A Gallery Of Crazy

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Meanwhile, yesterday was an absolute festival of weird at work. We now have a week left before CLOSING FOREVERZ, and apparently we are cramming. It was just nonstop insanity.

 

Setup: As of day-before-yesterday, every item of clothing left in the damn store is 80% off. On top of that, we are offering a deal where when you buy a skirt and shirt/sweater pair, you get the cheaper one free.* You can do this with as many shirt/skirt pairs you can come up with. We are also selling everything—clothes, fixtures, furniture, everything.

 

So!  I present to you the nominees for Captain Crazypants Of The Shopping Trip:

 

·         The Long Ring-Up. There are a lot of these, but this lady was the winner for long and slow. She brought a pile of clothes up to the counter and proceeded to stare at them thoughtfully for a very long time, mumbling about which one she wanted to keep. She gave me a few to start the ring-up, and I sorted them into pairs.  As I was doing this, she wandered off and started trying on shoes. I got all the clothes rung up and looked around, and she was on a cell phone across the store looking at the office supplies. It took fifteen minutes for that transaction to end.

·         The Man Who Needed Serving. A guy who ignored the fact that my coworker and I were in the middle of transactions in favor of demanding that we pay attention to his questions about buying the furniture. No matter how many times we told him we were busy and would be with him in a moment, he just kept asking. We suspect it was because we were both women and our current customers were women. We should drop everything and attend to him now, instead of in thirty seconds, because he’s got precedent, dammit!

·         The Oblivious Returner. This woman came in with a pair of shoes, and asked me if she could return them. As I was standing directly in front of one of the 26 or so big yellow signs we have floating around that say ALL SALES FINAL and NO RETURNS AFTER NOVEMBER 18, I told her no. “But I have the receipt!” she said, waving a piece of paper with ALL SALES FINAL printed on it. No, lady. “Well,” she said, “can I exchange them for the right size?” No. We don’t even have those shoes anymore. “Then I’ll just exchange them for a different style!” No.  Wait, what?  NO.

·         The Dressing Room Hijackers. Two people come in, try clothes on, leave the store. We clear out their dressing room. A little while later, someone else has clothes to try on; we hang all those clothes in the vacant room. When the lady is ready to try on, we go back and find the same two people in her dressing room full of clothes. “We came back! This is the room we used!” They magnanimously pointed out they were done anyway, so the lady could use it. THANKS, GUYS.

·         Holding Out For A Zero. Eighty percent off, and on top of that buy one get one free, one week until FINAL CLOSE, and this lady looks at me and says in all seriousness, “So do you think it’ll go any lower?” I actually stopped and stared at her for a palpable beat before saying, somewhat forlornly, “Lower than free?”

·         The Horrendous Alternative Medicine Lady. She was actually the day before, and she warrants a post all her own. She’s one of those considerate bastards who comes in five minutes before closing and takes her time trying on everything in the store. But to make matters worse, when she got rung up she would not go away. Apropos of nothing I could discern, she started telling my coworker about how antidepressants are nothing but a scam and her daughter was on disability with them and why are so many people on them nowadays? In the past we weren’t!** Fortunately she’s around to provide us with nutrition information that will cure depression! 

 

I got really pissed at this. “I’m on Effexor!” I also knew my coworker was on another antidepressant, but I didn’t want to speak for her. “It’s really helped. You should have seen me before.”

 

“You must not eat right,” the woman said.

 

I just about punched her, but instead I went with the Blinding Infodump—the science of SSRIs, the known problems with them, the heritability of depressive disorder, the ways actual scientific medicine helps, the way you shouldn't blame someone for their depression any more than you should blame them for pneumonia. Unfortunately, whack job evangelists are immune to it—every time I pointed out how medicine is actually helpful, she had a story about how it had hurt her and she was only saved by, like, sticking snails to her face so the slime could absorb in with its antioxidants.*** And then it occurred to me that she was not waiting to be rung up anymore—my coworker was in fact closing the register—and she was just standing there insulting us. And as I realized that, she started in on how if only people would try alternative treatments for cancer, they would find that chemo is unnecessary.

 

I threw her out of the goddamn store, with a hearty “Alternative medicine kills more than it helps!” to accompany her.  What the hell, we'll be out of business in a week, why bother with customer retention now?

 

I have decided that after this job, I am going to find a career as a professional hermit. People are just too damn crazy.

 

*A lot of customers ask whether the pair has to match. It sorta makes sense until you say it aloud.

 

**Never mind that in the past we didn’t have them.

 

*** Although oddly enough, every story involved her abusing the hell out of medications. “I lost vision in my right eye because of antibiotics! I took them five times in the course of three months and got a fungal infection!” “I was on steroids for months and for some reason had muscle trouble!”

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_wastrel/]

I may not have been able to word it as well, but at least I know enough about selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors not to dismiss them out of hand, especially not in the context of talking to someone whose life's been improved by them. On some occasions, I'd say that calling people on their bullshit is the only sane thing a person can do, especially when there's no reason to keep up appearances for and they're the ones who were crazy enough to pick a fight with you for no reason in the first place.

Not missing the kind of experience you describe here has to be at least half of why I've been out of work since November. People really don't realize that you, as an employee, have instructions that you've been given to follow by your employer, and act like you get to make up the rules on your own as you go along.