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Our state has recently been hit with record flooding. An area the size of France & Germany combined is currently under water, yep it's wet. Fortunately where I am is nice and dry. Possibly unfortunately, so is the shop I work at. Why unfortunately? Well the branch of our store in a nearby town went underwater (along with 3/4 of the town), so people have been calling us.
Almost every second call goes something like this:
"I've been trying to ring [town] store, and the phone rings out."
"Yes they are closed because of flood damage"
Considering most of the town went underwater, and had blanket media coverage, it is a bit dim of people to be wondering why their phone doesn't answer. But people get dimmer. At this point in the conversation their response will usually be either "aaahh ok" from the slightly smart ones, or "But the floods there went down a week ago" from the not so smart ones, so you have to explain "yes, but the store went completely under water, everything inside was destroyed, so they have a massive cleanup job".
Now that is normally enough to satisfy them, and so far we are talking about Stupid, not Sucky. But of course, where there are stupid customers there are also sucky, and he rang up yesterday.
After going through the above for the gazillionth time and thinking that would be the end of the call like the other gazillion calls that morning, SC decided "That's not good enough".
SC then went on to complain because they weren't working fast enough, getting cranky because if there was so much to do why wasn't I out there helping, getting cranky because I couldn't give a firm re-opening date, and finally getting cranky because I wasn't prepared to a) give him a substantial discount for his inconvenience and b) personally drive his product out to him (about 70 miles away) because he couldn't possibly wait for the post. In the end I just cut into his rant and said "well sorry sir, it appears I can't help you" and hung up on him. I was expecting my boss to get a complaint call, but none came (yet).
Almost every second call goes something like this:
"I've been trying to ring [town] store, and the phone rings out."
"Yes they are closed because of flood damage"
Considering most of the town went underwater, and had blanket media coverage, it is a bit dim of people to be wondering why their phone doesn't answer. But people get dimmer. At this point in the conversation their response will usually be either "aaahh ok" from the slightly smart ones, or "But the floods there went down a week ago" from the not so smart ones, so you have to explain "yes, but the store went completely under water, everything inside was destroyed, so they have a massive cleanup job".
Now that is normally enough to satisfy them, and so far we are talking about Stupid, not Sucky. But of course, where there are stupid customers there are also sucky, and he rang up yesterday.
After going through the above for the gazillionth time and thinking that would be the end of the call like the other gazillion calls that morning, SC decided "That's not good enough".
SC then went on to complain because they weren't working fast enough, getting cranky because if there was so much to do why wasn't I out there helping, getting cranky because I couldn't give a firm re-opening date, and finally getting cranky because I wasn't prepared to a) give him a substantial discount for his inconvenience and b) personally drive his product out to him (about 70 miles away) because he couldn't possibly wait for the post. In the end I just cut into his rant and said "well sorry sir, it appears I can't help you" and hung up on him. I was expecting my boss to get a complaint call, but none came (yet).
I hope you work at a hardware store, grocery, bank or something similar... 'cuz don't people have more important things to worry about when there's a flood? I also hope the water goes into the rivers soon...
Over the Christmas / New Year period we had:
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