Standard Mischief

It was a dark and stormy night. I was at Blows, trying to buy a electrical wiring box….

I went to the hardware store the other day. I got what I needed, and decided to go through the you-scan-it auto-till robo-teller checkout thingy at the local Blows hardware store. I get to the front, and theres a freaking queue to use the machines. There’s four machines. One is out-of-order, on another one there’s the one sales-droid helping a customer, on the third, there’s a guy that’s stuck because he had the audacity to buy a piece of trim. Apparently, when you purchase certain items, a flag is raised and you can’t finish and pay for your purchase until teh sales-droid comes around and keys in their special code that says ?yes indeedy, the person is only rightfully purchasing the same number of these things that the customer scanned?. On the fourth machine, there’s a guy stuck, just like on number three. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the store, the few tellers staffed by real breathing clerks have tremendously long lines behind them. This store is always like this. I’ve gotta quit shopping here.

I ask the sales droid (who has been at her keyboard clicking away for the last three minutes, and didn’t clearly look like she was helping anyone) ?Excuse me ma’am, do you think you could help this customer ahead of me who’s been waiting patently for the last five minutes for some help??, gesturing over to till #4. She looks up from her keyboard and says ?I’m sorry, but I’m still helping this customer here (waves to till #2). We wait another minute and the lady waiting ahead of me gives up and goes to stand in the impossibly long clerked lines, I’m head of the queue now. I say ?this guy (#3) merely needs to be approved, and he’s been waiting forever? The sales-droid gets up and quickly blesses till #3 and starts walking back to her keyboard. The guy at #3 starts feeding in pennies and dollar bills. I pipe up again, ?could you possibly call over the manager on duty? I could check out over here, but the guy that’s been waiting here for five minutes for your blessing, and he gave up and then walked away. Don’t you have anyone to help you when it gets busy?? I really didn’t mean to take her away from the guy at #2, but she walks up to the now-free #4 and says ?what’s wrong?? I told her that the guy gave up after waiting so long and the crap he scanned in needed to be cleared. She had to go into service mode, delete, and key in her super-secret code each time she wanted to take a single item of the list.

I don’t get any satisfaction out of being the squeaky wheel, or tormenting the poor sales-droid, but I’ll be dammed if I’ll sit by and receive crappy customer service. This lady was on top of things, but she was overwhelmed. It’s unbelievable that she could not get some quick help from her manager when it gets busy. I don’t know why she was stuck for so long helping the guy at till #2, but I suspect he wanted to buy 3 feet of wire, or a random nut or bolt and didn’t happen to come prepared enough to bring his own pen and paper and she was stuck looking up the cost of an unbarcoded 98 cent item.