them was a lady who called up asking why there was a billing error from us, so i did standard procedure,
Me: Do you have your ten digit [insert company name] phone number?
Stupid *****: No
M: Do you remember your account number?
SB: No
M: Do you have any bills or other information that would have either your phone number or account number on it?
SB: No.

Me: ¬_¬

cue two of the most hellish hours of my job ever as i tried to find her account with the mountain of "useful" information she had given me ¬_¬

I finally got something out of her and got into an account, took a look around at the policies and everything like a good little CSR, annnnnnd I have no fucking clue what it is i'm looking at ¬_¬

her information was so WRONG it literally sent me into a part of the system i wasn't supposed to see, nor was i trained to go into, hell it wasn't even our company, it was our parent company's part of the system, cue 40 minutes of me fumbling about as the customer gets more Irate, yes, what started as a rather simple, pleasant call quickly devolved into an irate Customer calling me useless and stupid, over and over and over. This coming from the stupid ***** who didn't even remember her account details, and sent me off to a place i wasn't trained to go, My service can only be as good as the information provided to me by the customer. She eventually refused to even talk to me and i had to get the site manager, after this C@#% decided she didn't want to wait for me to call up to an off site supervisor.

I kinda had a breakdown on the floor that day listening in on the call while the customer continued to insult my intelligence directly to my boss' boss, she eventually figured out we had been sent to the wrong place, so i wasn't chewed out, but i really wanted to tell that ***** "listen, you are the one who couldn't remember their account details, it took a considerable amount of time to even get into an account with your name on it, to top it all off my training doesn't even cover the account you sent me into, if anyone here is the stupid one, it's you"

but my company had a strict policy of being nice to customers, even if they were rude or insulting. ¬_¬

I'm glad i quit a few months later, the job was shit, the customers were retarded, and management were a pack of fuckwits. the only thing i really liked were my co-workers, they were hilarious, like the guy who got so stoned on the job that we tweeked him right out and made him paranoid that he was going deaf, or the "Force Battle" i had with a friend who was at the other end of the aisle.