And the prize for stupidest shop customer ever goes to...

Really, what pisses me off the most though is crap suppliers & wholesalers - "Yes, we have it in stock", six weeks later you have to refund the customer his deposit b/c they have repeatedly failed to deliver the item they "have in stock"

Or the carpet cleaner machine we are supposedly a service agent for, who repeatedly failed to supply parts, or sent the wrong parts in to us for machines brought in for warranty repair. I eventually stopped taking their machines in. Oh, and they relocated from Ireland to London w/o telling us, so when I phoned them for Service info I wound up talking to the security guard in their empty ex-warehouse - I could hear this cavernous reverb behind him,

Or the well-known vacuum cleaner company, who routinely refuse to give out any service information to people like us, despite the fact they will happily sell u machines or service parts (expensive too) By coincidence surely, said company operates a fleet ov vans selling service and repairs to their customers. Surely the fact that, uh, the fourth machine in their series is seemingly designed not to be repaired w/o VERY specialised disassembly knowledge - haha the same knowledge they refuse to share, (unlike ANY of their competitors, some of whom have faxed me exploded diagrams and service instructions at no costAnti competitive practices?) Well, surely that is totally unrelated to thee phleet ov servive engineer vans. I mean that would pretty much amount to anti-competitive practices, and this is a major british success story, and a design classick!

Thee worst thing though is when you try to keep high quality items in stock, and the producers of said items close down their manufacturing plant, and turn into an importer/outsourcer/brander - always, ALWAYS the quality drops (strangely the price never does) and the producer you have built up a relationship w/ and whose produckts you have recomended to your customers b/c of their high quality & general pleasingness just turn into a lot ov generick garbage, with a fancy name stuck on the side.

Compared to wanky customers, this is the really bad stuff. the really obnoxo cutomers, I throw out of the shop anyway. Haha. More to follow, as I remember more stuff.

Oh, I thought of one more. I used to service Russell Hobbs kettles, back when their old K2 model was this tank-like thing which would last 20yrs. This old lady brought oue in which we'd fitted a replacement elemet to previously, and copmplained that we'd only fitted it "six months ago". Sad for her, the receipt for the repair was still in the box. Six months? MORE LIKE EIGHT YEARS!@#!@#!@#

Customer: So how much discount will you get with 10% discount then?

Me: 10%

Customer: How much is that then?

Me: Well it really depends on how much you're buying

Customer toddles off to choose something, and comes back again to ask how much the discount is.

They'd always then look at me suspiciously as if I was trying to rip them off.

also, all of our coffee was self-serve. the urns would run out every so often. usually, customers would simply ask for more coffee. one customer, a few weeks ago, realizing the coffee urn was empty, yelled "hello" at the top of her lungs in the meanest voice imaginable. I should have told her that "there are twenty customers in line, all of whom arrived before you, and I am helping them first, so go fuck yourself." I didn't, and only because my wages were very low and I needed the tips from all of the people in line. I was fired a week later, anyways. oh well ;-)

I think Killian Murphy is the reason why I got into dance music.

Eh?

I'm definitely not allowed take in Irish notes, and I don't think too many shops will. You can still get Irish money converted at the Central bank in Dublin, but we are under strict instructions not to take em in. There was a period where we could take in Euros and Irish money, but that period ended ages ago.

I'm still confused about the dance music remark, though...

Woman proceeds to go over to THE EXACT PLACE I WAS POINTING (under G) and look there. Sigh.

"I'd like a room tonight please"
"Certainly, which hotel would that be sir/madam?"
"The (insert well known hotel chain)"
"Yes sir/madam the (insert well know hotel chain)where?"
"In the centre"
"The centre of where?"
"Well you work for them, I don't know the address!"
"Yes but I'm in a call centre and I book hotels all over the world, which city would you like to stay in, you thick twunt!!!!"

I forgot the endless stream of take-out coffee orders coming in to the diner on Nantucket where I worked one summer:

"lahge regalah"
"two lahge regulahs"
"lahge regulah"

They do not want it regular at all! They want you to put two spoons of sugar and two creamers in it for them. Yech.

The woman I buy my coffee from every morning is very kind and nice, in that she understands when some days I stumble in and can't manage to say hello, or I fumble with change and sometimes almost forget to pay or etc. Once the cream was gone and I was just pointing and mumbling -- "empty. empty. empty."

I mean. that's what we're all like without coffee.

c/coffee/sleep

Naturally, people weren't happy with this, but that was kind of the point - it was partly introduced to reduce the number of unsolicited submissions we got in. So occasionally they tried to negotiate, despite a flat refusal on our part to agree to negotiate.

One chap sent in the disclaimer contract with his solicitor's amendments. "Sorry, we aren't able to change the contract". So he sent it back, this time with different revisions. He did this four times in all. My friends in the legal dept reckoned that there was at least £400 worth of legal time spent on the document at his end. Does this count as stupid?

(and then it turned out to be the Tweenies. Actually, it didn't)

"May I help you?"

"Yeah, what does it mean when it says something is missing?"

The conversation went downhill from there.

Our subject matter experts are not *shop* customers. But that Skype conversation just depleted my will to live.