Customer Service Thread

WV winter weather is pretty unpredictable, too. Some years it doesn't do much worse than hover around freezing with some rain and a few flurries, other years it drops three feet of snow in one night in February and they have to cancel school for a week because the bus depot is buried in a giant snowdrift. And road clearing when it does snow can be really all over the place because Twisty Mountain Roads.

 

Honestly I haven't noticed studs being all that much better vs what I got: siped all seasons and chains for when it gets nasty. Though to be fair, we also live in a place that gets regular harsh winter conditions and has the infrastructure to handle it so it's at more of an advantage than say, a place that is usually mild but suddenly has some bad years.

 

Biggest tip I have for winter driving is one I actually heard on the radio and was like "that's it, that's exactly the thing!"

So, going slow and having good tires are super important, but it's not just low speed that is crucial, it's also being gentle with changing speed/direction/whatever. The radio guy described it as driving while pretending you've got a full container of liquid without a sealed lid in the car with you that you don't want to spill. No jerky motions, no rapid changes.

(I've also always managed fine with all season tires, but the most terrain we get around here is hills and hollers, no mountains)
*ETF typo, dyac

 

WV is mostly hills and hollers too, we just act dramatic about it.

 

I get up in a giant bowl of a place, flat but you saw mountains in all directions. Sometimes a bit of variation, a few dips. All the roads were square and our idea of a "bad" road is kind of hilarious, looking back

 

Bringing back the thread to say I think my workplace is trying to get people to quit or have a reason to fire people. They’ve been cornering people to have them sign a paper saying they’ve been told the new rule that you will be terminated if you park outside of the employee spots. No warning once and done.

That would be unreasonable as is but add on to that the fact we lost a third of the employee parking to construction recently you have me over here wondering just how far disconnected management is

 

So I work as a cashier at a resort, and my boss has initiated a new program that involves the 'employee of the month' system. Working at this place is typical service industry hell, and he decided anyone specifically named in a positive light the most in reviews gets their own pick of an employee of the month tee-shirt, that they Must wear all month.

The catch? Whoever's wearing it gets extra flack for having an off day, even if it's something we have no choice over (eg, a card reader is broken and we have to use cash only, pissing off customers, or having a group of thirteen come up and telling them we only have twelve slots for something, that kind of thing).

No one working in the park wants the "Honor" of the shirt and it's breaking both morale and productivity to an all time low... It's frustrating as shit

 

Normal day:
"Hello, how can I help you?"
Customer hands me a prescription and says nothing.

Yesterday:
"Hello, how can I help you?"
Customer hands me a discount coupon and says nothing.

At least a prescription has a name on it, a coupon gives me no information at all about who you are.

 

Also, in worse news, our pharmacy manager just put in their two weeks notice and the only other pharmacist we have has been job hunting. And is already getting interviews.

 

From the receptionist job I did several weeks back: dude called in, asking if he could speak to a manager or someone in HR about a posting he'd seen, because he wanted to make sure he had the qualifications needed for it. I am 90% sure that he was actually trying to Gumption his way into at least a job interview, if not being hired.

Fortunately/amusingly, the manager on duty was having none of it and told me to tell the dude that the best thing for him to do was to just send in an application and the person in charge of reviewing applicants would be the one to sort out if he was properly qualified. Which I did.

 

It's cute when confused highschoolers butcher book titles and ask for things like "uhhhh hemingway's the hamlet please"

It's notably less cute when it's towering middle-aged men Huffing and Puffing because there really isn't a Hemingway's Hamlet in our system no matter how much he insists there must be, no it can't be Shakespeare, it's Hemingway, you work in a library you should know, why don't you kids these days know anything, of course it's Hemingway's

In the end he pulled up the texts from his kid and turned out he needed Romeo & Juliet and I was ready to spontaneously combust from rage

 

A lighthearted one- we had a customer attempt to pay by check, with the check made out to a different store. Which was two miles away. And was a grocery store, not a pharmacy.

 

Not only has someone who was working as a cashier in pharmacy called out today, one of the pharmacisists has not come to work as expected. I don't fully understand what's going on with that. What I do understand is I've been called in to work on my day off, and today is probably going to suck.

 

Shitty thing about working payroll: becoming intimately familiar with how nauseatingly entitled and shamelessly prone to robbing their employees the average business owner is, based on my sample size of the several thousand clients I have interacted with through my tenure

(It has also turned me into a person with Opinions about spreadsheets, which I never expected)

But it did afford me the sweet opportunity, when a client called questioning why no federal income taxes were being withheld from her employees' checks, to explain in a bright, helpful, matter-of-fact sort of voice "Oh, since all of their incomes are so far below the federal poverty guidelines, our system won't calculate any income taxes to be withheld. They just aren't making enough to owe any taxes at the end of the year at their current rates!"

And I like to think that that little hitch of hesitation in her voice after my explanation was her sudden awkward awareness that she had just mentioned before our discussion that she was running an operation large enough to merit an industrial size kitchen complex... But is on track to send home the highest paid of her workers with just over $10,000 a year.

I hope it eats at her >:c

 

Tfw all of your clients' listening skills have been amputated in a tragic conversational incident

 

I realized tonight that all the things that made me nightmarishly bad at brick and mortar food service are the same things that make me really enjoy, and really good at my delivery job.

• I’m not good at keeping a schedule, especially if someone else sets it. It doesn’t matter if the schedule stays the same for months at a time or changes week to week, I cannot show up “on time” if there’s a consequence for not showing up on time. I’ve been fired from three jobs for consistently showing up late. But if I get to decide when I start, and no one is going to yell at me for being twenty minutes late, I’ll work extra to make up for it.
  
• I despise being micromanaged. Just. Don’t tell me what to do. It makes me angry to have someone looking over my shoulder giving me directions unless I’ve specifically asked for directions, which... is a really counterproductive attitude to have when you have a, you know, manager. And shift lead. And coworkers with seniority. Uber eats directions come down to “go to the restaurant.” “Go to the house.” “Leave on the porch.” And the rest of my job is up to me.
  
• I... don’t like people. Brief pleasantries are fine, but I’m terrible at talking to people for any length of time at work, either coworkers or customers. Uber Eats is 90% sitting in my car by myself, 8% confirming order details with servers at restaurants, and 2% telling customers to enjoy their food and have a nice day. I talk to other drivers while we’re waiting in restaurants sometimes, but never for more than a couple minutes at a time.

and, like, it’s worth mentioning that I have really good ratings on this app and make a lot more money than I did waiting tables. I’m good at this job, and really enjoy it.

 

Like, the customers are the exact same people I was dealing with in my brick and mortar jobs. They’re the exact same mild to moderate dumbasses who ask me what kinds of nuts the almond clusters have in them, if the mint chocolate chunk has chocolate in it, and where the candy aisle is, when they’re standing in the candy aisle. They’re the same kind of dipshit I turn into when I enter a hardware store, or my boyfriend became when I asked him to pick me up three and a half yards of white cotton muslin. Everyone is dumb in an unfamiliar situation.

I have to deal with their shit so much less when I have an app to act as a buffer between me and customer nonsense. Most of the mistakes that make it to my end of the interaction are a wrong address. Once in a blue moon a restaurant will give me the wrong order. One time a customer’s neighbor stole their McDonalds off their porch. All of that is either extraordinarily easy to fix, or not my fucking problem.

I haven’t been screamed at since I started this job, haven’t had anything thrown at me, haven’t been threatened, haven’t had to clean up after anyone’s tantrum. It’s been really nice.

 

i might try getting into that, i just found out my store is closing and i'm trying to figure out what to do

 

I dont work at earlier mentioned resort anymore (though new job is still essentially customer service but with sick people), but my dad still does and he told me a customer came up to the outdoor activities booth to play paintball and it was raining (which can make the paint explode in our guns) and asked who she could complain to about the weather. He just confusedly answered "uhhh, god???" And she got so pissed