alpacas?01-25-00 My cold medicine wore off around 5 this morning. The cold symptoms appeared to be gone, but something jolted me awake, so I stumbled out to the living room and turned on the TV. 5 am TV is just as I remember it from when I worked the opening shift at the grocery store. Shit. This morning, my mind reeled with the possibilities: replays of weather-related accidents, caucus talk, and infomercials. I channel-surfed wearily. My clicker-thumb paused when I saw animals. (I tend to stop at the happy-fuzzy pet tricks sorts of shows.) I was floored when I realized I was watching a paid program. For alpacas. Alpacas. Not protein power plans. Not bowflexes. Not buy-up-rental-property-and-sell-it-with-a-new-coat-of-paint schemes. Alpacas. Living creatures. From what I gathered, between fits of hysterical laughter, you are expected to buy up a herd (?) of alpacas, breed them, and...sell their wool, I guess. They don't say that, exactly, but I know alpaca wool is in demand right now. And I've never heard of anyone eating alpaca meat. (Around here they probably would, actually; they eat everything else.) There were shots of happy kids leading happy alpacas around and around in show pens. The alpacas were groomed and dressed up; they looked like either small, fancy llamas or large, woolly poodles. Some wore tuxes. There were happy ex-CPA's and retired couples caressing their alpacas, their second source of income. There was a large chart showing that if you buy seven alpacas, next year you could have eleven alpacas! And then nineteen alpacas! The possibilities are endless! Alpacas! Alpacas! Alpacas! I spent an hour or so today working on some note cards for my retail flashback project. Right now I'm collecting dribbles of customer service, store politics, and other retail details. Eventually I'll post more, but I haven't decided yet whether to make this a website or a memoir or a publishable project. I'm leaning toward all three. In the meantime, I'm soaking up all the retail horror stories I can get my hands on. Any readers who are (or were) in customer service professions are welcome to share their pain. See, this is just a veiled request for more mail. I'll start with a little story of my own, culled from my earliest online journal days: 11-13-98 Tonight a woman came to my service desk at the grocery store and asked for a credit on a few items she "didn't get." A can of cranberry jelly that should have been free, a tub of margarine that should have been free (Thanksgiving promotion,) and a jar of olives. The olives, apparently, didn't find their way home with her. I suggested that the olives might have gotten into someone else's bag at the check-out counter; things like that happen sometimes. She waited patiently as I wrote out the credit slip for the 3 items, then stopped to scan her receipt for prices. Margarine...79 cents. Cranberry jelly...1.29. Olives.... Olives.... I said, "Ma'am, it looks like you weren't even charged for the olives." "I needed the olives. My HUSBAND really wanted the olives." "They must have gotten mixed up with someone else's groceries and probably ended up back on the shelf." Happy at finding this simple solution, I figured it was obvious that I wouldn't be able to give her a refund for something she never paid for. She failed to see my logic. By this time there was a bit of a line behind her, and one of my coworkers was invading my personal space (I hate that) by reaching for the office keys that dangled from my wrist. I stared at my daft customer. "I didn't get the olives," she repeated. "You guys moved everything around in here and I. Couldn't. Find. Them." She emphasized that last bit to be sure I understood. She wanted me to give her a refund on the damn olives—the ones she hadn't paid for—because she hadn't been able to find them in the store. |