Customer Service Thread

Fix’d. I think it was a problem with my phone

 

"but I saw it advertised on the televisions"
That's nice sir but we still aren't an actual pharmacy, we aren't going to have your highly specific request unless it's an otc painkiller or cough medicine

 

Did they at least have the name of the product? Every so often we get people looking for something they saw on tv and they don’t know what it is, which makes it really hard to help them.

 

This time, yes, thankfully
Other times, I know exactly what you're talking about .-. those ones are always harder to get rid of too

 

Had a guy from ICE in my store today. I'm not allowed to actually kick people out, but I did make sure he knows that childhood trauma is for life.


Also got screamed at for like half an hour by the mother of the bride in this wedding party over something I was already trying my hardest to fix. The killer is that I had just gotten off the phone with her husband to give him a progress report (since he’s the one who’s going to be wearing the damn thing) and she came in without talking to him. She wound up getting in touch with our regional and getting a refund on not only her husband’s rental, but also her son’s which had nothing to do with it. Wedding season is fun (:

 

It’s the year of our lord 2018 and a groom was crying in our store today because his mother disagrees with him marrying a black woman and won’t come to the wedding. Why are people like this?

 

Face blindness is a hell of a drug.

I have a manager at work who's an average-pretty black woman. No real identifying features, good or bad. She's not bad looking, not awe inspiring, has a pretty average body type, pretty normal face, basically looks a bit like a background npc in a video game. I love her and she's awesome, but I keep running into a problem with her.

She changes her hair a lot. When I first started she had a long, straight weave. I introduced myself to her and we talked a bit, and I went back to trying to learn how to do my job. A couple weeks later she changed her hair to a huge, gorgeous mass of long spiral braids and I introduced myself to her again because I thought I still hadn't met everyone yet and she laughed at me and thought I was joking. Right now she's rocking a bob cut wig and I almost introduced myself to her again but learned my lesson well enough the first time that I waited for someone to call her by name before I did anything.

At least she has a distinctive voice so I can usually tell who it is by how she speaks.

 

This might sound weird but do you happen to know if they have a gift registry somewhere/have some deets on the guy that could help locate one?

 

I don't, but he's my boss's nephew so I might be able to find out.

 

I have some good Weird Constituent Stories(TM) I've mentioned over in the local politics thread; does anyone want to hear them?

 

please tell us the Weird Constituents Stories

 

I can’t go to politics thread, please share!

 

Okay so just for reference: I work for a state politician. My boss is chronically overscheduled and never in the office, so a couple of the major parts of my job are a) going through the mail and sorting out what Boss does and doesn't need to pay attention to, and b) checking the voicemail. Which means I am the first line of defense between Boss and a whole lot of people who have decided they need to Talk To An Elected Official(TM). I hear about every pothole in the district, and there are often five or ten messages on the voicemail every time I come in when there's something divisive up in the legislature (anything about guns or abortion that goes anywhere gets a ton of people both for and against, for instance). Most of the time I just get name, pet issue, and phone number, then email it off to my boss and forget about it.

And then there's the people like State Fair Bathroom Lady.

Spoiler: Transphobia, rape mention

This was in 2016, a bit after Obama made that executive order saying trans people in public schools could use whatever bathrooms they felt like. An older lady who I assume vaguely heard about this on Fox News and didn't know what a trans was (and who was not, in fact, in our district, so I kind of wonder if she was calling down a list) left us a ~5 minute rambly message about how she was Very Concerned. You see, as a woman, she wondered if it had occurred to anyone that evil, creepy men might use this as an excuse to lurk in women's bathrooms and rape people!

Pretty standard transphobe, even though she seemed to think it was a law being considered by the state, not a presidential executive order. But then it got weird.

She continued on that the reason she was especially concerned about this? Was that it would kill the state fair.

One of the two main highways leading toward the state fair grounds, she explained, had a fifty-mile stretch in which there was only one rest stop. THEREFORE everyone driving to the state fair from that direction MUST stop at that rest stop. THEREFORE a CREEPY DUDE might lurk in that one bathroom in the middle of ass-nowhere and rape people, because lots of people would be stopping there! And THEREFORE people wouldn't come to the state fair, because they'd be afraid that someone could be lurking in that one bathroom at a rest stop in the middle of ass-nowhere. And THEREFORE the state fair would lose money and die.

No, not the actual bathrooms at the state fair. Just this one rest stop.

Best part? The legislative session was over. There was absolutely nothing my boss would have been able to do anyway.

 

Another one that happened a few months before that one:

One of the big issues in the 2016 session was how to fund PEIA, which is the state government employee health insurance program. They settled on increasing the tobacco tax, though there was a ton of bickering and politicking about how much to raise it by. So I got in this one day after several weeks of the voicemail being full of "PLEASE SAVE PEIA" and then there was... this guy.

I need you to imagine the smuggest voice. The voice of a man who is absolutely convinced he has found a completely infallible gotcha.

Now I need you to imagine it saying that, about that cigarette tax, this means he should get to smoke in government buildings, right? Since the government is getting TOBACCO MONEY now.

To this day, a part of me wishes he had left his number so I could find out if he knew there was already a tobacco tax.

 

No, you can't bring your big china mug of coffee into the computing lab and sit directly under the NO FOOD OR DRINK sign with it.

And no, you don't get to sit there with it until I work out for you where you should put it, or where the nearest sink is so you can wash it out.

These would fall in the category of things that are your problem.

(I actually said that last part to him; it was awesome)

I have a kid, I know that game inside out and backwards, and I'm sure as hell not playing it with you.

 

Time for more tales from the crypt lab.
You know, normally patients have zero business being in the lab. We don't draw their blood, it's biohazard level 2, and none of them signed NDAs about patient data.
Despite this, our out of house docs love sending us blood via Patient, instead of the driver. This leads to the lovely Situation where we suddenly got patients in the lab, looking confused and expecrant when you take the samples off their hands and try to usher them out again. Occasionally, this leads to patients getting upset because we weren't friendly enough.
Rarely this leads to patients who speak very little German standing there and nodding as you try to explain to them that they ought to leave now, we got it handled. And we can't just go back to work while they're there because now an unauthorized Person might have access to patient data if we turn our backs. I'm not a fan.
I can't even complain to the relevant lady because she jzst goes 'that's customer service' and hangs up.

 

I am reminded of that one-week internship (the kind where you can't really do anything and are just there to be there) you have to do in 9th grade in France, which I did in a medical laboratory. Specifically, what the director told me during the mandatory Why Do You Do This Job And What Kind Of Studies Do You Need Interview, which was basically "Don't do this job. It sounds like a good idea for about two weeks and then everything sucks."

 

I mean i've been at it for nearly 3 years now and i still enjoy it? It's very satusfying work, despite the oncall shifts and customer service so *shrugs*