no really, i'm listening.

I walked in the door today and was immediately assaulted with Christmas music. Captain Chaos is a giant child, and gets silly and giddy for Christmas. He blasts that sappy shit on the radio from the moment the local stations start playing it. I don't mind it so much, but I really can't handle it at high volume in a warehouse for 9 hours, so I immediately put a stop to it. What the hell are they doing playing it this early anyway? It usually doesn't start until Black Friday, and even then, it's waaaaaaay too early in my opinion. Christmas has already swallowed Thanksgiving and is quickly encroaching on Halloween territory. This sparked a debate amidst my uneducated minions, (as my rantings usually do), but I didn't get involved. This was one of those mornings where my iPhone music library and headphones came in handy. You may call me a Grinch or a Scrooge, but...I can't think of a way to finish that sentence.
     Other than that, the morning was pretty uneventful. Stock orders here, deliveries there, people interrupting my efforts at Facebook-ing and YouTube-ing, a phone call from Chuck Norris, you know, the usual.
     I did have a couple of annoying things happen after lunch. We have a relatively new customer who hasn't filled out his new account paperwork yet. When he orders something, we invoice him on a generic cash account, and he pays COD. Today he finally realized that he is paying sales tax, and had a small meltdown. I politely tried to explain to him that taxes are as equally certain as death, but he wasn't impressed with my Ben Franklin reference. Plan B was to suppress my natural sarcasm genes while I reminded him that if he had filled out and returned the paperwork I sent him THREE MONTHS AGO, he would have an account by now and his wholesale tax exemption would be in effect. Furthermore, writing his state and federal tax I.D. numbers on a Post-It note doesn't help me. Sadly, I refrained from telling him that if I had any control over taxes, I probably wouldn't be working for a living. So I left it as a shortage when closing my cash drawer with a note to my supervisors in my paperwork saying that my drawer was short $5.11 because this guy thinks he is above the law. I'm looking forward to the e-mails I'll be getting on Monday morning.
     I had another crabby excuse for a human come in later and whine about his pricing. Pretty much all he buys from us is batteries, and our battery supplier recently raised prices on us, which means we get to stick it to our customers, too. This is actually normal for the ridiculous roller coaster that is the auto parts supply chain, but what isn't normal is that the company I work for almost never bothers to inform its paying customers of an upcoming price structure change. When Mr. Crabshit came in to spend his hard-earned money on an obnoxiously heavy thing that I hate selling anyway, I had the pleasure of ruining his day by telling him that the same part # he bought last month just increased in price by a good 15%. I used to hate having to bear the burden of giving customers the bad news, but since I don't have a choice, I've decided to start enjoying it. I got the usual tirade about taking one's money elsewhere, and possibly something about customer service, but I wasn't really listening. The nice thing about being behind a counter is that the customer can't see your computer screen. There's something deeply gratifying to me about playing solitaire while I'm supposed to be getting a verbal thrashing. In the end, I got his money. I always get their money.
     I did get a visit from a nice customer. He has a good sense of humor and we pick on each other regularly. I haven't seen him in almost two weeks, so I asked what he'd been up to. When he replied that he just had surgery on his hand, I couldn't help but to ask if he'd finally gotten his thumb removed from his ass. It's funny how fast the overall mood can change in my store.
     Things slowed down in the afternoon, which is always welcome on a Friday. I like to think I'm a relatively lenient manager, and when things slow down I let my guys slack off and basically do nothing for a while. I find that it's good for morale to not be constantly driving them like slaves. It's also hard to be strict when I'm laying on the couch playing Angry Birds, but I digress.
     The only bad thing about the slow periods is that the Human TiVo has a captive audience. This guy must be really lonely, because he almost never stops talking. It's verbal diarrhea in its purest form. I have never in my life known anyone who can endlessly ramble on about inane bullshit like this. It's really amazing to see. One of these days, I'm going to discreetly take a video with my phone and share it here, just in case any of you think I'm exaggerating. We have taken to calling these slow afternoons "story time". Today it was endless blah-blah-blah about baseball players from the 60's that no one has ever heard of, living next door to Loni Anderson (who used to sunbathe in the nude!), and a defunct drive-in movie theater that I'm pretty sure didn't really exist to begin with. Again, the headphones came in handy.
     We close at 5pm, so of course we had one customer order something at 4:45 that they absolutely had to have delivered today, or else demonic horsemen would swoop down and rain destruction upon the world and riddle us with fire and brimstone. So I reluctantly dispatch a driver to deliver parts that I know won't be installed on a car today anyway, and start shutting down computers and turning off lights. My other remaining driver goes out to park his van, and THE SAME CUSTOMER calls back and needs something else. I really wanted to tell him to go suck a bag of dicks, but being the good corporate robot that I am, I quickly reviewed his monthly sales in my head and calculated that his overall business is worth a little Friday afternoon aggravation. So now I have to send a second driver with only ten minutes left to close. I really think people do this on purpose just to irritate me. I was already resigned to leaving at 5:10, now I have to wait until 5:20 for the second driver to return before I can go home. I know it's just twenty minutes, but that's a long damn time when you've already been at it for nine hours. Furthermore, it places twenty more minutes between me and my big comfy recliner.
    Speaking of, it's calling me from the other room. I'm gonna go park my lazy ass on it, have a drink, and pet my dog (who mercifully does not require auto parts).
     Viva la resistance.

Tito

 Today started off rather slow, which left me with the hope that it might be a nice, easy Monday*. The coffee was hot, there were only a few deliveries to go out, and even Captain Chaos was pretty calm. After listening to Human TiVo tell everyone about a show he watched last night, (apparently Thomas Edison and George Jefferson were integral to the signing of the Declaration of Independence) I sent them all out on deliveries and reveled in my quiet store and hot, fresh coffee.
     I expected it to be short-lived, but to my surprise, things went pretty smoothly until about 11:30 or so. There's been an interesting phenomenon happening with my customers lately. They have begun ordering en masse between 11:30ish and 1:00ish. It seems that people like to place orders before they go to lunch thinking that when they come back from their break, their parts will have been delivered. This is not a bad idea, but the problem comes in when thirty or forty customers all start doing it. Factor in that my drivers all need to take lunch breaks too, and we end up with a pretty hectic 90 minutes. This may be somewhat beside the point, but I think it's also worth noting that old farts who get paid minimum wage can get very crabby when they're hungry for their "noon-day sammich".
     Being busy is one thing, but what really irritates the poop out of me is when we're unnecessarily busy. For example, Tito's Auto Service needs brake pads and rotors for a car they're working on. Their customer cannot wait so they need us to deliver the parts quickly. Fine. I'll be happy to dispatch a driver to bring you what you need. In some cases, a mechanic can be too hasty and place an order for parts before he's looked at the whole car. So while we're delivering the pads and rotors to Tito, he calls back and orders mounting hardware for the brake pads, and of course, he needs them as soon as possible. SHIT. Now I have to send a second driver to the same damn place, while the lunchtime rush orders continue piling up.
     I would like to tell the fictional Tito what he can do with his second order, and that he has no business getting mad at me because it took two deliveries to get him everything, but I can't. I have to sit there and apologize for wasting his precious time. Why? Because if I get one single complaint about our service, I get 273 bosses descending on me and angrily asking why my store is having customer service issues. In this event, I usually relate it to pizza. If you order a pizza for delivery, then call them back after the delivery person has already left and demand that they add breadsticks to your order because you're hungry, and you need your food right now, you are complicating everything for the people that are just trying to help you. Not to mention that it's inconsiderate and just flat out rude. This usually seems to get my point across, and leaves my bosses free to go about their business of harassing some other poor, corporate slave. It also leaves me free to continue the conversation I was having about the plausibility of masturbating during Leonardo DiCaprio's death scene in "Titanic". (Hypothetical, of course.)
      I often surmise that I must be part masochist to subject myself to all of this, and ask myself why I don't find another job. I start thinking about other things I could do, but pretty much every job in the world comes down to customer service. It's a consumer's world, and if you don't keep them happy, they'll go somewhere else and you may find yourself without employment. I guess I'll stay in my comfy little rut for a while. I've been here long enough that I'm now the manager, so I'd hate to have to start over somewhere else and work my way up the corporate ladder of pain. I'm also kind of lazy. So I soldier on, trying to help people and getting yelled at for stuff that isn't my fault, until the day I'm deemed an "cost-inefficient asset" by someone in a suit who knows absolutely nothing about the automotive industry. It's alright though, I already have my next job lined up. I'm going to go work in a pizza shop, just so I can spit on Tito's breadsticks.

*I intended to post this on Monday, but I wasn't happy with it. A few edits later, I suppose it's passable.