When you work in any position in which you have to deal with the public at large, you are bound to run into certain members of the populace who could well be the poster children for retroactive abortion. I refer to these unlovely folks as Customers From Hell. Actually, the terms I use to refer to them are in violation of several censorship laws in some countries.
There are actually several subcategories of CFH. I have listed them below, in order from "mildly annoying" to "RUN LIKE HELL."
"No Hablo Ingles"
Here in Houston, we get a lot of people in the store whose primary language is not English. This is fine as long as we have at least one Spanish-speaking salesperson who would otherwise be standing around watching Jerry Springer. The problem: invariably, the Spanish-speaking salesperson is busy, or the customer in question speaks something else. Vietnamese, for example. Nobody on our payroll speaks Vietnamese. This CFH is common, mainly five minutes before closing time, when he will wander to the CD department and point to his eye if anyone offers assistance. The eye-point means "Just looking." They can't speak the language, but by God they can give the conditioned response. Half an hour after closing, he's still there. Depending on the manager, you might be there till the crack of dawn babysitting this guy.
RTFM
In case you aren't familiar with it, the above acronym stands for "Read The Fu...uh, Fantastic Manual." You'd think this would be common sense. IT ISN'T. You'd be amazed at the number of people who buy something like, say, a cordless phone and wonder why it doesn't work when they take the handset to the grocery store five miles away. They'll buy speakers for their stereo and wonder why there's no sound coming out of them (hint: they have to be connected to the stereo). They'll buy a $20 boombox and expect it to play their bootleg dub of Extreme Phat Thumpin' Booty Bass Trax '98 without blowing its 50-cent speakers to Kingdom Come. That sweet little old lady you sold a fax machine to will invariably try to fax her grandson a batch of freshly baked cookies, or else bring the "broken" machine in with the complaint that when she tries to fax something, it just comes right back out the front. That nice man who bought that computer will be utterly clueless as to why his computer says "Drive A:\ Not Found," and doesn't understand when he (either vocally or via keyboard) tells it that Drive A:\ is on the front of the computer. And where do they place the blame for their stupidity? Three guesses and the first two don't count. Fear not. There are people who get paid to deal with these guys, and they're not you. Smile and hand them the number for tech support.
The Psycho
At my particular store, we have more of a problem with this than some other locations do. Maybe they get psychos too, but their psychos have money. I keep track of the psychos, and when the moon waxes full they come out of the woodwork.
My first psycho was via phone. These are easier to deal with. He sounded perfectly rational and calm as he asked me if it was possible for him to purchase a Cray supercomputer from our store. I just as calmly and rationally told him that we had discontinued that model and had just sold the last one off the floor. And then I just as calmly and rationally hung up on him. I do not know what the street price is for a Cray these days, but I imagine there are a lot of zeros involved.
Most psychos run along that line. They call, or come in, asking for bizarre stuff. Ribbon for a 1973 Smith-Corona typewriter. Electric toothbrushes. Binoculars. Jewelry (!?). Lamps. The most memorable was a woman who came in looking like she was strung out on smack and/or hadn't eaten or slept in three days.
"I need thirty Tamagotchis right now," she informed me in an urgent whisper.
At the time, I was the proud parent of a Tamagotchi, which was in my pocket at that very moment. I was terrified that it was going to beep and she was going to mug me for it. I informed her that I'd seen three left at Target, so she needed to get a move on if she wanted to catch them. Fortunately, this had the desired effect. She bailed.
Uhh...hey, baby...huh-huh
Ugh. It doesn't matter if you and the Creature from the Black Lagoon could have been separated at birth, at some point in your retail career you WILL have customers who will try to pick you up. Unfortunately, it's rarely the cute ones. It's usually the trailer park resident with teeth that look like a 7-10 split and an inch of hairy ass-crevasse looming over the waistband of Levi's 501's that have had the excess length walked off them instead of being hemmed. Okay, they're usually not that bad. But you get my point. They're rarely attractive by any stretch of the imagination. If they are, it is probably too good to be true. For example:
When I worked in the PC department, a very cute young man asked me for assistance with a printer. I gave the assistance, and he picked out a pricey little ink jet. Cool points for him. I showed him all the stuff he'd need--cable, paper, extra ink--and we started shooting the breeze. We hit it off fairly well. Finally, we got to the register. He took out his checkbook. At the exact moment he handed me his check and his ID, he asked me out.
"His" name was LINDA. Yup. I'd spent the last half hour unknowingly being flirted with by a chick.
Have you ever heard that expression "her bowels turned to water?" I could literally feel an anime-style sweatdrop growing on my forehead. By the grace of whatever deity was on duty that morning, I maintained a straight face, concocted a passable excuse (dinner with parents always works wonders), and took her phone number (like I was gonna call). Now don't get me wrong. I do sort of like women. But I like women that LOOK like women. Can't deal with the butch type. Never could.
As soon as she left, my manager (who, at the time, was an extremely tall, perpetually cheerful black lady) zoomed over to me and asked me what the story was. I told her. I thought she would never stop laughing.
Hot Hot Hot
An ever-present threat in retail: check and credit card fraud. Fortunately, the perps are easy to spot if you know what to look for.
Say, for example, someone comes in wanting seemingly one of everything, then plunks down a credit card...and acts as if it's perfectly normal. Or they grab the nearest salesperson, point at the most expensive laptop or camcorder on display, and ask for one with the extended warranty, no questions asked. I hate these guys if, for no other reason, they insult my intelligence. I did not fall off the turnip truck this morning, dumbass. When folks are about to part with a large sum of money, they want to know EXACTLY what they're paying for, what it does, how to use it, what other stuff they need to buy with it, blah, blah.
Some of the crooks have figured this part out, so they just buy a couple of small things here and there. And then they whip out an ID so obviously fake or a credit card with so many melt marks all over it from them dinking with the embossed number that you're not sure whether to call the police, die laughing, slap them around a bit with the nearest blunt object for being stupid, or all of the above.
And then there is the true dumbass, who whips out a credit card they've made no effort to alter, which very obviously does not belong to them. This happened last Christmas. There was a very sweet little lady working in our video department at the time, and a gentleman came in trying to buy a big-screen TV. Our first warning that something was amiss: he was carrying a purse. We are in Houston, not San Francisco, and we are nowhere near the Montrose strip. He plunked the credit card down on the counter, she looked at it...looked at him...looked at the card...looked at him.
"Sir," she said, calmly. "You don't look very much like my sister."
The man blanched, wibbled, and then hauled ass out the door, dropping the purse as he went. Sure enough, the purse was that of the sales lady's sister, who had been shopping at the mall across the street and gotten it swiped.
Now bearing this in mind, there are times when all the alarms are false. Sometimes the sale turns out to be legit after all. Most of the time, it doesn't.
Hostile Territory
Last but not least...the just plain assholish customer.
There are several variants of the Asshole. There are the false Assholes, who are fairly calm and have a legitimate complaint. There are Assholes with legitimate complaints who are not quite so calm about it. There are lusers who forgot to RTFM and blame you for their stupidity. There are lusers who, say, bathed their camcorder in acid for six days and are pissed because the warranty doesn't cover that. And there is the worst kind of asshole: the one that comes to the store with will and intent to stir shit up.
The shit-stirrer comes in several flavors as well. There's the sweet little old lady who is so nice to you that you feel like an asshole if you refuse to do a single thing for her, even if it means making her a book-on-tape version of the owner's manual because the print is too small for her to read. There's the quiet one. There's the yeller. There's the cusser. And worst of all, there's the one that threatens physical violence. With the cusser and the threatener, you're supposed to get a manager involved immediately. Yeah, right. let's just say our current management staff--hell, 90% of our payroll--just ain't built for that sort of thing.
Another manager who is no longer with the company came up with the greatest asshole defense I've ever seen. A combination yeller/cusser was raving at the front counter one evening, and John was called up to run interference. Calmly, he stepped up behind the counter and just looked at the asshole.
"Sir?" he asked, softly. "What do you want?"
The asshole stopped in mid-rant. "I--I don't know!" he spluttered.
John nodded. "Let us know when you figure it out," he said, and just WALKED AWAY.
The asshole stood there for a moment, utterly shocked. Then he apologized. And left. Peacefully. Quietly. Granted, this probably wouldn't work in every situation. But it worked then, and it was beautiful.