Customer Tries to Inflict Guilt Trip

At 9:30AM the phone rang at work.  This is nothing unusual in itself, but the subject of the conversation was different.

Seems that the customer had been in the store on Sunday asking about having a refrigerator delivered to her house that day.  Well, for starters, we are basically only open on Sunday for video rentals.  We used to be closed, but we had several requests from customers that we be open on Sunday.  We tried it for a little while and it paid for itself, allowing us to provide more hours to our part-time employees.  When the employee working told her that we don’t do deliveries on Sunday, she tried to play a trump card.  She told him that the former owner, from 7 years ago, had told her to have the employee call the owners at home.  Now I don’t know what she thinks “former” means, but to me it means “they no longer have any thing to do with the operations of the store”.  Needless to say, she did not have a refrigerator delivered to her home immediately on Sunday.

When she calls at 9:30, she tells me that she had tried to call the store early in the morning, but no one answered the phone.  I asked her what time she tried to call.  She called at 6:00AM and 7:00AM.  Well the store opens at 9:00AM (she knew this), so why the hell did she think that someone would be here at those times.  Now, we do have people here at 8:00AM to open the store.  Had she been patient and called a little later, someone would have been there to take her call.

Now, for the reason why she was calling now.  She wanted to let me know that because she had been in yesterday, she had not gotten a call back Sunday night and she was unable to reach us at 6:00AM, she had called another store, in another town and purchased another refrigerator.  WTF?  Ok, am I supposed to be upset?  By this time I am realizing that this lady is a nut.  She called attempting to make someone feel guilty about her not purchasing an appliance from a “local” business.  Out of all the people involved with this cluster, I think that she is the only one feeling any guilt.  I am certainly not.

Actually, the woman did manage to accomplish one thing in all this.  She managed to waste about 3 minutes of my time!

Woman vs. A/V Sender

About a week ago, a customer purchased a remote A/V Sender.  If you are not familiar with this device, you connect it to an audio/video source and it transmits the A/V signal wirelessly to a remote A/V viewing or listening device.  Usually this is a TV.  My boss recommended this device to this woman without properly accessing her ability to hook the device up.  As usual this caused a mass of problems, something that my boss is known for causing.

Incident number one.  She comes into the store and tells me that I sold her a piece of shit.  Basically, she is unable to make the device work.  Problem one! She didn’t understand that it had to be physically connected to the A/V source, in this case a Dish Network receiver.  Problem two! The receiver was connected to her television with the composite cables, the yellow, red and white cables that are a rather standard system for connecting receivers to TV’s.  This particular receiver has only one set of composite outputs.  So when she realized that the A/V sender had to be connected to the Dish receiver, she couldn’t without unhooking the TV that was currently connected to the Dish receiver.  Problem three!  After she had “analysed” the problem, she decided that she “had” to have an S-Video cable.  This, she demanded, was going to solve all of her problems.  I explained that if she only used an S-Video cable, she would not get any sound from the TV.  This is due to the fact that S-Video cables only carry video and not audio.  At first, she didn’t believe me and tried to show me the part of the manual that, in her mind, said the S-Video cable would solve all her woes.  Little did she know that she actually needed mental help and the A/V sender manual couldn’t provide that.

Finally, after some discussion about the connections available on both TV’s, we settled on a left and right audio cable with piggy backs and two S-Video cables.  I specifically asked if her TV’s had S-Video inputs, to which she assured me that they did.  This solved the problem as long as all the proper inputs were available on the TV’s.  The left and right audio piggy backs allow for connecting the current TV and the A/V sender to the Dish Network receiver to the audio.  The yellow video connection from the Dish receiver was left connected to the current TV.  The A/V sender was connected to the Dish receiver with the S-Video cable to provide the video signal to the remote TV.  She made her purchase and left the store.  All the time being a smartass and acting like I was the one who was stupid for selling her the thing in the first place.  (Keep in mind that I wasn’t the one who sold her the A/V Sender, I would have known better.)

Incident number two.  She returns to the store on Jan. 02, 2009.  Seems that I am a dumbass again.  I sold her an S-Video cable and her second TV doesn’t have an S-Video input.  Oh yeah, I asked you that the first time I had the unfortunate opportunity to speak with you.  Ok, now that she is not “demanding” to be sold an S-Video cable, she wants to return them.  Fine!  Now we get to do it the way I told her to do it in the first place.  We return to S-Video cables and sell her an RCA Y-adapter for the video connection.  She also wants an additional set of RCA A/V cables.  OK, that’s fine too.

After she purchases these items, I give her the speech.  I tell her that if she can’t get this to work she has the following options.  One, she returns everything in sellable condition.  Two, she calls the store to have someone come up and connect it for her for $60 per hour. And three, she just keeps everything and it just doesn’t work.  I tell her that we are done dealing with this shit for free.  We just can’t keep wasting out time explaining the same stuff over and over.  We also can’t keep selling her stuff that she just returns over and over.  At some point you just have to cut these type of people off.  They are becoming like a poison flowing through the store.

New Store Notification

I came up with a sign the I would like to post in our store. Of course, it was vetoed for reasons which will become clear in a moment. Here it what it says:

For all those people that bring back the fully functional wireless routers and tell us that they don’t work. The reason is that 90% of the time you are a DUMB-ASS! There will also be a dumb-ass assessment fee the amount of which will be proportional to our evaluation of how much of a dumb-ass you are.  Thank you, the Management.

There, I feel better already.