For all that rubbish out there. Someone's gotta complain.
Customers
Anyone who knows me will know that I'm a complete workaholic. I LOVE my job. I'm a sales assistant at a video games store, and being able to talk about games without the, "Shut up, you're a geek and completely boring and you don't enjoy clothes shopping and you're SO not feminine and no-one cares what difficulty you're playing on Guitar Hero (Expert, for the record) and no-one thinks you're cool because you play WoW and shut up, right!" is brilliant.
Part of why I love it is because customers like a lot of the games I do. I had a lengthy discussion with one about the Destroy Walls spell on Dungeon Keeper, it was great fun. The Halo 3 launch was my first shift. There I was, terrified, plunged head-first into a sales world I had little experience in, and you know what? It was GREAT, 'cause there were people like myself there who loved Halo and were dying for the third installment.
I find it so sweet when old dears come in and ask for "nunchunks" and "Intendo things". What I DON'T find sweet are customers who go by the ol' "the customer is always right" policy that seems to be the norm these days.
Take this guy with a broken DS Lite the other day. Now, I can understand the trauma of the DS Lite being broken; owning on myself I think I'd be devastated if I dropped it and I was without Phoenix Wright for a number of weeks. And he came in, and I sympathized, and immediately thought about how I could help him out.
He explained the situation: it was his daughter's DS and the touch screen wasn't responding. I tested it, and it was pretty clear that it had been dropped - which counts as accidental damage. The guy hadn't taken out the extended warranty, but we couldn't prove it was accidental. We were set to replace it, however he hadn't got a receipt or proof of purchase with him.
We get SHOT if we return something without something to say it was bought from us. So I asked how he'd bought it. By card - brilliant, he could use a statement. His response? "I shred them". Cautious guy, but without that vital information there was nothing we could do.
I could see he was getting annoyed. I asked if he had a loyalty card, if so we could track it back and get the transaction number, alas, he didn't have one. I explained that it was company policy to have a receipt or something, otherwise how would we know it was bought from us? So I said that without a proof of purchase, there was nothing we could do, and we couldn't replace it.
Well, that was it. He refused to believe it was how we operated. Getting annoyed myself, I went to fetch my supervisor, who came out to back me up. He explained that without something to prove he'd got it from us, there was nothing we could do (basically everything I'd already said). The guy said he'd got it from the Blackpool branch, and could we track it back through our computers?