Everybody’s Lookin’ Forward To The Weekend, Weekend

(I work at a car dealership. Our online appointment system kind of sucks; in theory, we can set parameters, but it has so many bugs it still allows customers to make appointments for things they shouldn’t and in ways that set totally unfair expectations for our team. As such, we regularly go through the pre-scheduled appointments to call customers with those sorts of appointments and to clarify and reschedule their visits. A common situation is people scheduling the very last afternoon appointment of the day for intense diagnosis, something we only purposely schedule in the mornings to give our technicians the best shot at getting the customer an answer in the same day, and hopefully even leaving us enough time to fix the car without it having to stay over, possibly for multiple days if we miss the cut-off to order parts if we don’t have them in stock. Unless we notify them otherwise, those customers often expect to still get their car back the same day, even though the shop closes soon after they would be dropping the car off.)

Me: “Ugh, here’s another last Friday afternoon web appointment for multiple concern diagnosis. We need to call to reschedule.”

Coworker #1: “I don’t get why people do that. And it’s for Friday afternoon more than any other day, too!”

Coworker #2: “Yeah, what’s that about? Like, even if their problem ends up being something we might be able to get out quickly if no other cars showed up for their appointments and the techs really busted their butts, it’s Friday afternoon. People just want to go home. Their car is probably going to stay until Monday.”

Me: “I used to work with a tech who fully admitted that a Friday afternoon car doesn’t get as good an inspection as the rest of the week because he didn’t want to find anything that might make him stay late; he just wanted to start his weekend.”

Coworker #1: “I know! I don’t get why people don’t think about this stuff. Like, are they doing their best work on the very last thing they do Friday before they go home?”

Coworker #2: “I feel like it’s normal to be pretty checked out at that point.”

(This wouldn’t be too noteworthy… except that about twenty minutes later, I hear [Coworker #1] and [Coworker #2] talking about their nails. They regularly go together to get manicures and are complaining about the workmanship.)

Coworker #2: “It’s really frustrating. Like, look at this smudge! I totally felt like they were rushing.”

Coworker #1: “Tell me about it! And this keeps happening lately!”

Coworker #2: “Maybe we should switch nail places.”

Coworker #1: “Maybe we should. It’s just so annoying. Like, we purposely go in for the very last appointment on Friday evening so there are no other customers after us so they don’t feel like they have to rush!”

Coworker #2: “Seriously. Why are they in such a hurry, anyway?”

(I don’t think they knew I could hear their conversation as there was a cubicle wall between us, but as I listened to them I just shook my head wondering how they don’t see the parallels between their situation and our customers’.)