An Above Average Idiot's tale of woe

[carryonnow]

An actual phone call between me and an above average idiot (AAI):



Store Mgr:"Thank you for calling RR Ranch, this is Carry. How can I help you?"

AAI: "Uhya...I need to talk to the manager."

SM "You are speaking with the manager, how can I help you?"

AAI: "Ohumyaok, so last night I stopped to get gas at your store. I had $18.00 in my account but after I pump $1.25 the pump turned off and wouldn't let me get the rest of my $18.00. Can I get my money back?"

SM: "Let me make sure I understand the problem. You came to the store and slid your card at the pump, the pump turned on, and you pumped $1.25 of gas into your car...now you want your money back?"

AAI: "Yeah, that's pretty much what happened. I called my bank and they said if I had my receipt, I could get a refund."

SM: "yes, of course. How do you intend to give the gas back to me?"

AAI: "Give the gas back?? I used the gas to get to work."

SM: "So you want me to give you $1.25 back and I don't get my product back, is that what you are saying?"

AAI: "No, I didn't get the $18.00 like I wanted...so I want my money back so I have $18 again...I DO have a receipt....doesn't that matter?"

SM: "Well I would gladly refund your money but I would need my product back; that's kind of how the refund process works. You give me the thing that you DON'T want or need and in exchange I return your money to you."

AAI: "Look lady, I don't have your 'product' but you are keeping my money...I don't think that is fair."

SM: "Let me try to explain this another way. Let's say that you come in and buy a gallon of milk. You go home and use the entire gallon of milk. After using the entire gallon of milk, you come in with an empty plastic container and ask for your money back because you didn't get what you wanted. I couldn't give you your money back because you can't give me the product. I can't even give you a replacement because there is nothing left to replace. Do you understand what I am saying?"

AAI: "No...because I didn't get milk I got $1.25 of gas. I put it in my gas tank...so I can't give it back to you..."



I HAD to interrupt the MENSA wanna-be "That is precisely my point...you can't give it back because you used it. Tellya what, you bring me $1.25 of gas and I will gladly give you back your money. Until you can do that, I cannot and will not give you any money back. Hope you have a good weekend."

[Kittish]

I think there may have been a failure in communication from AAI. I think what the guy was trying to say is that he thought your store had charged him his entire $18, not the $1.25 in fuel he actually got. That, or he's running nose first into the bank hold for pre-authorizing at the pump that hasn't fallen off yet and can't comprehend that.

[MoonCat]

But he did say the pump shut off at $1.25, why would it have done that if he actually had at least $18 in his account? I get the pre-authorizing thing but why stop at $1.25 worth of gas?

[EricKei]

Let's say that you come in and buy a gallon of milk. You go home and use the entire gallon of milk. After using the entire gallon of milk, you come in with an empty plastic container and ask for your money back because you didn't get what you wanted.

Sadly, customers pull this all the damn time with pizza delivery. Even worse, it WORKS, as often as not!

"Yeah, I got a pizza from you guys two hours/days/weeks ago and it was made wrong...Whaddya mean we gotta give it back?! We ate it all! ...Well, no, we just didn't wanna complain at the time, so we ate it instead of calling you. We were hungry! But yeah, now we want a free replacement with pepperoni, sausage, green peppers..."

[notalwaysright]

But he did say the pump shut off at $1.25, why would it have done that if he actually had at least $18 in his account? I get the pre-authorizing thing but why stop at $1.25 worth of gas?

The other day when I was getting gas the pump stopped at a couple dollars. I started it again, and it filled like normal. I don't know why it stopped in the first place, but after that minor blip everything went fine and I was charged the correct amount.

[Aragarthiel]

I know my truck doesn't like some of the high-pressure pumps, so they'll stop a few times and you have to hold the little trigger thingy. Hubs's truck is similar to mine and only a year older and his hates almost every single gas pump ever. Sounds like something similar happened, and he didn't realize he could keep fueling.

[Titi]

Actually this is a scam that I have run into while working at a gas station. They think that if they just tell you they were overcharged and got no gas that you will just give them the money. The best one I got was a woman who claimed that she was charged $20 for gas that she had pumped but none went into her car. We don't have the clips so you have to hold the pump in the car and you can feel the gas going in. She tried to use her broken fuel gauge as proof that she didn't get any gas. (This was a newer car where when you start the car every gauge goes the top and then down the the levels, the fuel gauge didn't move at all.)

[Racket_Man]

Sadly, customers pull this all the damn time with pizza delivery. Even worse, it WORKS, as often as not!

"Yeah, I got a pizza from you guys two hours/days/weeks ago and it was made wrong...Whaddya mean we gotta give it back?! We ate it all! ...Well, no, we just didn't wanna complain at the time, so we ate it instead of calling you. We were hungry! But yeah, now we want a free replacement with pepperoni, sausage, green peppers..."

NAILED right the first time EXCEPT

Now-a-days it works ALL the time by corp. mandate AND we will NEVER ask for the "supposedly wrong" product back.
see more than a few of my previous posts.



The time line of days/weeks reminds me of one "customer" at the gas station. we had a car wash attached to said station.

A "customer" comes in one night "claiming" they ran their car through our car wash and it was still dirty afterward.

"Well do you still have the ticket for said wash?"
NO this was 3 weeks ago. we were in a hurry and going out of town.



EEEEEEEEEEEEEE sorry there is NOTHING I can do for you
*** cue much bitchin and complaining*****

[dalesys]

... EEEEEEEEEEEEEE ...

Mree Lah Foe, yer too damn stupid for me...
EEEEEEEEEEEEEE...
Another damn done gone.

[EvilEmpryss]

I'm going with the reasoning that this AAI doesn't understand bank holds when pumping gas: he got $1.25 in gas, but the hold hasn't cleared from the rest of his money. The pump doesn't know that you're only going to pump ten of your eighteen dollars, so it tries to grab something like $50 from your account to cover what you're doing, just in case. When it can't do so, it shuts off the gas or denies the transaction completely. I've had this happen when I used a card for an account with only about $30 in it. Then I had to wait for the hold to clear for me to be able to use the rest of my money in my account.

Now I know that if I have a low account and I have to use that particular card, I go inside and prepay. They don't put a hold on it then, and I can pump exactly what I want without the pump fussing at me.

But seriously, every pump I've seen in the States in the last decade has a sticker on it warning people that there may be a hold placed on their accounts if they use a debit card. Obliviousness sux almost as much as illiteracy.

[Aragarthiel]

I used to help out at a grocery store deli (actually its own restaurant, but it acted as a deli) that was owned by a couple Hubs and I were friends with. One day, I answered the phone to a rather angry woman who demanded to talk to the "manager." It was just me and the owners there so I gave the phone to one of them.

Apparently, she had ordered five fried chicken breast meals from there two weeks before and they were raw in the middle. She didn't have a receipt and claimed that her family had eaten the food and said it was disgusting (you gave your kids chicken breasts that you claimed were raw, and they ate them? Really?). Owner wouldn't give her a refund, and he later told me that she demanded the corporate number. He told her, "This is the corporate number," and she hung up in a huff.

Never heard from her again.

[bankworking]

The fun thing about holds from pay-at-the-pump gas stations is that it seems often enough the bank and the gas station will each blame each other for the hold. A customer (who gets the wrong employees) can go back and forth to increasing frustration as the bank tells them that the gas station put the funds on hold and they have to wait for the charge to either clear or time-out, and the gas station will tell the customer that they have no control over bank holds of transactions.

It seems that the truth is a little of both.
The amount held itself can depend on the gas station. I see a lot of pay-at-the pump authorizations that only check the card for a single dollar. Others check the card for $50 or even more. At our bank, we hold whatever the merchant checked as available, so we get a lot of those $1 holds for gas. So when we do get a $50 hold, we can honestly tell the customer that we are holding the $50 because that is what the gas station checked to see if it was available.

Whether it's the $1 hold or $50, my bank won't clear it until the actual charge comes through (with a 3-day time out). Sometimes this becomes an issue if a customer swipes their card to authorize more than once or cancels the transaction after we authorized it... we're waiting for a transaction to clear, one for each authorization, and if nothing comes through, 3-days of hold time can be a lot for a customer. How to get this released? Well, we can release it at the bank, but management doesn't want us to except in extreme circumstances because they worry that the charge will end up coming through after all or that employees will overuse the privilege and start releasing holds for charges that turn out to be unauthorized and instead need disputes.

What we're trained to tell most customers is that the merchant would have to notify us that the authorization was canceled... which does appear possible to do, as I've seen some merchants do it on their credit card systems and our hold automatically release accordingly, but I'm betting the hows depend on the system the merchant is using and the time period since the charge and the request for letting us know it's canceled.

So, we can release the hold easily, but won't, and the merchants might be able to release the hold (actually by putting through some sort of cancellation via the credit card processor that tells our system that it is safe to release the hold), but for them it is much more complicated, if their system is set up to do it at all.

[Catwoman2965]

This is exactly why I will never use my debit card at the gas station. That, and i there's any fraud, which I know can happen, I'm not out any money for any great length of time.

I also live in NJ so prepay isn't an issue as we don't pump our own. I will use cash, or a cc if I'm traveling. Yes, they put a hold on the cc as well, but its not usually an issue for me, and if there's any misuse, and someone gets ahold of my cc number, I just dispute that charge, and am not responsible, vs. trying to get my money back from the bank.

[Primer]

I don't use debit, either. All my credit cards have $0 liability in case of fraud. That said, 99.9% of the places I have ever gotten gas have a $1 "hold" or "pending transaction" show online until the charge actually goes through. That 0.1%? $100. I don't get gas there any more.

[XCashier]

Owner wouldn't give her a refund, and he later told me that she demanded the corporate number. He told her, "This is the corporate number," and she hung up in a huff.

That is probably the best thing about owning your own business. You are on the top rung, so you make the rules and don't have to answer to some wishy-washy, "customer is always right" dumbass corporate.

Oh, and your friend rocks for not knuckling under to that scammer.