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I had to take a phone call today from a woman who came in earlier to watch a movie around noon. It seems that when she bought her ticket, the cashier charged her for two, which she didn't notice until the evening, when she looked at her receipt. The call started normally, with her explaining the situation and being fairly nice about it, but then it just started to degenerate into this rather long rant from her as she kept bringing up unrelated problems she seemingly had with us.
First, she blamed the multiple-ticket thing on how the cashier was talking with the cashier next to him, "cutting it up," as she called it. She kept saying how she was a teacher or something and how she thought it was great that we hired kids but that we should get kids who would work better. Then she moved on to tell me about her last visit a couple weeks ago where the cashier then didn't scan her loyalty card and was "rude" by saying that the woman had only handed her a credit card. When a manager came to add the proper points onto the card, that manager started "cutting it up" with the employee while doing it. (She really liked that phrase and must have used it four times or so.)
After that, she started on about a broken hand dryer in one of our women's restrooms and how twenty women were waiting to dry their hands on the one remaining one and that it's been broken for five months. When I asked her if she could remember either of the employees' names on these occasions she got offended and said that it was my problem, not hers, to figure that out. When I asked her which bathroom it was in, she demanded my name and was appalled that I, as the manager, wasn't aware something was broken in the theatre. She even asked me to clarify that I was, indeed, the manager, and she seemed rather confused when I said that I was one of them. As she put it, "I just don't understand that." I'm fairly certain she was referring to the fact that there's more than one manager. She even had this moment of (blissful) silence while she contemplated it.
Eventually I got her calmed down (though she wasn't yelling, just ranting, I guess), assured her she could get her refund, and even offered a refund of her proper ticket for the various bad experiences, but she just wanted the one extra one given back. I think she just wanted to rant at someone.
Unfortunately, since she specifically got my name, I couldn't respond to her as I wished, for fear of her sending a negative comment card to corporate (and I have no desire to get written up for sarcasm), so here are the things I wish I could have gotten away with saying.
1. You didn't notice you had an extra ticket, that numbered, bar-coded thing that gets torn by the ticket tearer and handed back to you, both stubs stuck to each other?
2. It's not a crime for employees to talk and "have fun" at their jobs. You accuse them of not paying attention, but you didn't listen to the total ticket amount, either.
3. How can I possibly know which employees I need to talk to if you won't tell me their names? Just because someone is scheduled officially to sell tickets does not mean that someone else isn't taking his place. Plus, you're saying a girl was in box office the last time, but I looked up your card information, and it was done with a male's login code.
4. That hand dryer has not been broken continuously. People just continuously break it. I've lost count of the number of times we've found various activation buttons deliberately pulled out so that the machines are unusable.
5. No, I don't know every single broken thing in our theatre. I care more about the big things, like the leaking water heater we just had or our elevator, which is needing to be reset occasionally. (Otis, just fix it already!)
6. I only asked you the bathroom thing to help myself narrow it down. What if the problem hadn't been a missing button but was instead something like, I don't know, people not realizing they need to push it a certain way that I manage to do correctly somehow while testing them all? Then I would conclude there's nothing wrong, just by getting lucky with that broken one.
7. The bathroom has about eight or nine stalls. I doubt twenty women, as you put it, were waiting to use this one hand dryer. Heck, from my observations, approximately half of all women using the restroom don't wash their hands at all, so that cuts it down even more.
8. That girl with whom you might have dealt eleven days ago was new to box office, but she surely would notice two cards in her hand instead of one, as she was working concession before that. Are you sure you didn't just put it down on the counter and expect her to notice without telling her?
9. If you don't want compensation for your supposedly horrible experiences and just want the one ticket refunded, why tell me all this? Why accuse our employees of being rude? Why act appalled that I don't know some random detail? What was the point?
I just hope that when she comes back in a few weeks that the manager helping her remembers what I put in the log book and doesn't insist on giving her a readmission ticket, which is normal procedure, as our computers can't give refunds from previous days. Like I said, she's got my name, so I wouldn't put it past her to then send a negative comment card to corporate and mention me, since I said she could get the refund. (To tell the truth, I didn't even mention the readmit ticket, since I didn't want her back. I almost suggested she go a few miles down the road to our competing theatre but stopped myself just in time. I can just imagine her putting that on the comment card, as well.)
First, she blamed the multiple-ticket thing on how the cashier was talking with the cashier next to him, "cutting it up," as she called it. She kept saying how she was a teacher or something and how she thought it was great that we hired kids but that we should get kids who would work better. Then she moved on to tell me about her last visit a couple weeks ago where the cashier then didn't scan her loyalty card and was "rude" by saying that the woman had only handed her a credit card. When a manager came to add the proper points onto the card, that manager started "cutting it up" with the employee while doing it. (She really liked that phrase and must have used it four times or so.)
After that, she started on about a broken hand dryer in one of our women's restrooms and how twenty women were waiting to dry their hands on the one remaining one and that it's been broken for five months. When I asked her if she could remember either of the employees' names on these occasions she got offended and said that it was my problem, not hers, to figure that out. When I asked her which bathroom it was in, she demanded my name and was appalled that I, as the manager, wasn't aware something was broken in the theatre. She even asked me to clarify that I was, indeed, the manager, and she seemed rather confused when I said that I was one of them. As she put it, "I just don't understand that." I'm fairly certain she was referring to the fact that there's more than one manager. She even had this moment of (blissful) silence while she contemplated it.
Eventually I got her calmed down (though she wasn't yelling, just ranting, I guess), assured her she could get her refund, and even offered a refund of her proper ticket for the various bad experiences, but she just wanted the one extra one given back. I think she just wanted to rant at someone.
Unfortunately, since she specifically got my name, I couldn't respond to her as I wished, for fear of her sending a negative comment card to corporate (and I have no desire to get written up for sarcasm), so here are the things I wish I could have gotten away with saying.
1. You didn't notice you had an extra ticket, that numbered, bar-coded thing that gets torn by the ticket tearer and handed back to you, both stubs stuck to each other?
2. It's not a crime for employees to talk and "have fun" at their jobs. You accuse them of not paying attention, but you didn't listen to the total ticket amount, either.
3. How can I possibly know which employees I need to talk to if you won't tell me their names? Just because someone is scheduled officially to sell tickets does not mean that someone else isn't taking his place. Plus, you're saying a girl was in box office the last time, but I looked up your card information, and it was done with a male's login code.
4. That hand dryer has not been broken continuously. People just continuously break it. I've lost count of the number of times we've found various activation buttons deliberately pulled out so that the machines are unusable.
5. No, I don't know every single broken thing in our theatre. I care more about the big things, like the leaking water heater we just had or our elevator, which is needing to be reset occasionally. (Otis, just fix it already!)
6. I only asked you the bathroom thing to help myself narrow it down. What if the problem hadn't been a missing button but was instead something like, I don't know, people not realizing they need to push it a certain way that I manage to do correctly somehow while testing them all? Then I would conclude there's nothing wrong, just by getting lucky with that broken one.
7. The bathroom has about eight or nine stalls. I doubt twenty women, as you put it, were waiting to use this one hand dryer. Heck, from my observations, approximately half of all women using the restroom don't wash their hands at all, so that cuts it down even more.
8. That girl with whom you might have dealt eleven days ago was new to box office, but she surely would notice two cards in her hand instead of one, as she was working concession before that. Are you sure you didn't just put it down on the counter and expect her to notice without telling her?
9. If you don't want compensation for your supposedly horrible experiences and just want the one ticket refunded, why tell me all this? Why accuse our employees of being rude? Why act appalled that I don't know some random detail? What was the point?
I just hope that when she comes back in a few weeks that the manager helping her remembers what I put in the log book and doesn't insist on giving her a readmission ticket, which is normal procedure, as our computers can't give refunds from previous days. Like I said, she's got my name, so I wouldn't put it past her to then send a negative comment card to corporate and mention me, since I said she could get the refund. (To tell the truth, I didn't even mention the readmit ticket, since I didn't want her back. I almost suggested she go a few miles down the road to our competing theatre but stopped myself just in time. I can just imagine her putting that on the comment card, as well.)
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