For “productivity” reasons, we’re now required to report our activities daily, with an indication of the time spent, e.g. one and a half hours filing paperwork, two hours on [project], and so on. This annoys my colleague to no end.

One day, she shows me an email she received from the boss.

Boss’s Email: “How come when I add up the hours on your daily, the total is always seven and a half? What do you do in those thirty minutes?”

Colleague: *To me* “He doesn’t get it, does he? Thirty minutes a day are wasted writing the bloody daily itself!”

Our bookshop sells e-readers, and like a lot of electronic devices, they are relatively expensive.

Customer: “No, €179 is too much for it. Can’t you give me a discount?”

Me: “Sorry, I can’t give discounts on these.”

She thinks about it for a while and then her face lights up.

Customer: “I produced an audiobook.”

Me: “That’s lovely?”

Customer: “It’s a beautiful composition of texts and music, perfect for the Christmas season. It comes up to €90. What do you say, I exchange an audiobook for an e-reader?”

Me: *Pause* “We’re a company. We sell products, not exchange goods. Besides, the math doesn’t add up.”

Customer: “But it’s so expensive.”

Me: “I’ll let you think about it for a moment.”

She eventually left!

I’m working holiday retail in a fancy-shmancy accessory and “lifestyle” store in lower Manhattan. 

One of our services is that if you buy a journal, we will imprint three — and no more! — characters on it for free, using an old-fashioned, hand-operated imprinting press. Once a journal has been imprinted, it cannot be changed, and if the customer rejects it, we have to mark it as “damaged” and make them a new one. The imprint doesn’t take very long to do, but given that there are six journal covers, two font sizes, and eight color options, and the imprint can be made anywhere on the cover, it’s one of those things that are best done in person.

The following call happens thirty minutes before we close.

Customer: “Hello? I’d like to purchase three journals and have them imprinted. I’ll come by at 6:45 and pick them up.”

Me: “All right, ma’am, but I should inform you that we close at seven, and the journals are best selected in person to be sure that you get exactly what you want.”

Customer: “I don’t care about that. Get me three journals.”

Me: “Do you want regular or large, and grid paper, plain paper, or ruled?”

Customer: “Regular and ruled.”

Me: “All right.”

I rattle off the color options for the journals.

Customer: “Just… black! Make them black!”

Me: “Yes, ma’am. Now, about the color of the imprint—”

I list the colors we have available, none of which are true white.

Customer: “White. I want true white.”

Me: “I’m sorry, ma’am, but we don’t carry true white. The closest we have is a cream color.”

Customer: “What color is that?”

Me: *Pause* “Like an off-white, or an ivory.”

Customer: “Ugh, fine.”

Me: “Now, what letters do you want on the journals? We only take three characters, including punctuation and spacing.”

Customer: “I want ‘ABC,’ ‘A.B,’ and ‘X.Y’. Do the first two in gold and the last one in white.”

Me: “I’ve written it down. Now, where would you like the imprints to be made?”

Customer: “Why so many questions? Can’t you just do it?”

Me: “I’m sorry, ma’am, I’m just trying to make sure you get what you want. If it helps, most people put the imprint on the bottom right corner or in the dead center of the journal.”

Customer: “Put the first two in the bottom right corner and the last one in the center.”

Me: “The dead center?”

Customer: “Yes, the dead center.”

Me: “Thank you for your patience, ma’am; that’s all I need.”

I ring her up via the phone and then take my written notes on the items she wants over to the imprinting machine, and I quickly make sure all of the imprints are completed. Then, at 6:50, she comes bustling in and demands to see the journals, which I take out of their decorative bag to show her.

Customer: “These two are okay, but this last one is all wrong. I said I wanted true white!”

Me: “We don’t carry true white, I’m afraid. We carry cream, which is what I put, because it’s the closest to white.”

Customer: “I also told you I wanted it to say, ‘X.Y.’!”

Me: “Ma’am, we don’t typically go beyond three characters for our imprinting because we’ve found it damages the journals, but I’ll make an exception just this once.”

I redo the impression, which requires a whole new journal and for me to reload the press. Around me, my colleagues are sweeping up and closing the shop for the night. I finish and hand over the completed journal.

Customer: “No, this is still wrong! People like you are why Christmas is always a nightmare. I’m trying to get gifts for everyone at my office, and this one is supposed to be for the head creative director! I had all of them done at [Other Location] except these three, and this one is the most important! I just forgot about it until now!”

Me: “I’m sorry, but what’s wrong with this one?”

Customer: “I said I wanted this in the center! You put it here in the middle!”

I have put the initialing exactly where we agreed, in the dead center of the journal. She indignantly jabs her finger into the center… at the bottom of the cover.

During this time, my colleagues are walking out the door for the night, which has already locked because it’s past seven. My manager turns out the lights in the back and closes down the registers, leaving just me and this customer and the imprinting machine, which I will have to clean and turn off by myself. She seems to notice absolutely none of this and continues to rant.

Me: “Let me get another one, and I’ll redo it.”

Customer: *Sniffy voice* “I don’t know what’s so hard about three letters.”

At this point, this was technically four characters, but I bit my tongue.

I grabbed another journal from the dark back area, came back, unwrapped it, and re-pressed it to her satisfaction. Rather than letting me put these journals back in their decorative bag with a bow, she shoved them all into her purse and stormed out… or would have, if I hadn’t had to go and unlock the door for her.

Despite the fact that I had told her this was best done in person, had worked after closing for her, had to go through three separate journals because of her miscommunication, and was ultimately making up for her forgetfulness and saving her face to her boss, she never once said thanks. Lady, people like you are why Christmas is a nightmare.

A common thing pet food companies do at times is attach certain coupons to every other product, such as a “buy one get one free” offer for a little package of cat food, and people can redeem them with their next purchase.

A customer walks up to my register with her cart absolutely chock full of this one type of cat food, which is unfortunately common. As her husband begins placing the cat food on the register:

Customer: “Hello, I have a couple of coupons to use!”

We usually accept several different coupons on a purchase if the parameters are met, so I’m not surprised and happily agree to take them.

She then takes out several fistfuls of coupons from her purse and piles them ALL on the counter as I’m ringing up her order. I’m talking along the lines of a small mountain of coupons on my register for her cartload of cat food.

Realizing this is going to take a while, and seeing three people queuing up behind her, I call another cashier to help everyone else while I sort through this lady’s coupons and purchase.

The coupons are all the same “BOGO” manufacturer coupons that sometimes come attached to products — she must have bought an unholy amount of cat food to have gotten this many — but I dutifully begin ringing her up and putting in the coupons.

After the first one, the register won’t scan in any of the other coupons, and upon closer inspection, it clearly says on the coupon that it is “limit one per customer per purchase,” i.e., that she could only use one of these coupons when she clearly planned on getting HALF of all of her cat food for free.

Me: “I’m sorry, ma’am, but it appears that these coupons limit one per purchase, so you can only use one.”

Customer: *Unfazed* “Oh, I was worried about that, too, so when I was in here last week I asked one of the workers and they said it was okay to use several!”

Me: “I’m sorry. If it was just one of our salespeople they may simply have been misinformed, as it clearly states that it’s a limit of one per purchase here. Only a manager would be authorized to tell you that.”

Customer: “Oh, you know what? Now that I think of it, it was a manager!”

Our store isn’t that big, and we have three managers, one of whom is a woman and two of whom are men of very different statures and appearances. All of them always wear name tags with their names on them, so I ask her if she remembers which manager it was.

Customer: “Oh, I don’t remember their name!”

Me: “Was it a man or a woman?”

Customer: “I’m not sure, sorry, but they did say I could use several coupons at once, so please ring them up!”

By now I’m suspicious since she can’t even remember who she spoke to, and since the computer requires a manager’s code to override instructions for coupon parameters that are already met, I call over my manager. I explain what’s going on, and the manager says the same thing to the customer, who keeps insisting she was told she could use these fifty-plus coupons.

The manager then goes to the office and calls the store manager, who isn’t working that night, to ask him if he’s allowed to authorize this sale.

Manager: *Returning* “The store manager says you aren’t allowed to use more than one, but just this once he said we could use five. But please know that, after this, you can only use one per purchase.”

The customer complies, and, after deciding not to buy about 70% of the cat food that she brought up, leaves, after an ordeal that took at least half an hour.

Later that night, my manager approaches me.

Manager: “You know that lady with the coupons?”

Me: “Yes?”

Manager: “Last week is when we last got a shipment of that cat food with those coupons, and I stuck them on myself in the morning. Later that day, all the coupons on the cat food packages were ripped off every package on the shelf. I guess that lady came in, took them all without buying the product, and decided to use them all a week later. Guess it didn’t work out for her!”

Related:
The Couponator 21: The FINAL Sale
The Couponator 20: Coupons Of Mass Consumption
The Couponator 19: Fast Food & Furious
The Couponator 18: The Digital Revolution
The Couponator 17: Attack Of The “Programmer”

I work in a public library where the majority of our patrons are elderly, so they can’t hear as well. With the current health crisis, we are wearing masks and have plexiglass around our work stations, and thus, we have to speak up because lots of our patrons can’t hear us.

It is a Saturday afternoon. The library is fairly quiet and the patron in question has been working on a computer and received help from my coworkers already.

Patron: “Excuse me. Do you sanitize stations?”

Me: “Yes, ma’am, after every use, we wipe down and clean the computers.”

Patron: “Well, I’m finished at my station. But I wanted to tell you something…”

I’m gearing up for a complaint about the masks or sanitization methods.

Me: “Yes, ma’am, what can I help you with?”

Patron: “I’m originally from California, and I’ve been to two libraries here now, and nobody knows how to use their library voice.”

Me: *Surprised* “Okay…”

Patron: “Yes, I know that with these—” *gestures to her mask* “—it can make it difficult, but there is no reason for people to be yelling in the library. You should go to a training or refresher on how to use your library voices in your library. Who can I speak to about creating a course for staff?”

Me: “Well, we have some comment cards that you’re more than welcome to fill out, and those will go to our supervisors.”

Patron: “Great, I’ll take two. You really should use your library voice in the library.”

Honestly, I don’t know how much quieter we could’ve gotten, but apparently, that’s not enough for her California ears. Oh, well. Some people will never be happy.