The past two days I have been thinking about Borders, specifically any customer complaints that I may have handled. After so many years in management and customer service in general, I have handled so many complaints they all tend to blur together. Yes, there are some that stand out in the forefront of my mind: the customer complaint to the attorney general when her contractor applied our cheapest brand of paint to wet drywall in her new addition and tried to get Sears to replace her paint with our highest grade for free; another Sears customer who placed two gallons of paint in her trunk on a 95 degree day and wanted compensation for her ruined dry cleaning when the cans exploded under the heavy pressure caused by the overwhelming heat; the customer who melted her VHS when she placed it on her dashboard the week that Casino was released and didn’t understand why she had to purchase a new copy for the video rental store I worked at (we were willing to waive her two weeks of overdue fees with a replacement copy saving her money) and threatened a law suit despite the fact that she signed an agreement with the rental store; the man who purchased The Goonies because the rental store was out and his daughter wanted to watch it at her birthday party and then demanded a full refund when the movie was not damaged and he wanted a “rental” for free (this stands out because our corporate office never did back us up at the store level).
All these and a few more spring to mind, but Borders…how do I explain Borders Eastside?
I suppose I could start with the man who screamed at me for a full thirty minutes because somebody stole the toilet seat in the men’s bathroom and I wasn’t aware of it until he brought it up.
Or the man who was rude to several of my employees on the floor which ultimately resulted in his wanting to speak to a manager all so that he could rant and rave and call my employee an idiot because he didn’t like the way she wrote her number one on the slip of paper she gave him.
I’m not sure that I can count the numerous complaints our customers had regarding the inevitable sleeper that I had to wake up and ask nicely not to fall asleep again or I would be forced to ask them to leave. In one situation I had asked two gentlemen to please wake up or they would be asked to leave only to be yelled at by another customer who felt they should be left alone.
There was also the time I took the complaint over the phone by the woman who needed clarification on our return policy. After repeated attempts to try and explain the policy I discovered the true disconnect wasn’t in the policy itself, but in her understanding of what a comma was used for in a sentence.
The was also the gentleman who came uninvited into the stock room one evening as I was sorting a pallet who wanted to chew my ear off for half an hour because our physics and mathematics section was smaller than he deemed necessary. I listened to countless other complaints about other sections in the store but the majority of these came from those who merely wanted to use us as a library and had not intention of purchasing the expensive books they requested.
Of course, there was the man who locked himself in the men’s bathroom to sleep off a drunken stupor that resulted in our calling 911.
And the customer whose books were ripped out of her hands by a meth addict who consequently shoved them down his pants. When confronted he pulled said books out of his pants, handed them to me all while telling me he didn’t have any books and didn’t know what I was talking about.
There were the endless complaints over the free wifi not working on their computers by those who planned to camp out in our café all day while buying only one cup of coffee and rearranging the furniture (not to mention stringing their cords across the aisles causing tripping hazards for other patrons).
Or the man who was outraged because we did not permit him to sit in a chair blocking the line to the registers all because he planned to read the DSM IV book instead of purchasing it or going to a public library to do his research.
I could also cite the multiple instances when customers complained about the escalator shutting down nearly every other day which forced them to either walk the ‘stairs’ or use the elevator that was four steps from the bank of escalators.
Heaven forbid if we didn’t open up exactly at 10am sharp on a Saturday morning and the swarm of people couldn’t flock to their designated chairs. (Although I will admit it was mildly entertaining to watch them race each other for that special seat that nobody else could take but them for the next 10 hours).
My personal favorites were the complaints about how we categorized our store and alphabetized our sections by the authors last names (in the majority of situations) and “wouldn’t it just make sense to alphabetize by title instead?” (This suggestion coming from the person who couldn’t remember what the title of the book was they were looking for or the author’s name). Which leads me to my next favorite complaint…the one that centers around our not knowing what the customer is looking for when all they can tell us is what they think the cover looks like...but it was on TV on a show they can’t remember by an author they cannot name on a subject that mentioned someone’s name or maybe a place.
Out of all of these, and many more that escape me right now, how do I choose to tell in an interview? The complaints that make me sound whiney or the ones that sound so bizarre that nobody, unless they actually happened to be there, would believe? So for now, I will remain silent on particulars and instead refer in generalizations.
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