Bitchy McBitcherson's Blog

Tag: Customer Service

  • People Make Me TIRED

    A couple of weeks ago I made a black & white 8 X 10 ad for somebody to use in some dumbass program they were buying an ad in.

    Last week they contacted me wanting to know if I still had a copy, and wanting me to send a PDF of it to another email address. They were purchasing an ad in a new program. Let’s not even address the fact that the first ad was personalized to the program it was being printed in.

    I asked, “You are getting another 8 x 10 ad?” (It is an usually large ad.)

    He asked, “Does it matter?”

    I tried to explain to him that it did. It turned out he didn’t KNOW what size ad he was purchasing, just that he had agreed to spend a certain amount of money, so he was going to ask and get back to me.

    He got back to me and told me that it was a 5 X 7 program and he was getting a half page ad. “Can you just reuse the old ad?”

    “No, I really can’t. I’ll make a new one.”

    Now, is the half page adspace 5 X 3.5 or is that the size of the paper, with the adspace being a bit smaller? Of course I have to wait to get the answer to that because he doesn’t know.

    Today I get email that says:

    they said to make it 5 x 3.5 and they will modify the size as needed.
    they may enlarge the size to 8x 10 because kinko’s may do their
    printing for free.

    That, my friends, is why when you see ads in programs for dumbass little events they always look like total shit and the logos are completely stretched and distorted.

    I HATE that, so I will email them a 5 X 3.5 design and an 8 X 5 design. I know it doesn’t matter, because they will no doubt use the wrong one for whatever fricken size they end up with. As long as nobody ever ever ever shows me the finished product, hopefully my head will not explode.

    ETA: To be clear, yes I mind a little that he doesn’t just get the fact that an 8 X 10 ad can’t be used as a 5 X 3.5 ad, just because it means I have to work a bit to keep THAT tone out of my voice when I answer. I accept the fact that if most people feel like they “have somebody” who understands “that stuff” they call before they think. Also, you go to some portrait studio to have photos taken and they show you the proof and give you check boxes to selects photos in a variety of sizes. It is presented as if all these sizes will be the exact same visually, but in a different size. With photos they typically handle the aspect ratio problem by cropping and a lot of people won’t notice the difference. With print ads they usually distort to handle aspect ratio differences, the look of which drives me completely crazy. Or they maintain the aspect ratio and shrink to fit and create useless whitespace while a client is paying for a certain amount of advertising space.

    What really pisses me off are the people on the other end. I don’t care if they are just volunteering to help some organization raise money and this isn’t their real job. If they are asking people to give them money in order to print and distribute an ad, they should make an effort to give those purchases a chance of having the best had possible. They should have an instruction sheet detailing out everything (preferred format, resolution, various ad sizes, type of color, b&w or grayscale, bleed, etc). If the purchasers are too stupid to follow the instructions that is one thing, but don’t just plan to do a half-assed job from the get go and then have the nerve to have people pay their hard earned money for your shitty nonchalant services.

    For the people selling the ads and giving the instructions to say it should be made as a 5 X 3.5 and they will just resize it if they change to an 8 x 10 sheet (and notice they plan to resize it up, not down which will increase the quality issues) just irritates the crap out of me.

  • See What’s Become of Me

    I don’t really understand the way so many people seem so hung up on time.

    I completely understand it as a tool to coordinate. It would be much more difficult to meet somebody for lunch if we had no common reference point for when.

    I also grasp it to measure the passing of it. It is good to know how long something took to accomplish.

    I just don’t understand the random value attached to certain times of the day.

    Daylight Savings Time, for instance, to me is a big dumb piece of crap. People tell me how happy they are because “It stays light later.” What does that mean? The sun isn’t staying up an extra hour all of a sudden. It isn’t like the whole world changes, heck it isn’t even as if the whole country changes. Change the times at which things open and close, don’t change the time designation.

    I also hate “banker’s hours”. We live as part of a global economy and it is dumb that we don’t have a 24 hour society. It would make more sense to me if we worked on shifted schedules and all service industries also worked on shifted schedules so that people could find a place that was open and take care of needed errands no matter what time they worked, without taking time off. For some reason the collective mind thinks we are supposed to wake up “early” and go to bed at a “decent hour” and that no good can come of being out and about at the wrong times. Our population would not be putting as much of a drain on space an resources if we were active around the clock. Traffic would be less of a problem. Companies wouldn’t need to build or acquire buildings as much or often in order to increase their total number of employees. Everybody would be safer because there would always be activity instead of those quiet times when they claim only criminals operate.

    I pay my local and state taxes, but I cannot use the public parks most of the time I would actually want to, because they are “Closed at dusk” and don’t open again until morning. They close them because they claim it discourages crime and use of the parks for illegal activities, but making it common for law abiding citizens to use the park at all times would also do that.

    The morally superior attitude of some so-called morning people, also baffles me. So what if the early bird gets the worm? I am not a bird. I don’t eat worms, and owls are not starving to death either. Back in college we were usually up until 4 AM, and it was not at all unusual to still be up working on something at 6 or 7 AM. If we didn’t have an early class, that might lead us to still be asleep at 10 AM. However if the husband’s mother happened to call at 10 AM and find us still home and in bed, she never apologized for waking us. To her, it was like she had caught us being naughty and lazy. She had been up since 6 AM and had four productive hours of the day behind her, so she found us lacking. Of course, she had gone to bed at 10 PM. If we had called her and woken her up at 2 AM , she would have been pissed off.

    I used to consider myself a night owl, but I am no longer convinced it is that simple. Yes, I do tend to prefer the night for reasons such as, less sun, less crowds, less heat, and less distractions. The thing that made me think I was night owl, was because I typically had an extra boost of energy at night, and felt motivated and alert. I attributed this to me being a night person.

    Then I went through a stretch of time when I lived alone and had no outside obligations, and I just did whatever I wanted sleep-wise most days. What tended to happen was I would wake up, but still feel rather fuzzy and unmotivated. I’d fumble about doing mundane tasks and laze about. Eventually I’d feel semi functional and I would start to assess the things I was planning to do for the day, look through things, maybe get in touch with people I needed to be in touch with to get things done. After 2-3 hours I would eat something and then get going. I would spend 8 or 9 hours doing whatever it was I needed to do. By then I had been up for 10-12 hours. Around then I would feel very energized and alert. This was when I was most likely to get involved in a new project, get a burst of energy to finish a project. I was at my most alert and productive and also as the most receptive to social interaction as long as it didn’t interfere with something I was driven to work on. This would last for 6 hours and then it would start to fade away. I still felt amped, but no longer alert. If I was driven to finish something I would keep working, if I had no time pressure I might start reading a book or something else to help me wind down. Assuming no pressure to stay up and finish something, I would go to sleep about 20-21 hours after I woke up, and then sleep for around 5 hours.

    20 or 21 plus 5 does not equal 24, so I would not get up at the same time everyday. Instead I would chase myself around the clock. So some days I would be getting up in the morning, other days I was getting up at night. However my most alert time was typically after I had been up for about 10 hours, whether that was at night or in the morning. While I still liked running errands at night because of the things I mentioned about liking nighttime before, it became apparent that it wasn’t really that I “wasn’t a morning person” it was that I didn’t wake up alert and ready to start the day. Sleeping more did not help. Waking with an alarm versus waking on my own didn’t help. What helped was simply being awake for a while and having a chance to get moving.

    I see other people who hop out of bed and are totally ready to go. Most of them don’t get that burst of energy later in the day though. They are alert early and then have a longer slower decline cycle.

    Of course for most of my life there are external forces asking me to get up in the morning, at about the same time each day. This typically leaves me never getting enough sleep. I want to be up for 21 hours, but I want to sleep for (now that I’ve gotten older) around 6 hours. I either have to force myself to wind down while I still feel like I could really accomplish things allowing me to get the amount of sleep I’d like, or I can stay up until I feel like sleeping and then only get a few hours of sleep. I usually alternate between these two. If I do the not enough sleep option for too many days in a row I can induce insomnia. That is never good. I once had insomnia for a little over a year, and boy was I in a horrible mood.

    So, I try not to be too annoyed by the people who wake up all energized and then are blobs by the time I am ready rock, as long as they don’t treat me like I have a character flaw because I am not constantly trying to eat worms.

    I am ALWAYS annoyed by anything to do with DST. Spring ahead. Fall back. Fuck off.

  • More On How I Feel About the Medical Industry

    First I will start with the general.

    I do not like the medical profession laying their personal, or societal opinions on an individuals medical care unless they are specifically asked, “Well, what would you do?”

    Then I will move onto a story about somebody I knew.

    There was a woman who used to clean my house. She was nice enough, but unfortunately was entirely too chatty. As the result I know a lot more about her than is reasonable. Now you will know it too.

    When I first met her she was barely 22 years old and had just given birth to her third baby. Her first one she had when she was 16. The first two were with one guy, this third one was with a different guy, but she still considered the father of the first two “The love of her life, that she knows she is meant to be with again someday.” She swore that they were using birth control for all three pregnancies. She told me that during pregnancy number two she kept telling her doctor she wanted her tubes tied when the baby was born. Her doctor insisted she was too young to make such a decision.

    Prior to baby number three being born, one of the other girls suffered a severe head injury and became disabled. The woman was 20, no reasonable education, unmarried with two children and one of whom had extra educational and medical needs. During pregnancy number three she again repeatedly told her doctor that she wanted to have her tubes tied. Again she was told that she was too young to make such a decision. When baby number three was less than a year old she became pregnant for the fourth time, again swearing that they were using birth control (who knows if they’d ever been given decent instructions on HOW to use it).

    A doctor finally agreed to sterilize her at that point, two kids after she started requesting it.

    Finally we will get on to the personal.

    I have one kid. I am pro choice. I meant to have that kid. I was not absolutely positively certain that we would stop with one kid.

    We waited. We thought about it. We talked about it. We were pretty damn sure. We waited some more. We talked about it more. We decided. This took place over the span of years, not days.

    I went and saw a doctor and told them that I was done. She laughed and told me that I would change my mind. She did not want to refer me to anyone. Nothing. She just said I was too young (which I think “they” term as under 30 with 0 or 1 kid) to make that choice, and that (I kid you fucking not, she said this to me) “It isn’t right to have your daughter grow up so lonely.”

    I did not kill her on the spot. I hope somebody is as amazed by this as I am. As far as I know, she is still alive and practicing medicine. I never saw her again. If anything happened to her, it was not me.

    Now all I was going to do was talk and get pamphlets. We were still strongly leaning toward him having a procedure rather than me having something done, but I was not done researching. At that point we knew one person who had a vasectomy that they were not happy with. We knew several who had them who were happy and felt it had been no problem at all.

    After a bit of time (as I have mentioned before we tend to avoid doctors whenever possible) we finally got to a point where we set foot into a medical setting again. This time we let him try. We got a little bit further. They were willing to give him a referral, after he attended a class. This pissed me off to no end. I was furious. We are supposed to have medical privacy and being forced by insurance to go to a group class on any sort of medical condition or procedure as a condition to getting the care that you are requesting was completely beyond acceptable to me. I began throwing fits left and right and before we got very far with that our insurance coverage changed. Yes, I am choosing publicly to talk about this NOW, but that is my choice. They were holding the procedure hostage in order to force public discussion on it.

    By the time we got back to the subject yet again we knew two more men who had vasectomies who were very unhappy with the procedure and the outcome. (chronic pain, decreased sensation from orgasms, etc) I know that the vast majority of people have no problem, and a lot of the medical community discount the complaints out there, but these were people who I did not think were likely to be having psychosomatic complaints. I needed more time to research.

    Then I got sick. I’ve talked about that before.

    Finally I was ready to look into everything again and this time I found Essure. That looked very interesting to me. First I contacted a retired gynecologist who happens to be a friend’s father to ask him what he knew about it. It had come about after he gave up his practice, so he contacted colleagues to get opinions and got back to me. He also helped me formulate some questions that he felt any decent doctor should answer.

    I took his questions, did some additional research and added questions of my own. Pulling a list of doctors listed on the Essure website that happened to be covered by my insurance, I contacted fifteen of them. Fourteen by letters and one by email. The one who responded by email responded quickly and was great, but I was not thrilled with his answers to my questions. I liked very much that he communicated effectively by email, and I also liked that he was giving up the OB portion of his practice because that would make him a more effective doctor for me. However, he just had not performed the procedure enough times and with enough success that I was comfortable seeing him in this case.

    Thirteen doctors ignored me completely.

    One other had his nurse call me to give me the answers to my questions. I wasn’t thrilled with having the nurse call, but the answers to the questions were decent. I booked an appointment to meet him in person.

    I arrived on time to a fairly empty waiting room. I had to wait for 40 minutes before they took me to a room and another 20 minutes for him to appear. We spoke and were okay with the responses to each others questions. He remembered the letter and we talked a about his history with the procedure. He actually wanted to know if, should I go ahead and use him and do the procedure, whether I would be willing to be filmed for the local evening news. We also decided I should get a shot of Depo because that gives the best chance for the procedure to go well (condition of the cervix and endometrial lining) and we worked out when the right time for the procedure would be. Sounds good, right? Then it turns out the do not have the Depo in their office and I have to go downstairs to the pharmacy to get it. They write a prescription and send me down. This eats up more of my day as I have to wait.

    In the meantime I called my husband to discuss this television news idea. On the one hand I despised the idea of having a camera anywhere near me. On the other hand it seemed like the doctor would work extra hard not to fuck it up if a camera was there. Also I very strongly believe in getting any and all reproductive choice options out there for people to be aware of. We decided it was creepy and we were not comfortable with it, but that assuming all the details, as ironed out, worked for us, we should go ahead and do it.

    When they finally had the prescription filled for me they tell me insurance will not cover it. It is ridiculously expensive. Insurance won’t cover it because they will only pay for a 30 day supply from a local pharmacy and it lasts for 90 days. They will only cover it if the doctor has it in their office and it is used as part of the office appointment.

    *sigh*

    So I paid the exorbitant fee for the liquid and returned back upstairs because, of course, they only give me a little bottle, no syringe. I give the pets vaccinations, surely I could give myself a damn shot. Diabetics do it all the time. Instead I went back upstairs to the doctor’s office and was forced to wait again in the waiting room. Finally they stuck me back into an exam room where I waited some more. Eventually a nurse showed up and gave me a shot.

    I asked her when the procedure will be scheduled for. She told me that the scheduling person wasn’t in, but that she would call me within the next 10 days. She said that if I didn’t hear from the woman within two weeks, I should call.

    Now, here is the thing. They are running a business. They get real money to do this procedure on me. They actually have a woman who gets paid specifically to schedule procedures and book the operating rooms. That is her job. I am the customer. I already reached out to get the process rolling. I do not want to be having to chase people down to convince them to do their damn job.

    I explained to the nurse that it is very important that the scheduling person call me, because I will not call back. I point out how many years it had been since my last pap. They needed to call me. She said that she usually calls and she’d be sure to mark my folder correctly and put it in the right pile.

    I told her that I had spoken to my husband and we were willing to do the TV show, so she said the doctor would speak to the PR person from Essure and they would get back to me on that with the details and paperwork.

    I left. I had been there for four hours. 4. Not, 3 hours – 4 hours. I had to go home and load the car and drive to Seattle. Really, no problem I don’t mind it taking four damn hours to spend 20 minutes interacting with the actual medical people.

    They never called.

    I’ve now switched insurance, so I can’t go to him anyway unless I want to pay it completely out of pocket, and why would I want to when their office staff can’t fucking get it together enough to call and schedule me an appointment. They had months in which they could have. This is when I was willing to do them the favor of being their promotional poster girl on the evening news!

    But wait, the reason I am writing this is that I was reminded once again when I got a past due bill from them. They need $80 from me for giving me the injection (which I only got because I was supposed to have the procedure) which my insurance would not cover because they were injecting something that was not supplied by their office. They want 80 fucking dollars to have some fucktwit put on latex gloves, tear a package with a syringe in it, stick the syringe into the vial, draw the liquid into the syringe, and then stick a needle in my ass and depress the plunger. It took her less than a fucking minute.

    So there you have it, yet another example of why I am always so aggravated whenever I even think I might need to deal with anything remotely medical.

  • reply from Costco

    Thank you for your email to Costco Wholesale.

    Legacy items are PRE-new policy. Members who purchased prior to the new policy are grandfathered in, so the new limits do not affect them. The revised policy only applies to purchases after the policy change date.

    Thank you,

    Costco Wholesale Corporation

  • Costco’s New Return Policy

    We guarantee your satisfaction on every product we sell, with a full refund. Exceptions: Televisions, computers, cameras, camcorders, iPOD / MP3 players and cellular phones must be returned within 90 days of purchase for a refund.

    Now, I did not use Costco’s return policy as a way to get free upgrades. However the policy was part of the reason I shopped at Costco. It was not about cheap prices. The prices were decent, but usually I could find things for cheaper elsewhere. I spent the extra amount at Costco because it was like buying an extended warranty. I have returned a few expensive items because they quit working in an amount of time that was not acceptable for an item of that price point. I’ve also just tossed out cheap items which quit working. I have also bought plenty of things on impulse because “I can always return them if I change my mind.” Most of those never found their way back either, even if the box was never opened. Obviously their policy quit working for them, and I am aware of many people who routinely abused it. It is no doubt easier overall for them to change it across the board than to limit certain customers (although since they keep track of all purchases by account they could easily see who the abusers are.

    Anyhow since I have often been known for pimping Costco, I thought I’d point out the change. I’ve sent them an email to verify that purchases under the old policy would still be honored under that return policy. It is why we just spent more to purchase an MP3 player at Costco than we could have gotten it for at Amazon.

  • I have an idea.

    When I order something from you online, do not sign me up to receive your dumbass paper catalog. I do not want your catalog. I will not shop from your catalog. It is going to clutter up my mailbox, my house, and my recycling bin. It will aggravate me.

    I shop online. I proved to you that I shop online by placing an order online. That is where you got it into your fool head that I was interested in your products. I found you online. I found the product online. I purchased from you online. I gave you my address so you could send me what I wanted, not so that you could harass me forever with pounds of paper. Yes the catalog has instructions on how to stop the mailings. That takes up my time and effort. I need that for other things. I do not want to jump through hoops to cancel your catalog, only to have you sign me up again if I am stupid enough to ever buy something from you again online.

    Guess what? I know how to request your catalog should I want a catalog for some reason.

    Stop the waste. It wastes your money, paying for the catalog, paying to ship the catalog… Who pays for all that bullshit in the end? That would be your customers, assuming you know anything about business, which is somewhat questionable to me since you are making the mistake of targeting me as a catalog customer. I do not want to pay extra for your crappy items because you don’t know how to spend your advertising dollars correctly. If you piss your advertising dollars away, next thing you know you need to throw more money into that budget and you raise your prices. Also a good way to keep me from buying. Plus, paper is a resource. It does not appear by magic. It does not simply vanish the second I do not want it.

    You want to drive me really crazy? Send me things that look like catalogs, when you don’t even do mail and phone orders. (What is with Amazon sending me multipage advertisements of the crap they only sell online? Do they think I might forget how to type a m a z o n . c o m if they don’t send it to me? They would be wrong.)

    I have too much to do already, I do not want to be dealing with a mountain of your catalogs that will do me no good ever. They are printed on glossy paper, so they aren’t even good for absorbing pet piss and shit.

  • People Make Me TIRED

    A couple of weeks ago I made a black & white 8 X 10 ad for somebody to use in some dumbass program they were buying an ad in.

    Last week they contacted me wanting to know if I still had a copy, and wanting me to send a PDF of it to another email address. They were purchasing an ad in a new program. Let’s not even address the fact that the first ad was personalized to the program it was being printed in.

    I asked, “You are getting another 8 x 10 ad?” It is an usually large ad.

    He asked, “Does it matter?”

    (more…)

  • I’m Welcome

    We went out to dinner the other night, and I ordered roasted chicken with steamed vegetables, and to start, a wedge salad (wedge of iceberg, with crumbled bleu cheese, bacon, and tomatoes) with the dressing on the side. The waiter repeated back the fact the dressing was supposed to be on the side. He also named the wrong type of dressing. I told him the correct type and reiterated “on the side”. He named the correct type and parroted back “on the side”.

    I freely admit it. I am high maintenance. At a really amazing restaurant with an excellent chef, I will eat whatever the hell they want to serve me, but at a marginal restaurant with marginal food I need to make some adjustments so that it becomes tolerable. Dressing on the side is one of those adjustments. I am picky about dressing and I think most of them are, at the very least, not worth the calories and the sodium that I would far rather wolf down in some other fashion, and a good many of them are downright disgusting.

    Most interesting salads (like those with real bacon on them, which is a great way to consume calories and sodium) have enough stuff going on that they taste good without any dressing. Boring salads are fine with pepper and some lemon on them. Some places have good dressing and then I pour it on.

    The kid ordered a kids meal, which comes with a drink, but the menu did not specify what the drink options were. She asked the waiter if she could get a hot tea with her kids meal. I wouldn’t have been shocked if he had said no, but at the same time the hot tea is the same price as the sodas which I know they offer, and cheaper than the lemonade which I also know they offer with the kid’s meal. He said that would be fine.

    We waited and waited. Our salads arrived. Mine had dressing on it. It was drowning in the stuff. We told the waiter that I had ordered it with the dressing on the side. He stood there looking at me blankly. I repeated myself and he looked at the salad. I explained that I don’t like very much dressing, so I get it on the side so that I can control the amount. He kept staring at me. We had to detail out that I wanted a new salad, with the dressing on the side. He agreed and wandered off.

    Thirty seconds later our dinners arrived. By our, I mean not the kid’s, because surely we wouldn’t all want to be served at the same time. Also, we of course don’t want our salads to arrive early enough to actually consume them prior to our meal arriving.

    I sat and waited for my salad. It arrived, with the dressing on the side. It was a much smaller wedge than before, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that it was missing the bleu cheese crumbles. I didn’t ask for no bleu cheese crumbles. Those help to make it taste good. I requested that they bring me the cheese. I tasted the dressing. It was some of the most disgusting dressing I have sampled in quite a while. I pushed it far aside so it couldn’t infect my salad through osmosis.

    The kid’s food finally arrived.

    The bleu cheese crumbles showed up and I ate my salad, and then my meal.

    When the bill came, they have charged us for her hot tea. I point out to the waiter that the drink was to be included with her meal. He looks at me blankly and then asks “Do you want a drink now?”

    “Umm, no, she had the tea with her meal, but you charged for it.”

    “Oh, the tea.”

    “Yes, she asked if she could get that with her kids meal…”

    “Do you want me to take it off the bill?”

    “That would be great. Thank you very much.”

    Cheerfully, “You’re welcome!”

    I smiled.

  • This is from an official sign that I saw at the doctor’s office today:

    Family Medicine Department
    Service Standards

    Flexibility to member needs the best way we can
    Accountability for patient care
    Maintain quality for ourselves and others
    Integrity and professionalism in everything we do
    Live with partnership by involving people in decision making
    Yield to best service

    Member satisfaction is our first priority
    Encourage innovation
    Diversity in individual care

    I fear that somebody was paid to write that.

  • Another step toward becoming a hermit, on a mountain… with a shotgun (and internet access)

    We were running out of things we needed, important things, like dog food. Since I know that if we go too long without dog food, we’ll become the food, I forced myself to go to the grocery store.

    I had forgotten to make a list, so the shopping experience took longer and was more frustrating than usual, except in many ways that is the usual. I even knocked an item off the shelf and broke it, creating a mess. “Clean up on aisle 13!” I was finally ready to checkout, and there was only one line open. There were 10 people ahead of me (but some were together), and as I waited 3 more people joined the line behind me. People were getting antsy.

    The Assistant Manager spoke to the cashier and then walked over to another lane. As the cashier informed the people in our line that another check stand would be opening, an older woman walked up with her cart to where the AM was getting signed in to the register. The AM had not turned on the light. The older woman asked, “Are you open?” Obviously she thought we were all stupid. Of course the line was open, but we couldn’t be bothered to ask and just preferred to queue up with more than a dozen other people. The AM pointed toward our long line and told her, “I’ll be opening up, but I’ll be taking the next person in line.”

    The older woman huffed and muttered something under her breath.

    Meanwhile, in the line I am waiting in, everybody looks at each other to determine who is splitting off and who is staying. The next person in line already had her items on the belt. The people behind her decided to peel off for the new lane. This was a group of six people who were all there together, but paying separately. They only had four items between them. The person directly in front of me elected to stay in line, so I went to the new line and one person behind me followed.

    The older woman was pissed. She grumbled her way over to the first line I had been in, at exactly the place she would have been had she got into line to start with, complaining the whole way about “people cutting in front of her”. When she got up to the cashier she asked who was in charge, and the cashier pointed to the AM. This angered the older woman even more. The AM is trying to answer her angry accusations from the other lane, which slows her considerably in getting through my order.

    This allowed the older woman to finish checking out before me. She then came over and started complaining up close and personal to the AM. The AM was trying to finish ringing me up, but the older woman kept interrupting her. She wanted the manager’s name and phone number and the AM told her it was printed on the bottom of her receipt. The older woman insisted that the AM write it down for her and write down her own name. The AM finished helping me first, enraging the customer further. Essentially she was pissed off because she thought that the AM should have only taken one person from the other line, and then allowed her to be second. She said the AM had treated her badly by saying she was “taking the next person in line” but then taking more than one per person from the line. Absolutely nobody had gotten checked out ahead of her who hadn’t already been in line when she came up to the front of the store. Not only that but all her arguing meant that two people finished AFTER she did. She didn’t even seem to be in much of a hurry, since she was still hanging out to gripe long after her own transaction was complete.

    I checked over my receipt until MrsGrumpyBritches finally stomped and muttered her way out the door, and then I gave the AM my business card and told her that if manager had any questions, she could call me.

    I try to avoid leaving my house, it rarely works out well for me. Stupid dogs.