Tuesday, 19 December 2006 by marstinson.

While I was verifying links in the previous post, I hit a link at Paul English’s blog (www.paulenglish.com) that linked elsewhere and eventually dumped me out at Violent Acres in an article about employees being subjected to verbal abuse from customers who believe that “the customer is always right” allows them to behave like morons.

While I believe that she makes some relevant points, it also brings to mind something that has been irking me for quite some time - courtesy or the lack thereof. There are a few things that I’ve noticed down here on the border that completely baffle me. Shopping carts in the parking lot are probably the most irksome. For some reason, a good chunk of the population seems to think that they can just leave a shopping cart when they finish emptying it. The fact that a cart drop-off point is only 20 feet away doesn’t even seem to matter. They just leave the cart. Perhaps they figure that it’s the store’s responsibility to retrieve the cart? Maybe they think that their time is so valuable that 30 seconds would bankrupt them? Maybe they think their cart is someone else’s problem? In any event, they just leave the blasted thing wherever, even if that means blocking a parking space or creating a situation that could damage a couple of other cars. C’mon people - 30 seconds won’t bankrupt you, it IS your shopping cart so it IS your problem, and the exercise won’t hurt you any, either.

Another annoyance - clerks who believe that their socializing is more important than dealing with the customers that they are paid to deal with. I can’t count the number of times that I have gone into a store, had a problem with something, searched out someone who might be able to point me in the right direction and then had to stand and wait while they finished a conversation with another clerk (the conversations never seem to have anything to do with work) before they would deign to notice me. And this is not just teenagers, although they are the most common offenders. Needless to say, I do not do business at those stores, but I’m also noticing that I’m running out of stores. Is this something peculiar to the border area or has the meaning of customer service changed that drastically in the past few years? I don’t run into this problem in other cities, but I’ll also concede that my out-of-town time is pretty much limited to those areas that are generally frequented by visiting business people.

At any rate, would it be too much to ask that people exercise a little courtesy?

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Tuesday, 19 December 2006 by marstinson.

Tought I’d put this out, mainly for my own reference when I suffer from blown memory buffers:

 A fellow named Paul English put together a list of company phone numbers that usually went direct to a human being. The response to his list was so overwhelming that he moved it off of his blogspace and into its own domain and database:

www.gethuman.com

 If you’re about ready to go postal over Interactive Voice (Non)Reponse phone systems, you should be able to find what you’re looking for there. Be advised that some of the direct-to-human lines are toll calls and there is no indication of how long you may be waiting to actually get a live person on the line.

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