Retail Drone, Part 2

Well, work sucked today. There were two good customers the whole day. The rest were a happy mixture of morons, tyre-kickers, and the purely evil. Not to mention I think Cute Girl has a boyfriend, which is always the way.
I’ll make a list of the idiots who came in today, for my own satisfaction.

Moans For Kicks Man:
This guy was what Gollum would look like if you stretched him out to six feet tall and took away the nice bits, and gave him cancer of the personality. He came in for no other reason but to moan that we’d caused him trouble trying to get in a microwave he was happy with. The story was he’d bought a microwave. He brought it back to the store because it was fogging up when he cooked stuff in it. Microwaves do this. He obviously didn’t know, and wouldn’t accept any of the staff’s explanations (I wasn’t there at the time) that it was perfectly normal. So one of the staff – Cute Girl I think – rang the manufacturer and got some retard who didn’t know that microwaves fog up sometimes. So we got him a new microwave. Which he decided was not big enough. “Product knowledge,” he said, wagging his finger under his tumour of a nose. “Product knowledge would have saved me all this hassle.” I was a spectator for most of the time while he berated the girls, who are just out of school and in their first full time jobs. When he started getting heated I butted in, asking what the trouble was. He told me, in great detail. I tried to explain that the girls could hardly be expected to magically know everything about all the products in their first two weeks on the job. He didn’t care. He just wanted to bitch and feel a little power in his impotent veins. I said (politely as hell, of course): “So you just came in to tell us how unhappy you are?”
Him (entirely missing the sarcasm) “Yes. I am very unhappy”
Me: “There’s nothing else we can help you with?”
Him “No.”
Me: “Well, go shove your face in a blender and do the world a favour, you stupid, imbecilic, narcissistic fucking excuse for a human being.”
I didn’t say that, but I bloody well should have.

Waste All My Fucking Time Woman:
This bitch came in asking about a laptop, as her last one had died. Lots of questions, which I answered. Then moaning about the price. I figured it was going downhill fast, but I said I’d see what we could do with the price anyway. Now, the computer was already discounted right down, almost to cost. I took 50 bucks off and explained. Was she happy? No. So I saw the manager and asked if we could take any more. I got another fifty off. I should explain about discounts and how we calculate them. Discounts eat into the shop profit. The more we discount the less the shop makes. Company policy is we can only discount down to a certain margin (it’s not supposed to be lower than 15 per cent) otherwise the company isn’t even clearing staff wages. The way I’d sussed this laptop, it was barely scraping the 10 per cent margin. It was, without a doubt, the cheapest retail laptop in the country. We were literally paying her to take it away. What did she do?
“Oh, for god’s sake. I’m not paying that much for a computer. I’m going to go next door (there’s another electronics shop next door. God knows what they were thinking) and get one there.”
She’s welcome to it, not that a cheaper one exists in New Zealand. I hope it explodes. Her last one probably committed suicide.

The Person Who Made Me So Angry I Can’t Remember Anything About Them:
I don’t know who this person was, what they wanted, or what they said to piss me off. All I know is that I swore and ground my teeth and fumed for about ten minutes after they’d left, enough to start worrying my co-workers. They understood, though. Everyone agreed that it was the worst day for customers we’d seen in ages.

The funny thing was, we made quite a lot of money for the day. We should have Satan’s minions in more often. They’re pricks, but they’re big spenders.

Life as a Retail Drone, Part One

New mediocre moment: I got me a drone job. In retail. If I hang in there long enough I might rise to supervisor. Yus!

Work can be fun. Nothing interesting happened today, but there’s been some interesting stuff. I work with a pretty good crew. They’re all relatively non-stupid. One girl is really cute, which is a bonus. We were working with a gay guy called Raoul who I didn’t mind (despite his being a little bitch) but he opted to shoot through on Monday on account of breaking up with his shit-sack of a boyfriend. I’d met the guy when he came into the shop on occasion. Total fuckwad, gives gay guys a bad name. I’d advised Raoul to break up with the him, and he did. And shot through to Auckland, leaving the shop in the lurch. The interesting thing is the tills hadn’t been balancing for some reason and no-one could figure out why. Well, I guessed someone had busy fingers. Now Raoul’s shot the tills have balanced perfectly every day. Hmmm.
I’ll remember Raoul for one thing, apart from the bitching and backstabbing and reluctance to work. It was probably the only time we’ll ever agree on an assessment of a woman’s attractiveness. Picture this. I’m standing by the counter about four feet from the automatic door. This dude slopes in. He’s blond and shabby looking – one of the hillbilly types we get in fairly often. His smell followed him in about a second later. Then came his wife (sister? Both?) who was the fattest partial solar eclipse of a woman I’ve ever laid eyes on. Many obese women look a bit like the spinnakers on racing yachts but this one shamed even them. She blotted out the sun. Small objects orbited her. Parents screamed and clutched their kids close. She was almost perfectly spherical on account of her tits sagging around where her belly button would normally be. Rolls of fat escaped her already plus-size clothing. She was, of course, wearing the ubiquitous uniform of the hideously obese – trakkie daks and t-shirt. She heaved and snorted with each wobbling step. Her smell outdid even her husband’s impressive effort. Other customers swiftly began to leave. The entire staff of the shop managed to avoid getting near or making eye contact with the couple, in a lovely example of ignoring the glaringly obvious. The couple began to roam the now-empty store. I hid behind the counter.
Raoul, of course, needed to say a few words. The poor guy was almost dry-retching at this woman’s undeniable awfulness, and I was about as sick as he was. “God!” he said, sweating. “How could she wear that? How could she be like that? It’s so disgusting!”
Meanwhile, Partial Solar Eclipse woman and her hillbilly satellite were ambling over to where another colleague, Karl, was fiddling with the computers. Karl is a tech guru – he uses Linux, which should tell you all you need to know about him – and, while he remains a genuinely decent guy, he is not brilliant with people at the best of times. I watched, deadly interested, to see how this exchange would turn out.
Karl looked up and went white. Perhaps it was the woman’s gravitational field getting hold of his blood. Or it could have been the smell. Ever smelled rancid grease? Well, add a dash of Cabbage Juice, the stuff you get at the bottom of fridges, and a healthy smattering of Eau De Two-Week-Old-Dead-Possum, mix and marinade for an hour, and you’ve got it. Anyhoo, the freaks come up and ask him if we’ve got Microsoft Office (which is prominently displayed on shelves they walked past at least twice.) He answered in the affirmative and got the hell out of there. Then, thank the gods, they left.
Karl came up to me and Raoul afterward and told us that when the hillbilly dude talked to him, you could see fat lice crawling around in his sparse blond hair.
RIP, Raoul. You’re in a better place now, I hope.

Names have been changed because it’s cool to say “names have been changed.” Also, I’m not keen on losing my job.