Friday, January 30, 2009

I don't miss dealing with the public

I once worked at Advance Auto Parts and though there are many stories from those days of dealing with the public most of them have faded. The best one I ever saw there is still very clear in my mind. We were all at the counter and it was fairly slow. There was one customer checking out and one guy on the phone. The manager and I were standing side by side discussing some matter of business. We suddenly turned toward the door when we heard a noise so loud we thought some had broken the door off it's hinges. A customer was coming straight toward the manager with a battery. He slammed it down on the counter so hard that I thought I saw the catalog rack bounce. He exclaimed very loudly that this d*mn battery was a piece of sh*t and wanted to know what the h*ll we were going to do about it. The manager was standing there with his hands in his pockets. He calmly rocked back and then forward on his feet and looked down at the battery and said "Well buddy I aint gonna do nothing about it, but if you take it back to Autozone where you bought it they might help you out." At this point everyone in the place was almost rolling on the floor laughing. The guy backed away from the counter and said "what, what, where am I." We let him know he was in Advance Auto Parts and he left without another word.

The moral of the story is if you are going to show your *ss make sure you are at least aiming it at the right people.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Classic, I had forgotten that story. We had something similar happen at our store. Basically the same lead up but the manager leaned over and pulled off a very scuffed up black plastic cap off of the negative terminal. Customers are no smarter these days; I have concluded that the first person to call and order a pizza with no crust . . . I quit. I know my days are numbered with that personal ultimatum.

Michaelle said...

OMG! That is so true. I am a nurse and work on a busy Med-Surg floor. A lot of our patients are truly sick, but lately it seems as if we are getting a lot of younger people who are not sick, just in need of a little "vacation" from life.

They treat the staff as their own personal maids, demanding this and that and generally making a nuisance of themselves, which takes away from the care of the very sick patients. Amazingly enough, this is tolerated by the doctors and the administration, so we have to take it.