How
about a quick observation?
On
my last trip to get a haircut, I entered the establishment to find that besides
the two workers and one older lady getting her hair done, I was the only other
person there. After being seated, I
mentioned how I had been worried I was going to have to wait in a long line
since I was coming in after most people were getting out of work.
The
lady who was cutting my hair said that even though she would like more people
coming in, it did afford her the time to do school work. And that’s when I stumbled upon it – the one
universal constant amongst retail workers (and barbers). Love of down time! The greatest thing one in the world of retail can look forward
to. Those brief moments where you find
yourself not having to rush around doing three things at once or having to look
busy so management leaves you alone.
The time where you can just stand around and shoot the shit with
coworkers or skim the internet or glance at your homework or a book that you
had stashed away.
Whatever
it is, we can all agree that it’s better than what we are actually getting paid
to do. We’d rather be bored or doing
other things than having customers come in and bother us – even if it meant
giving us their money.
You
tend to savor those fleeting moments like you were a parent looking forward to
the five minutes your baby decides to nap.
We become inconvenienced even if a customer looks as if they’re
approaching our department.
“I
have to do my job now?” we all whine and huff, before dragging ourselves over
to the customer(s).
You
– okay, I – can’t even get through an entire six-hour shift without
wistfully daydreaming of when I can get five seconds of down time.
Take
this entry, for example. It should’ve
taken me just ten minutes to write but I stopped numerous times to go online or
to daydream. A half hour later and here
I am!
[Another
two minutes elapse.]
I
guess I’ll just end this now.
More soon from the frontlines...
Look
at me! I’m posting on a fairly regular
basis! Onto the entry…
First
off, only my humblest respect is meant to Simon & Garfunkel for the title
of this entry. However, it is quite
fitting.
The
latest installment features another customer interaction that I learned about
during my stint in appliances the other day.
This was just too good to pass up.
Do you want to feel better about your life? Well, then read on!
A
customer had recently purchased a refrigerator from our store. This refrigerator was a floor display that
was sold to him at some dirt-cheap price – nearly a thousand dollars off of the
original price. The customer called the
department later that day saying he wanted to cancel the refrigerator because
he was reading reviews that it was a bit loud.
Okay,
I get that. If you live in a small home
and noise is an issue, you don’t want it sounding like a freight train coming
through, right? But there are a few
directions you can go with this scenario.
1. There is a high chance that it was plugged in
when he purchased it. It was a demo
unit. Did he hear noise in the store?
2. Why cancel it before you even got it
into the home? If you saved over a
thousand dollars for a great refrigerator, wouldn’t you want to try to at least
see if it sounds fine? Even if
it is loud, you can still either return the item with no restocking fee or you
could ask yourself, “Is this noise not worth the hundreds of dollars I saved?”
Whoever
took the call was able to talk the guy out of it (mainly because they told the guy
that they’d be able to sell a great fridge at dirt-cheap to a less picky
customer on that same day.) but that wasn’t the end of it.
The
guy called the next day and told the supervisor that he wanted to come into the
store and listen to the refrigerator for two hours to see how it runs. He wanted us to get the refrigerator that
somebody had already wrapped up and placed off the floor, bring it back onto
the floor, unwrap it, and then plug it in just so he could sit around and
listen to it.
I
don’t know about you, but I sure as hell wish I could have two hours to kill
just sitting around some electronics store doing nothing else other than
listening to how a refrigerator sounds.
Even when I’m home, I have things to keep me busy. I have to give it up to the guy. He did find the one thing that sounds more
boring than actually selling appliances:
listening to them run.
According
to the appliance team, the guy came in just the other day, listened to it for
less than a half hour, talked with the appliance crew about all the customer
reviews he read online (UGH! That’s a
whole other blog post alone. Wait have
I already done one of those? Shit. See, this is what happens when you don’t
update regularly.), and ended up canceling it anyway. I went up to the refrigerator that he was sold, stood around the
item with another coworker for several minutes, and didn’t hear a damn
thing. I just heard the sounds of his
parents weeping at the wasted time their son wasted in our store.
More soon from the frontline...
There’s
nothing quite like having two days off in a row from your job, is there? Sure, most normal jobs might always give you
two days off in a row, especially if you’re working a Monday to Friday job, but
in retail, finding yourself with two days off in a row is an exciting event.
So
you can imagine my surprise when I found myself with three days off in a row. It
was almost as good as hitting the lottery.
It’s an amazing feeling to walk out of your job’s front doors and know
that you won’t have to be back until the fourth days. At that moment, you have the greatest amount of free time you’ll
ever have for the next three days before you have to walk back through those
same doors. The possibilities for your
future are wide open! You could do
anything you want! The sky is the limit
(or at least, so you tell yourself)!
Need to clean the entire house (or, if you are a lowly hourly drone, an
apartment)?
Have to finish editing all seven hundred pictures from that vacation you took a
year ago - the one that everyone is still hounding you about putting up
pictures for?
Have
to make several shopping trips to buy things you hate wasting your time
shopping for?
Want to go to the movies and watch six new releases??
Want to finally do a real nice detailing of your car?
Well, now you can! And if you can’t get
to something the first day, YOU STILL HAVE TWO DAYS LEFT!
That’s
how the thinking goes when you first leave the office, or the store, or
whatever jail happens to be your workspace.
You’re going to work on that story you’ve wanted to do justice in those
three days instead of churn out one mediocre blog entry. Hell YEAH, you are!
But, oh, how quickly that feeling of invincibility fades!
That
first day might feel pretty damn good, no doubt about it! You’re still getting lots done. You’re relaxing, not even thinking about
work. And hey, the weather is
perfect! It was as if Mother Nature was
giving you this perfect day to go out and get things done. It’s okay if you haven’t started that
story. You still have two days left!!!
That second day is still enjoyable because you still have that last day
off. This is still a day where anything
can happen! Perhaps you’ll mix some
real housework during the day with a quiet stroll around the neighborhood with
your spouse and dog(s). Besides, it’s
still okay if you haven’t started that story.
You still have that last day to stay up all night working on! You don’t need sleep that first day
back. It’s a short shift, anyway!
Then that last day hits. You wake up,
and despite not drinking the previous night, you have a heavy feeling in your
gut. It’s that, “Oh, god, why did I do
what I did last night?” feeling. That
feeling of completely wasting your previous two days and realizing you don’t
have enough time to do all the things you wanted to do in the remaining time
you have left. That dread of having to
deal with customers whose life stories you have long stopped caring about. That dread of having to fix issues your
superiors hand to you because shit rolls downhill and they put it all off for
three days. Soon, it becomes all you
can think about and now, instead of enjoying that beautiful day Mother Nature
is giving you on your last day off, you silently curse her because it’s as if
Mother Nature’s mocking you.
“Have
to go back to work? What a bummer! I plan on giving everyone else sunshine and
75 degrees for another day. And then
when you have your next day off, I’m planning on unleashing a typhoon all day
long, SUCKER!!”
So,
instead of writing that story and getting something done (and feeling pretty
good about it until you start to question the writing quality of it), you just
churn out that mediocre blog entry.
I
hope this has been more than mediocre for you all. I really need to focus and push myself to write. I’ve been slacking way too long on this
shit.
I
seriously don’t know where the three days went. I just know that it doesn’t make going back to work any easier
knowing I had three days away. Here’s
hoping my next day off arrives quickly!
More soon from the frontlines...