Customers who treat you like an idiot

[Lace Neil Singer]

This may not seem like a big deal, but it really pisses me off when someone either a) patronises me or b) acts like I'm brain dead. Or, as in this incident a couple of days ago (not posted before cuz I still was angry and didn't want to fill a page with repetitions of the word "f***") this woman practically shoved a coupon in my face before I started scanning and said in this really nasty tone of voice, "Don't forget the coupon. Did you hear me? Don't forget it. Last time, the cashier forgot to put it thru. So don't forget it this time."

Firstly, I am not deaf. Secondly, I'm not stupid. And finally, I'm not the cashier you had last time, you stupid stuck up bitch! Even the other people in my queue thought she was a cow; she even said after her little spiel, "And don't think you can answer back, cuz if you do I'll report you." Grr...

[Gravekeeper]

I love it when a caller treats me like an idiot despite the fact they themselves cannot even form a proper sentence. This happens way way to much with callers from a few States which will go unmentioned. -.-

Pardon? I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you across the vast abyss that is intellectual divide that separates us. You'll have to speak up.

[Hobgoblin]

I'm a huge fan of getting asked "Are you new?"

Honestly, no matter how nicely it's asked, there isn't really anything else that pisses me off more. It implies that I don't know what I'm doing, even though I just gave you our exact policy on why I can't give out an employee's phone number. If I've been here for a year and I don't know you or you don't know who I am, don't ask that. It just means you never come in during my shift, every weekday from 8-2.

I'm still mad about it, and this happened last week.

[csever01]

A lady threw a coupon at me and stormed off last week because she presented to me AFTER I had tendered her transaction. Now I don't know about your job, but at mine you CANNOT go back after you've tendered it. She apparently thought this was the most ridiculous thing ever. Do they not realize that WE are not willing to take a SHORTAGE on our drawer because of THEIR stupidity??

[RecoveringKinkoid]

My favorite instance of this was when a woman came into Kinko's for a large paste up job.

At the time, the price list had the price of a past up at 20 bucks. That's right, I squirt rubber glue on a piece of paper, stick on another piece of paper, roll it, wipe off the glue boogers and change you a 20. Not cheap.

So we would usually not charge that fee if there were multiple pasteups and it was a fairly simple job. We would just fudge it to whatever we thought was fair (ah, the old days of Kinko's.). But the 20 dollar price was clearly posted on the service board.

So this extremely nasty, impatient, stuck up bitch came in with a 10 page booklet with a ton of pasteups in it. This was normally the sort of job we would encourage the customer to do themselves. It was a big mess of a job, and in any case would have been cost prohibitive. I mean, we are talking several hundred dollars here, if we charged full price. And that was just for set up. I pointed at the board, and said to her, very nicely, that the cost would be quite a bit and she might consider laying it out herself.had a very nice self-serve paste up area, and I offered to show her how to do it if she'd like to go the cheaper route. Hey, I'd been down that road before. EVERYONE wanted to do their own paste up when they saw that price. We'd fudge for something simple. This chick's job was not simple and was the sort of job that took up a lot of time.

She refused to check the price board. She never asked how much per paste up. But she did make sure to roll her eyes, insult my intelligence, imply I was lazy, and snap at me to "just do the fucking job, okay?"

No problem. I got a deposit on it, and then made a note that the customer knew exactly what she was paying for and that we were charging full pastup charges. I also verbally told the person doing the order that the customer was an asshole (assholes always get charged full price. Back in the bad old days, they also got charged an "Asshole Tax", but there was no need this time. Simply charging her our real price was enough damage.). My only regret was that I wasn't in the room when she came back to pick up her order and pay.

Okay, I'm stupid. Far, far too stupid to go that extra mile and do someone a favor.

[BookstoreEscapee]

I used to get the people who would give you a title one or two words at a time. Or the ISBN (the book's "fingerprint") one digit at a time. I can remember more than one number. It's a ten digit number--just read it off. I can type it as you talk. It bugs me when they'd give it to you with the dashes, too. That's not really an "i think you're an idiot" kind of thing, they're just reading it as they see it, but it's annoying. Cuz I don't use the dashes. 1. dash. 23. 4. 5. dash. 6. 7. 89. dash. 0. Gaaah! I could have found the book on the shelf by now!!!

[Becks]

A lady threw a coupon at me and stormed off last week because she presented to me AFTER I had tendered her transaction. Now I don't know about your job, but at mine you CANNOT go back after you've tendered it. She apparently thought this was the most ridiculous thing ever. Do they not realize that WE are not willing to take a SHORTAGE on our drawer because of THEIR stupidity??

Couldn't she have gone to the customer service desk to return said item, then get another off the shelf and pay for it, using the coupon? Oh, wait...that might make some sort of sense. Never mind.

[MMATM]

About the Asshole Tax thing, semi but still relevant:

We used to charge what I referred to as a "Temporary Dickhead License" or TDL. The TDL price would change depending on what you bought. It was never a separate charge or anything that would be noticed at the end of the day, but it was a subtle way to drive away the worst customers' business. Simultaneously, the extra that was charged to the bad customers could be given as discounts (just as discreetly) to the good customers. Since our menu does not have tax (MA prepared foods/service tax) added in, this was very simple, as the customers never did the math to find out exactly how much they should have been paying. Example:
Jerk customer comes in and orders an egg salad sandwich, then grabs a bag of chips and a cookie, as well as a Tommy's Naked Soda. I'd ring up a chicken salad sandwich (about 50 cents extra), the chips, a "Monster" cookie (about 80 cents extra) and a Hank's soda (20 cents extra). Thus, the $1.50 that they had paid extra could be passed on to the next customer (maybe they would get their chips for free or else their Odwalla Juice would be rung up as a regular juice (which costs $1.45 less). In the case of a day full of really bad customers (which the owner would often give free stuff, since they would complain about everything and he wanted to keep their business, silly man) we could partially make up the cost of the free stuff he kept giving away (e.g. whole loaves of bread at $6.50 a pop, cookies, pastries, bagels, etc etc etc...)
Sorry didn't mean for that to be so long. Now I have to run to class and if I'm late I am so going to be a sucky CS.com-user and come back to complain that the board kept me from getting to class so now I'll never get a degree and never get a job and my being late traumatized me and what are you going to do about it.... *whinge whinge*
I kid of course.

[Bonnie Bitch]

I used to get the people who would give you a title one or two words at a time. Or the ISBN (the book's "fingerprint") one digit at a time. .....

GAAARK!!!!!!!!! I get the ones who call in and rattle off their phone number as fast as humanly possible. Of course, their diction ain't that great to begin with.

Of course, it sounds something like, "feesiuhfifuhfiayteeteeuh."
Anmd when I ask for the area code again, they invariably say, "Two.... <pause for drama>...... nine....<pause for drama>...... Get it now? Are you stupid or deaf?"
Yeah, they're gonnna get those late fees waived.

My other pet peeve is when customers call in and think it's "slick" to read numbers off in pairs. That's just nifty, as long as the area code isn't 805, because Slick the Customer will never understand that he's saying "Eighty-five." Why? Because he's thinking eight-zero-five but saying eighty-five and he's too effin' self-centered to realize that he's saying it wrong.

[LewisLegion]

God, I hate that Bonnie. I deal with numbers all day long, and techs who call in saying numbers like 'fourteen eleven, fifty three' will get corrected VERY swiftly. We type fast. Very fast. If you say 'fourteen', as soon as we hear the four we've put a four in. Oops, now we have to fix it. Also, sixteen sounds an awful lot like sixty, etc. etc.

Numbers given one at a time or I put a smackdown on ya.

[Getoutofmylobby]

When people make reservations, they sometimes like to spell out for me the most obvious of names. If i interrupt them to make the call go faster, they get mad. And what makes it worse is when they do this:

Me: Your last name please?
SC: Hanson, that's H as in Harold... A as in apple.. N as in Nancy...
Me: (sigh) and your first?
SC: Betty, B as in boy...
Me: Your home address?
SC: Twenty-Three Fifty-Two Baker Lane. That's B as in boy... A as in apple...



SC: And that's in Grihziplatzistantinople, Missouri, Zipcode six hundered five twenty-three. Got that wage slave?

[myswtghst]

Gah. Y'all just "spelled out" some of my biggest pet peeves. We use the whatever-you-call-ems that Getoutofmylobby mentioned above, but we really only need them if the spelling is important or if it's for a system ID number, and even then, only on the letters that are easily mistaken for each other (M and N, B, P and V, etc).

Also, people start rattling off numbers as fast as they can as soon as I answer the phone, it really peeves me. Give me a second to even get into the proper window to enter the number, or to grab a pen to write it down. Same applies for notes they want in the case. I type VERY fast, but I still can't type as fast as you can talk, especially when you're using technical jargon I'm unfamiliar with. If you want it word for word in the case, you need to slow down so I can get it word for word.

And I constantly get the a**holes who spit everything out as fast as they can, then immediately get obnoxious and start talking incredibly slowly when asked to repeat what they just muttered/mumbled/slurred together.

Final complaint? Customers who assume they know more about company policy than I do. In the rare case (hey, it happens once in a while) that the customer is someone smarter than me, it still does not mean they know better than I what our policies/procedures are. They make me go through weeks of training and refreshers every week to make sure I know this stuff. Trust me, I do know better than you.

[BookstoreEscapee]

GAAARK!!!!!!!!! I get the ones who call in and rattle off their phone number as fast as humanly possible. Of course, their diction ain't that great to begin with.

Of course, it sounds something like, "feesiuhfifuhfiayteeteeuh."
Anmd when I ask for the area code again, they invariably say, "Two.... <pause for drama>...... nine....<pause for drama>...... Get it now? Are you stupid or deaf?"
Yeah, they're gonnna get those late fees waived.

Oh, yeah, I've had those too. And the ones who think they can rattle off their whole list of 10 titles and ...what, I'm going to look them all up at once??

[Sonoma]

We're required to spell things out phonetically where I work. Those darn B-C-D-G-E-Vs.... that all sound alike over the phone. Sometimes someone will call in, and they try to read out the order numbers phonetically as well. Works great, most of the time. I actually had one individual start of "K, as in cat" Fortunately he caught his error before I had a chance to ask where he graduated from grade school.

[pookalamouche]

beer

i hate hate HATE it when customers assume i can't remember more than one drink on their order at a time!

SC - 'i'll have a pint of bitter'
ME - *pulls pint*
SC - 'and another one
ME - *pulls another pint*
SC - 'and a JD and coke'
ME - "with ice?"
SC - 'yeah'
ME - *walks to other side of bar, gets drink*
SC - 'and a coke'
ME - *.... leaps over bar and throttles SC*

it takes about 4 times longer to do it your way so give me the whole bloody order in one go!

grrrr!