I stopped by the Mac's store on the corner today to buy, let's call them flammable health sticks, and experienced my most hated customer-service faux pas. The total for my conflagration flavour-tubes came to $23.26. I gave the uninterested clerk my $23.35 and held my hand out for my nine cents change. Then the phone rang and the world stopped. Instead of giving me my nine cents, nine cents, and moving onto his next ever-so-important task, he answered the phone. Now I understand that many people can't walk and chew gum at the same time. For whatever reason a human's throat closes and the knees buckle and it is impossible to walk while chewing a little wad of rubbery sweetness. I understand that and I'm tolerant. But if you can't say "Hello, thank you for calling Mac's" and count one nickle and four pennies at the same time then you can't be allowed out in public.
So I stood there like an idiot and waited for him to put the caller on hold to give me my change. Again, my nine cents! But oh no, apparently this clerk has never heard of a hold button. He decided it was safer to stand there with my twenty dollar bill and change, jingling it in his hand (because apparently he can talk on the phone and jingle money at the same time) and make me a third wheel in this obviously very important business tele-meeting. Come to think of it, who the heck calls a Mac's store anyway? Is it seriously someone asking what their hours of operation are? It's a Mac's store; the hours of operation are all of them! So I can only assume the person on the other end was a fellow uninterested staff member asking for their schedule, or someone kid asking if they can have mac and cheese for dinner. I'm sorry caller, I'm sure you're a lovely person, but at this moment I am more important than you. I don't care that you don't know when you work next and I don't sympathize with your craving for powdered cheese.
Then, to rub salt in the wound of my wallet where the nine cents should have been by now, another uninterested staff member came along and leaned on the counter to eavesdrop on this riveting phone call. You'd think she could have taken the phone and dealt with the Prime Minister or whoever was so important to keep me from my nine cents. Or at least she could have peeked at the open register, saw the negative nine cents flashing on the till screen and, oh I don't know, counted out my nine cents. But no, the most important subject at hand was making sure that the 3:00 shift was going to make it, or that little Bobby gets permission to crack open that blue box. Eventually I realized that, as unjust as it was, I was the idiot for standing there waiting for the nine cents and I muttered something about just tossing the nine cents in the Muscular Dystrophy donation box, which is where I was going to put in anyway. Let's just hope that if one day a cure for the disease depends on the fifteen bucks in change sitting in that donation box, the phone doesn't ring when the person comes to collect.
Am I the only one that can't stand customer service people on the phone when they should be helping the person standing in front of them?
