Apparently we have NO professionalism and NO pride in our work

[Valentinian]

You know how sometimes you have customers who have genuine reasons to be upset - heck, genuine reasons to be really angry - but they keep it together and stay polite and civil, because they don't want to be sucky? I like those people. I do my best to make those people happy, and if I can't succeed I genuinely feel bad.

Then there's the people who think that anything that they don't like, no matter how petty or stupid, gives them licence to rip you up one side and down the other, because hey! They're the almighty customer, which means they're practically God and we should be down on our knees begging for their forgiveness! I don't like those people, and frankly, if they stay unhappy I don't give a flying ffffffffruitcake.

We got one of each this morning.

First there was Nice Customer With Genuine Problems. We've been working on her very large order for... er... rather more months than it should have taken, and everything that can go wrong has gone wrong. Some of it is our fault. A lot of it has not been our fault, but even when it's our materials suppliers or subcontractors that have screwed up, we haven't caught the errors as soon as we should have and we have been, frankly, terrible at keeping Nice Customer informed of what's going on. For the last couple of months we've been doing better, and it looked like we were on track to get practically everything completed and all sorted out this morning...

...but one of our materials suppliers dropped the ball in a big way, and a subcontractor made a Thing using the wrong Stuff (not their fault, they had no reason to believe that it wasn't what it was labeled as), and we didn't realise what had happened even though we had ample opportunity to, and the poor woman had a big delivery of Not The Right Stuff arrive for installation right when she was hoping to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

She was really, really angry. I do not blame her in the least; we screwed up, and screwed up big, at the end of a long string of screwups. And yet she was still polite and controlled when she was talking to me, and she paused the conversation and walked away when she got to a point where she didn't think she could stay polite, and she made a point of telling me that she's been really happy with the customer service that K and I have been giving her, and... basically she's a class act and a lovely person and I will fix this for her if I have to build her Things myself.

Ahem. Anyway.

Not long after that conversation, while I was still calling three different places to find out exactly what had gone wrong and how fast we could fix it and coordinating pictures and evidence to back up a polite "Hey, Supplier, you kinda buggered that one up big time, how about you send us the replacement Stuff to remake this order gratis?", the Not-Nice Customer With No Real Problem called.

(As I'm sure you can imagine, the timing did not make me any happier with him.)

Anyway, he opened with both barrels. We installed his Things yesterday and he is disgusted! Disgusted with our complete lack of professionalism! It is obvious that we take no pride in our work! He-- okay, you get the gist, that's almost a direct quote from the start of his tirade. He kept going for a while before I could get out of him just exactly what horrible, terrible crime against customerkind we had committed.

There is a slight snag in the material of one Thing. Okay, that's a real reason to not be happy, but it doesn't merit the vitriol he was yelling at me. We will fix it.

One of his other Things is slightly crumpled. He made a point of telling me he had been very patient and waited a whole twenty-four hours (!!!) to see if the wrinkles would smooth out, but they hadn't and rawrrrrblarghle he and his wife can't be expected to get out an iron and smooth out a Thing that should be perfect on delivery rawr spit... For crying out loud.

There are a couple of short thread ends sticking out at the ends of seams. Well, yeah, that is a Thing that Happens, and apparently he and his wife are also incapable of operating a pair of scissors to trim them off if they offend them so. Believe me, if they'd been obvious we would have trimmed them off ourselves.

And finally, what he seemed to be most upset by - he brought it up first, and last, and in the middle, and attached most of the ranting about 'lack of professionalism' and so forth to this complaint... there were some loose scraps of thread clinging to the backs of his Things, and he had to clean them off. HOW COULD WE.

...

......

.........okay, I try to be polite at all times, but the closest I could come to giving this guy an apology was saying "I'm sorry you're not happy" and not actually telling him what I thought of his terrible horrible problems to his face. I booked our installer to pick up the Things, and the first appointment slot we had was a week from now (which, hey, gives his crumpled Thing a more reasonable amount of time to smooth out), and that was even more proof that we are just complete incompetents who take no pride in our work. He and his wife have waited SO LONG for their Things (actually, we delivered within our original perfectly reasonable ETA, thankyouverymuch) and now they have to wait another whole WEEK to get their Things FIXED OH MY GOD THE WORLD WILL END. Maybe his wife will get tired of his grousing and take a pair of scissors to the terrible horrible thread ends that are sticking out a whole half-inch.




So. I'm currently sitting at home drinking good schnapps out of a Japanese teacup (big enough you get a good drink, small enough you can kid yourself you aren't really drinking more than a shot) and feeling a bit better about my day, and when that twerp's Things arrive for us to 'fix' we plan to gather around and mock his life choices. That'll be fun.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Whenever I encounter or witness someone with the same level of high dramatics as Customer Jerkface there, I just remind myself that they're going to wind up giving themselves a heart attack or embolism or similar with their high blood pressure.

And then I smile at this thought and go on with my day.

[Food Lady]

Good grief! Just get out the scissors! Stuff happens.

[Evannah]

I'm like the first customer. My laptop fan broke so had to get it repaired but it came back not fixed, and I was not happy, but I remained calm and polite. (it's fixed now) It really isn't that hard. The customers who get angry probably like yelling at others. I find it disgusting.

[Valentinian]

THEY CAME BACK!

The asshole couple CAME BACK! Okay, it's more Asshole Dude And His Wife Who May Or May Not Be An Asshole In Her Own Right, We Can't Tell Because He's Done All The Yelling, but whatever, they came back! Wait, wait, before we get to that bit I have to fill you in on what happened with the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Things we made, that were being brought back to be fixed.

"What happened, Val?" I hear you say. WELP. What happened is that our installer went out to get the Things, and Asshole Dude handed him an envelope with the loose threads he'd pulled off them in it and invited him to "stick it up {his} arse". Then Asshole Dude asked him if our workroom was full of "slants", because "the quality of these is so bad that it looks like you're running a Chinese sweatshop."

(Apparently Asshole Dude is not just an Asshole, he's a Racist Asshole.)

Anyway, our installer managed not to tell Asshole Dude to stick his attitude up his own ass, and the Things were brought back, and our workroom supervisor had a look at them.

And then she had another look at them.

And a harder look. And she called other people over to have a look.

And she could not find a single thing to fix. No snag. No long thread ends. Not even much in the way of crumpling. She found one loose thread stuck to one of them, and pulled it off, and then packed the Things back up to go back, and gnawed on her knuckles for a while wondering how Asshole Dude would react if he could tell that we hadn't actually 'fixed' a damn thing.

And our installer took them back, and Asshole Dude didn't say a word.

And last week, Asshole Dude and his wife were back in our showroom, looking at options and asking us to pull out the samples they'd had before and generally acting as if Nothing Had Ever Happened.

And I went over and asked them if I could help... and they told me what they were looking for... and I nearly told them to get the fuck out and never come back.

There is nothing wrong with their Things. There never was anything wrong with their Things. The problem is that they don't like the colour they picked. The colour they agonised over, and took months to decide on, and took samples home to consider four times, and now it turns out that they liked the way the samples looked but when they look at a whole full-sized Thing in the room it's in, it's too dark. So they're going to get new Things.

Therefore, I deduce that Asshole Dude was making all that fuss and verbally abusing us and making me, personally, feel like shit, because he was mad that they didn't like the Things they chose and was hoping for us to, IDK, fall down at his feet and grovel and offer to make brand-new Things to make them happy. Presumably free!

Well, that is not going to happen. Because I told the Boss, and the Boss did that angry-laughing thing, and you know what he said?

"Hell, if he was like {name} and actually admitted it was their mistake, we might do something for him. {Name} came right out and said 'Look, I fucked up, I picked this and now I don't like it, is there anything you can do?' So we're giving him a discount. Not this guy. Fuck him."

So yeah. Fuck you, Racist Asshole Dude. Fuck you very much. And I have explicit instructions from the Boss to shut you down like a ton of bricks on your head if you pull that shit on me again.

[aulocksmith]

Your boss needs cloning, stat!

[WishfulSpirit]

I think those people have a general victim mentality. Lacking any sense of agency in their lives, they feel very little control over what happens to them. So they exert control in any way they can: by picking on someone being paid to be nice to you (or who at least could be punished when they're not).