Customer Service

On a day-to-day basis, the customers I interact with while waiting tables never cease to horrify me in shocking, ugly, new ways.  At the end of my shift, on the drive home, I am finally able to exhale and forget about how poorly some strangers treat their restaurant servers.  Many patrons seem to confuse server and servant, treating me as free labor, flexing their power where they can.  Granted, for every wretched, selfish, rude person I quietly try to kill with kindness, there are ten generous, friendly, wonderful people who fall on the complete opposite end of the customer-spectrum.  But we aren't talking about them right now.

The other day, the Gap I was in was in the process of closing up shop for the day.  The clerks had been encouraging everyone to check out, informing us they were closed, their pained smiles suggesting they, too wanted to go home and be finished with customer service for the day.  I made my way to the back of the store to pay for my wares.

"So is the designer going to come out with something new soon?"  The woman at the next register over asked her exhausted-looking clerk.  

"Probably," he said, "we get new things all the time."

"But Spring is going to go away, right?  We have to be getting into summer soon."

"We're in summer now," he said.

"I just want all this neon, 80s to go away, I don't like it.  The designer is going to do something new soon, right?"  

I'll spare you the rest, but she essentially continued to sprinkle in jabs about how much she doesn't like Gap's current clothing line while asking the clerk the price of her sale items as he rang them up ("Six dollars?  Put that one back, I don't want it.") and I realized that it isn't just me who has to spend my weekends dealing with rude idiots.  The woman finished checking out, corralled her children from under the sale racks and went home.  The clerk exhaled audibly and I exchanged a knowing glance with him and smiled.  

Be good to each other, especially if the person you're interacting with is wearing a plastic name tag.