Sunday, August 24, 2008
I recently read about a librarian who was fired for writing a book with characters based on odd library patrons. I don't know enough to comment on her case, but without further information, I don't see how this merits outrage.
When I was young and working in retail we had lots of different nicknames for different characters that would frequent the store, but they weren't meant to be derogatory. They were functional names for otherwise nameless cash customers.
RobotMan
For instance, there was "Robotman". He was a polite quiet man in his late 20s or early 30s. Every week he'd be in to buy some resistors or relays or some such thing. Every time he'd hang out in the components section, studiously reading the backs of the packages, reading about the parts inside. He would study the parts for 20 minutes to an hour, never wanting any help. Eventually he'd come up to pay for the part he'd selected that week. While paying for it, he'd always look you in the eye and say with all seriousness, "I'm building a ROBOT. I need some parts." The only details we could ever get out of him demonstrated he had no idea what he was doing. We'd smile while telling each other we "saw RobotMan" in an earlier shift, and it was always a burning question of what he'd buy next for his robot. Sure, he had no idea what he was doing, but who can fault a guy for having a goal and then trying his damnedest to get to that goal. He was just RobotMan to us, and we'd laugh while telling stories of his adventures in the store, but it was never done with malice.
After describing this, I'm all nostalgic for all those old characters.
The AdmiralAnother one was "The Admiral". He was an old man, perhaps around 70-80 years of age. He had some kind of metal on the front of his shoes that would make a loud CLACK noise as he walked. Except he didn't walk. The Admiral marched everywhere he went. You could hear him coming before you could see him, with a "clack clack clack clack" getting louder as he got nearer. He was clearly demented, and carried a handheld radio frequency scanner with him. He constantly listened to police bands and would talk into it, responding to them. We knew the model he used, and it was a receive-only unit. Sometimes he'd say something loudly and come to attention and salute the air. Everybody had nothing but respect for him, and always took care of him kindly; he was probably the most well-treated customer we had. (He came to us to buy batteries for his scanner)
Crazy Ed
We had a manager named Ed. He is one of the best managers I ever had because of his honest positive motivation supporting his employees. Other than one character weakness that I could not condone (but was not my place to judge), he was a great guy as far as I'm concerned. He was also a little crazy. If you were reasonable to him, he'd be reasonable to you. More often he'd be more than reasonable and downright generous. And if you tried to fuck him over in some way, he would stomp you down. Ed was also built like a linebacker, with black eyes, one of them wandering. He was around 30 years old, and his size was physically imposing.
One Boxing Day, when there was a (predictably) busy store filled with people returning crap they had received for Christmas, I saw Customer Service Nirvanna. One guy came in to return a plant monitoring device. I checked his receipt and it said December 24. Anything on that short a timescale (2 days) was automatically returned, no questions asked, unless it was broken. This one was broken. He claimed it was already broken when he opened the box. It wasn't an unreasonable excuse and it was only two days, over Christmas and we'd been given orders to carte-blanche accept all returns from within the last two weeks of purchase. Just as I was about to process his refund, I realized that the year on the receipt was the wrong one - it was two days and one year since it had been purchased. We had a posted return policy of 14 days on anything, and the warranty on the part was 90 days. When I paused and pointed this out, he suddenly got a guilty look and stammered out "uh...well...yeah... I bought it last year but ...I just opened it and it was broken!" When he figured out that last part about just opening it, he looked happy again, like he had just figured how to wriggle out of an implicit lie. I told him I'd have to ask my manager about it, and I'd be right back.
Ed's open-door office was fully visible to a customer at the cashier's desk. I took it to Ed, explained the details of how this customer had most likely just tried to rip us off. Ed stared down the guy to make eye contact, threw the monitor on the ground, then stomped the living shit out of it for what seemed like a gleeful eternity while the guy looked on with pie plate deer-in-headlight eyes. Did I mention that Ed was built like a linebacker? Ed calmly gathered the tiny pieces together and gave them to me while he explained what I should do next:
I took the pieces back to the customer, put them on the desk in front of him, and told him "I'm sorry, we tried to fix it, but we just couldn't seem to get it to work." I paused for a few seconds, as Ed had said, "to let him think about what he just did", then smiled brightly and told him we'd be happy to replace his defective plant monitor at no charge. I gave him a brand new one in a store bag and apologized again for not being able to fix the old one. Needless to say, the new ex-customer looked scared, and he never came back to bother us again.
Ed was awesome. And crazy. I miss those days.
Burton MacKenZie www.burtonmackenzie.com
Labels: retail customer stories
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