Tonight has been pretty pants so far. First off I got stalked by
Slaphead. We were driving to work and this car came up behind
ours, then followed us all the way until there are two ways to go to
the store. Dad dummied going one way, but went the other, and
fooled the car behind us. It was only when I got to work that
Slaphead asked me if I knew my dad had a taillight out. He then
explained that he was going to give me a lift into work. Not that
I really wanted him to, nor needed him to, although I suppose it was a
nice offer of his.
I also did the paper returns in an incredible 19 minutes.
Normally they take half an hour to 45 minutes, although often more if I
need to serve a lot of customers. 19 minutes has to be the record
though. And it included serving a fair few customers. Not
that I actually got off the tills at any time before midnight, because
the customers seemed to be playing tag teams. As one left,
another arrived, and did for about 40 minutes solid. Whilst I
admit to liking customer service, when it's like that, I could rapidly
go off it.
Then we had some, as I term them, idiot children come in. These
are kids that are in their early teens and don't have the sense they
were born with. I mean, how hard is it to use a coffee machine
that has literal step by step instructions written on it? Adult
manage it. Kids always take 2 or more attempts to make their
drinks. Well...kids and builders. Plus they did the hugely
annoying thing of putting their stuff on the counter, and wandering off
to fetch other stuff, except, because there were three of them, two
stood by the tills and held up the other customers whilst the densest
of the trio looked gormlessly at the sandwiches trying to decide which
one to buy. And when he got the hurry up from the two others, he
yelled "I don't give a f**k if they're waiting, I can't decide what to
buy!" Moron. Seriously, if they were kids of mine, I would
be appalled. My kid are never going to grow up without manners,
or not being able to operate the simplest of technologies. This
said, my kid are also going to know how to use a computer, rather than
just have Bill Gates hold their hand (private joke).
However, easily the biggest thing which affecting the store at the
moment is the Shell tanker driver's strike over their pay. Now,
as I don't drive I don't really care about this dispute, but apparently
it goes something like this. The drivers are paid £32,000 a
year, but their pay is made up in different ways, they want this to
stop so they are on strike. Guess they can afford it when they're
on £32,000 a year. The other reason this doesn't worry me
is that our drivers aren't Shell drivers, they are from a private
company, so we are doing a roaring trade. Especially as the local
competition ran out of diesel 2 days ago.
Hahahahahahahahaha. Anyway, we have had pretty much every other
customer asking "are you ok for petrol?" I'm actually getting a
touch sick of smiling and saying "yes, we're supplied by a private
company" and then getting into a conversation about how we both wish we
were on £32,000 a year.
One other thing that really annoys me lately is grazers. Not sure
if you have heard of this trend, but from our point of view it's hugely
annoying. Especially for someone like Miss C with no customer
service skills whatsoever (she'd rather insult them or be cold to them
than try and inject personality) Anyway, grazing is when you buy
stuff (or not) whilst you are wandering around the store. We had
a woman come in tonight who had a box of fairy cakes and was eating
them as she went around the store, then handed me the half empty
box. Thing is, you're never sure whether or not they want you to
bin it or scan it! Anyway, she really annoyed me as I had to scan
all her shopping (basket and a half) and then discover she actually
didn't have any money on her, so she had to go back home and get
it. All the time I was wondering whether or not she was going to
return. Turns up that she did, and actually was a really nice
person who just moved to the area today, but still...annoying that she
grazed!
Lastly, I got to do a little one upmanship on Slaphead. You see,
he is supposed to be my supervisor, which I don't really care about,
anything that takes responsibility away from me is a good thing.
Lets me focus on other things such as listening to music in my
breaks. I digress. So, first thing, on my first break I was
sat in the canteen busily writing this article on the eee PC, and he
rushes in and asks if I can help with the broken Pay Point
machine. Turns out that it isn't actually broken, he just needed
to retry the transaction. I did, and it worked. Then the
delivery came in and I noticed a blue bag with the produce, which he
didn't notice. This is significant because if he didn't send our
blue bag back with the returned cages, we would have been fined.
And here is my point about niceness. People misunderstand
me. Yes, I make barbed comments about people. Yes, I can
sometimes be cruel to people. Yes, I am bitchy. But I am
not nasty. Nasty would have been cheerily allowing Slaphead to
not see the bag, letting the driver drive away, and making Slaphead
carry the can for our fine. But I'm not a nasty person. I
told him as soon as I saw it and even rushed into the office and got
and zipped up our blue bag for the driver. I also fixed the eGRN
computer for Slaphead. Sort of. The printer itself still
wasn't working when I left, but what I did do was leave the eGRN system
in a usable state, if convolutely. Which I think makes me a nice
guy. I could have feigned not knowing what to do, claiming it was
a Windows system therefore not my speciality, but I didn't.
And that pretty much sums up my night. Today should be
interesting. Having yet another meeting with myself over the
direction of this blog and the old blog (planning to resurrect it in
some way due to offers I can't ignore any longer...) Permalink |