(I work in a cafe that sells bagels.)
Me: “Welcome! What can I get for you?”
Customer: “I’d like a beagle.”
Me: “Sorry, a what?”
Customer: “A beagle, please.”
Me: “I am sorry, but we don’t sell beagles here.”
Customer: “Oh. Ooooh. You know what, I am actually glad. A bagel it is, then!”
(When I am a kid in the 70s, my mum sets me up with a Post Office Savings Account with her as a trustee. Just after I turn sixteen, my mum and I go in to switch it into my name only. My mum is asked to sign something, and then it is my turn. My full name is quite long; let’s say it’s Elizabeth Suzanne MacKenzie.)
Cashier: “I need you to sign this signature card to put in your Savings Book.”
Me: “Okay.” *signs card*
Cashier: “No, I need you to sign your name.”
Me: “I did.”
Cashier: *sighs* “You signed ‘E MacKenzie.’ The name on the account is ‘Elizabeth Suzanne MacKenzie.’ That’s what you need to sign.”
Me: “But…” *pointing* “…that there is my signature. Do you want me to just write my name?”
Cashier: “You need to do your signature, but with your full name.”
Me: “But… my signature, that I use all the time, is that: it’s just my initial and surname. My signature doesn’t have my full name in it.”
Cashier: “Well, we need you to sign your full name.”
Me: “I can write my full name, or I can do a signature, but they’re completely different things. What one do you want?”
Cashier: “You need to sign your full name.”
Me: *totally fed up at this point* “Okay, fine.”
(And that’s why, until I got married ten years later and changed my name, I held an account where my signature was just my name, entirely printed in bold capitals. Yes, apparently that was perfectly acceptable as a “signature.”)
(I work at a popular game store where we have just recently begun taking in iDevices on trade. One day while I am working alone, this is the phone call I receive.)
Me: “Thank you for calling [Store]; this is [My Name]. How can I help you?”
Customer: “Yes, my son went in there a few days ago and traded in his iPhone. He had planned on using the money he got for it to get a new phone, but we decided we aren’t going to get one anymore.”
Me: “Okay?”
Customer: “Well, since we don’t want to get a new phone anymore, can we just get our old one back?”
Me: “Well… unfortunately, we can’t do that.”
Customer: “Can’t we just give you the money you gave us for it?”
Me: “Ma’am, there would be no way for me to do it. When we take an iDevice on trade-in, it automatically gets put as defective and we send it back to our warehouse to be restored and cleaned before we are even allowed to sell it. Even if your phone was still in our store, we wouldn’t be able to sell it back to you.”
Customer: *a bit irritated* “So, we’re just stuck, then? You can’t just void the transaction or something?”
Me: “Our systems won’t let us do that. If you guys would have changed your mind right away, or maybe even an hour later, we might have been able to help, but there’s nothing we can do about a transaction that happened two days ago.”
Customer: “This is ridiculous!”
Me: “Ma’am, when you traded the phone in, we had you sign a paper that told you basically once the phone was traded in it was no longer yours and that you were fine with losing all memory on it. Do you remember doing that?”
Customer: “Well… what if I told you the phone was technically my phone since the plan is under my name and he stole it from me and sold it?”
(I am highly confused since she has already informed me that they had traded in the phone in the thought of buying a new one, indicating her son didn’t actually steal it.)
Me: “Well, then, ma’am, you’ll have to file a police report against your son and when the police talk to us, then we can help you out with that.”
Customer: “Fine! I’ll just do that, then!” *click*
(We never heard from the police about that iPhone.)
(We are a company that offers self-storage, apartments, and office space. One of our residential tenants asks about storage for just one night. I explain what we have available but that we only have month-to-month agreements. He does not want to pay for the full month but since he has an apartment right next to our office, we decide to do him a favor and allow him to store about 30 boxes in our conference room for the night at no cost. He promises to have them picked up in the morning. The following morning at 9:00 am, as soon as we open, a man and woman come in.)
Customer: “Hi. I’m here to meet [Tenant] to pick up the boxes he left here yesterday.”
Me: “Great! We’ve put them into the conference room so that they are out of the way. Is he on his way?”
Customer: “Yes, he will be here in just a minute.”
(The man and woman go into the conference room and start moving around the boxes. The tenant comes and goes, but no boxes have been taken out of the conference room. I peek in and see that they have started to unpack the boxes and are looking through all the files on our conference room table. They aren’t hurting anything, so I let them do what they need to do. They even bring food in to eat lunch at the conference room table. After about four hours, they walk out, again with no boxes.)
Customer: “We’ll be back!”
Me: “Okay…? What time do you think you will be done moving the boxes out?”
Customer: “Well, what time do you close?”
Me: “We close at 4:30 pm. You’re planning to be here all day?”
Customer: “We will make sure to be out before you need to leave; we wouldn’t want to take advantage of you letting us leave the boxes here.”
Me: “Uh… okay.”
(They leave for about an hour. When they come back, they are in and out and move about ten boxes to their car. The entire time, I am trying to get through day-to-day activities and helping customers around them.)
Customer: “Okay, we need to close this door. She’s been having people in and out of here all day. We can’t even hear each other.”
(He then closes OUR conference room door to block me out of my own conference room so that they can have a meeting.)
Me: *to one of the owners* “Apparently, I’m disrupting them!”
(They then stay until after 3:00 pm, when I finally have to say something since they still have unpacked boxes in the conference room and are simply in there talking.)
Me: “Are you guys almost all set in here?”
Customer: “Yep, we’ll be out of here by 4:30.”
Me: “Well, our office closes at 4:30, so in order to get everything out by then, you will have to start packing and moving the rest of the boxes out now.”
Tenant: “Yep, we’ll get out of your hair.” *to the couple that have been there all day* “We gotta get out of here, guys!”
(They finish packing up and finally move the rest of the boxes out. Right before I start closing up the office, the tenant is the last one to walk out. He says as he’s walking away
Tenant: “I’ll say it for you, ‘Never again!’ But at least you can say you were part of a CIA investigation.”
Me: “Uh… what?!”
(I work for the Elite/VIP line at an airline call center in Prague. While most of our passengers are polite and understanding, sometimes they are just entitled jerks.)
Me: “Good morning. Welcome to your [VIP line]. My name is [My Name]; how may I help you?”
Caller: “I need to be on the next flight from Paris to New York. One-way, business class, quickly.”
Me: “Sure thing. Let me look at what we can offer you.”
Caller: “The price on the website is outrageous; I hope you can do better than that.”
Me: “I’m sorry, sir, we are almost fully booked and the departure is in two hours; the best price I can offer you is [horribly high last-minute price].”
Caller: “WHAT?! I FLEW FOR FOUR TIMES LESS SIX MONTHS AGO! THIS IS RIDICULOUS! I WANT TO TALK TO A SUPERVISOR.”
Me: “I understand, sir, but she will not do that. Looking at your booking from six months ago, you purchased the ticket four months in advance. You cannot expect the same price for a last-minute business-class ticket.”
Caller: “But I’m a [second-highest tier] passenger; I should get cheaper prices!”
Me: “That’s not how it works.”
Caller: “Your program is useless. Frequent flyers are not rewarded enough.”
Me: “With your additional bag, your extra-comfortable seat on the [arguably the best passenger plane in the world]’s top deck, as well as the shuttle to the airport, all free of charge on both legs, you saved more than €300 on your previous booking.”
Caller: “I didn’t… I mean, this is normal, but I expect more.”
Me: “I’m sorry, sir, but it looks like the last seat on this plane was booked by another passenger since we did not confirm it early enough, and the next ones for today are already overbooked. If you wish, I can put you on tomorrow’s flight, same time.”
Caller: *curses, then hangs up*
