Customer Service Thread

i have not

 

http://webcomicname.com/

 

oh no

 

Customers arguing with us about filling out-of-state prescriptions for controlled substances. Like, sir. I understand you need your medication but we have to obey the law.

 

And it's not like we flat refused the guy, either. We tried to explain why we couldn't fill it as-is (he didn't like that). We called the doctor's office to get verbal verification (they weren't there, it was Saturday). We gave him the address and phone number for a local urgent care clinic (not sure if he went, honestly). We offered to hold the prescription until we could reach the doctor (he kept the prescription). The guy wound up coming back Monday morning and we called the doctor, again.

 

Heh. The time I tried to get my wife's post-op scripts filled at the local chemist.

I hadn't particularly read them, just handed them over. The pharmacist peered at them for a while, went away, came back, told me they couldn't fill the script because they just didn't carry the meds.

wtf, it's only... :checks: flagyl and some endone, they're not exactly rare.

So I hike to another chemist, who again peers and shuffles ... and points out that there's actually *two* scripts for the endone, which isn't legal.

She kindly calls the hospital to get it sorted, has to spend ten minutes explaining *to the doctor* the difference between a prescriber number and a provider number.

"Ah, that's okay then, you're not shady, your doctor's just an idiot. Here you go."

 

At walgreens I have a 60-some-odd year old coworker named connie who is... a little out of touch. She's not malicious, I don't think, she just has no idea what she's talking about. Today, we were talking about makeup. She isn't happy with what she's using right now.

her: Liz, you're young. can you answer a question for me?
me: shoot. I don't really wear makeup anymore, but I'll try to help.
her: what do the transgenders use? They always have such good makeup.
me: I... what?
her: is it theater makeup or something?
me: well... most of the transgendered women I know wear regular makeup. Some of them use higher end stuff because it works better, but that's how all women do things.
her: I mean the ones with the sparkly dresses and heels.
me: ????? you mean drag queens????

and i never found out what the fuck she was talking about because she had to go to the weekly meeting and i had to stay up front and watch the store. but holy shit. baby boomers are a trip.

 

I wish desperately for this one specific surgeon at the hospital to stop talking the fuck down to me and the other lab people whenever she's on the phone.

today we tried rather desperately, for roundabout 20 minutes, to reach ANY surgeon, because the people they wanted to operate on the next day had 2 known antibodies and since the last differentiation had been a while ago, we'd have to send blood away to redo it. Because the lady might have gotten a THIRD antibody in the meantime and if that happens and she has a bad reaction, it's the lab who's fucked.
So we ring up every single surgeon we have and none of them will answer their damn phones until we're at the very bottom of our list, at the youngest one we have (she's a sweetheart). And my boss is halfway through explaining the problem when this other lady-surgeon takes the phone from the nice one, goes 'we're in a conference now' and hangs the fuck up on my boss. In the middle of boss telling her that either we sent stuff today, and SOON or they will have to delay their damn surgery because we won't have save blood on hand.

The fucking gall.

And then it still took nearly 1h before anyone had the grace to come down and fetch the paperwork. They sent a trainee (girl), which was fine, they often do, and half an hour later another trainee (boy, this time) comes and goes 'I was asked to fetch stuff for Ward 3' so naturally he gets told 'oh the other one already got that' and we send him away.
Yeah ten minutes later the very same lady-surgeon who hung up on my boss is on the phone, talking down to me this time on how we should have given the boy trainee the material AGAIN because she-the-surgeon had problems getting enough blood from the patient. And we were supposed to just divine that or unquestioning hand out extra material to trainees who give us such detailed requests as 'the stuff for Ward 3'. Of course none of us can mindread and instead we have to let this woman talk to us like children who had to have explained on how a blood draw works and I am SO FUCKING DONE with her both in concept and execution.

 

I work in the IT department at a university.

Every PhD who starts at our school gets a new computer. Fill in a form and get a seriously decent dual-monitor desktop there and then, or successfully argue that you neeeeeeed a laptop (even though they're much lower-spec, and the Mac ones are also non-upgradeable), wait a week or two while we order it, and get a laptop.

So of course, everybody neeeeeds a MacBook. And wants to put windows on it. And no, they're only getting one external monitor because HAVING ONE SCREEN BUILT INTO IT ALREADY IS WHY WE'RE PAYING TWICE AS MUCH FOR THE DAMN THING IN THE FIRST PLACE. And waaa, the un-upgradeable reduced disk space and ram they signed off on being more than sufficient for their work isn't nearly sufficient for their work, can they have an upgrade please. (No.)

And they never take it off their desk anyway.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa


Best of all though was the guy who rocked into the office and said "Laptop."

Sorry, what?

Laptop.

... which laptop?

Laptop.

... who exactly are you? Are you a student?

Lap. Top.

Do you have one? Do you want to order one? Have you come to pick one up? Tell me more!

:waves arms: Laptop.

It took a good five minutes to get him to actually explain what he wanted.

I thought that maybe it was a language barrier thing, he did have a strong accent and maybe that was the only English he was confident in using.

But no, his English was fine, he just had an attitude problem the size of his ego, and expected us to dance attendance upon him.

Even my manager called him Laptop after that.

 

if....you want a low spec windows laptop............why not just pick up one from best buy for $200 and get that beefy beefsteak desktop computer........................and do your random bullshit on the shitty laptop and work stuff on the beefy desktop.........................................

 

Jockeying for status.

We have one prof who absolutely cannot bear to have a less-impressive computer than his PhDs, so if one of them buys something shiny, he'll order something even shinier.

And fit for the purpose or no, MacBooks make you look far more important a student than if you have an HP notebook, and as for desktops, how is anyone meant to be impressed by a black box?

 

Man all I got when I started my PhD program was gray hairs and a chronic disease, what miracle school is this that also gives computers

Nb I'm not seriously asking, just making a rueful joke

 

Compcsi, which I suppose is fair enough.

Over in medicine I assume they give you a free germ.

 

Yesterday, a tourist from Monaco was absolutely offended at how the only places that had water bottles were bars, and at us therefore not having any. I pointed out to him that there was a fountain nearby and the water was safe to drink, and it was in fact one of the purposes for which it was built centuries ago, and he said something along the line of "What the fuck, I won't drink out of a fountain, I'm civilized"
Enjoy the dehydration, I guess ?

 

...huh. I wonder if it was a misunderstanding of sorts - maybe he was figuring you were telling him to go drink out of one of those big water-feature sort of fountains, instead of a nice normal drinking fountain. Which would be understandably confusing, but doesn't excuse him from being a rude asshat about it. (Plus, I'm sure there were lots of bottled drinks that aren't water for sale.)

 

I keep meaning to come back to this thread and tell my retales, but for now I shall recount my encounter with The Flowers Lady, which may have very nearly snagged top spot for 'most obnoxious customer experience' (but I think that Hi-Vis Mushroom Lady continues to reign supreme for that award. It's hard to beat Hi-Vis Mushroom Lady.) But I digress.

So, to give a little context, I've seen this particular customer around before. She's tall, not exactly posh but holds herself with a lot of importance. She's mainly known for haunting whoever's doing the fresh food reductions (usually @inchwyrm, who then gets to field all the ~fun small talk~ about whether she works part-time or not - no? oh, then is she a student? no? then what does she do...? I do not envy Wyrm one bit, and commend her on her patience - Wyrm is stronger than I.) but usually that's the extent of it. She's a familiar fixture.

I found myself approached by her on a Sunday, while attempting to work backstock. She presented to me a bouquet of flowers (one of our fancy range ones) and declared that they were out of date and needed reducing. "It says here," she proclaimed, indicating the date, "that they're dated the 14th. And today is the 15th." And indeed, this was so!

But they're flowers. And they already had a reduction label on, reducing them by 25%. (Flowers, on account of not being edible, don't adhere to the same reduction rules that food items do - so long as they're still looking nice and they're within a certain number of days of the Best Before, they can stay displayed for a bit with some minor reductions. These particular flowers, I may add, still looked fabulous - like, not even curling at the edges of the petals or anything. These were still tip-top flowers.)

I explained the situation regarding flower reductions, but she was absolutely adamant: not only should these be more reduced, when she usually comes in they're reduced by 80%, they're usually like £1. (I call attention once more to the fact these were the fancy-range flowers, and this was like a £13+ bouquet, reduced to like £10.) This is not true. Obviously. But in the name of making sure, I found my coworker who was doing reductions at the time, and she pretty much cackled because for one thing, our store doesn't even do 80% reductions, and for another, they were reduced 20 minutes ago.

Flowers Lady's response upon being informed of this was to double down on the fact that she was definitely right, and to brandish the bouquet at me once more - all the while pointing emphatically at the dates, enunciating each word with as much emphasis as possible, with all the relevant gestures to indicate the information she desperately wanted to convey to me. *HERE* it says the FOURTEENTH, and TODAY....it is the *FIFTEENTH*...

(I think the words, "Yes, I am aware," may have escaped my mouth without passing my brain in that moment. I was just kind of taken aback.)

So I did my best to explain the protocols for flower reductions again. And I did my best to explain they'd been reduced as much as they were going to be that day. Did she yeild? Absolutely not. She was clearly on a simmer, heading towards fuming, so I just...emphasised that it was what I'd been told by my colleague who did the reductions, and that I was not personally able to reduce them because that's not my department. And after a moment's pause (and a quiet, disdainful "It's not your department...") where you could pretty much see the gears turning as she processed that I could not be strong-armed into giving her a £13+ bouquet in full bloom for £1....

...she turns on her heel, literally throws them back down into the water bucket, and announces that, "Well, you'll never sell them!" before storming off, presumably out of the entire store.

When I looked back at the flower bucket about five minutes later, they were gone, so I can only presume that we actually did sell the Very Nice Flowers Reduced By 25% That We'd Never Sell. :)c

(All goofing aside it was a very stressful interaction but I will never forget that parting sour-grapes diss.)

 

Several years back, we used to administer all the PhD machines from the ground up - no administrator access for the users.

We're primarily a Linux shop, and for legacy reasons, maintaining Windows machines was left to the Hardware department. They took care of all the low-level stuff - installation, drivers, joining the domain, etc.

So one day a guy comes into the office and says he needs a driver for some bit of hardware installed on his system Right Now. I tell him sure, I'll send a mail to the hardware department, and they'll come and do it when they can.

This was completely not good enough. He wasn't having any of this pointless bureaucracy. It was just a driver disk he needed, and he'd get it himself dammit. (despite the fact that he didn't have admin rights on the machine...)

So he shoved past me down to the Hardware department area (off limits to non-staff), marched down to the big cabinet on the wall, and triumphantly yanked the drawer open.

The drawer was full of motherboard screws and blanking plates.

He stared bemusedly at the contents for a good 30 seconds while trying to recover the shreds of his dignity, while I did all I could not to point and hoot.

 

Today at work a guy came up to the counter and set his stuff down. I did my usual greeting “hi, how’s your night going?” And he was like “it’s about to get a lot better!” And winked at me. Then I looked down at what he was getting to start scanning his items.

Nothing but a 12 pack of natty ice and the largest tube of astroglide we sell.

What a romantic

 

You posted that three times

 

I think there may be something wrong with the forum