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.