Service demon returns
About a year ago, I noticed that my customer service demon seemed to have gone on vacation. It hasn't been entirely absent this past year, but it hasn't been around much, either.
Sadly, it seems to have come back.
In addition to the usual sorts of things—incompetent IRS phone service, various catalog people, long waits for food at restaurants, etc—I had one particularly amusing interaction last night at a toy store in Santa Cruz. I paid for my $17.43 purchase with a $20 bill; the clerk gave me a few coins. I looked at the change, confused. I poked at it in my palm. There seemed to be less than a dollar's worth of change. I looked up in confusion at the clerk, who said, "Oh, that's a fifty-cent piece." I looked down again. Sure enough, it was a fifty-cent piece. I said, "Um, how much change was I supposed to get?" She said, "Two fifty-seven." I said, "Shouldn't there be two dollars more here?" She looked at my handful of change, looked at me, said, "Oh! Yeah, sorry about that." She opened the cash drawer to get the rest of my change, and added, "I do that all the time."
Another one, less extreme: tonight I called the video store and asked if they had Rocketeer, 'cause I want to make sure I'm not copying anything from there for my Zeppelin story. (Today was my writing day; I took a nap and did a lot of necessary reading and research, and took some notes, and typed up some handwritten notes, and did some brainstorming, but didn't do any actual writing per se. But since those writing-precursors are all things I've been putting off (except the nap, which was pretty much beyond my control), I figure they count. Also, I'm still planning to finish the last changes to my Blowfish-anthology story before I go to bed tonight.) The guy there hadn't heard of the movie and claimed they didn't have it. I told him (speaking loudly and clearly) that I'd seen it there, I just wanted to know if it was in tonight. He said, "Could you speak up? I can't hear you." I got off the phone. I didn't remember 'til then that this is the video store that files "The" titles under "T", and apparently their computerized database search system can't find such titles without the "The" at the beginning. Sigh. Anyway, I could use the exercise of a walk to the video store; I haven't been out much lately.
One last item, re the IRS stuff mentioned in passing above. The main reason that interaction was so painful was that I forgot my primary rule for dealing with customer-service people on the phone: as soon as it becomes clear that the person you're talking with is useless, get off the phone as soon as possible. Don't try to convince them that they're useless; don't try to get them to be useful; just thank them, hang up, and call back another time when they're not likely to be there. It's an extremely useful rule, as long as I remember to follow it.