In which I live to serve, but not for much longer

On July 12, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Work1 Comment

butler-rhett Actual Fiction has happened today; not much, but nonetheless Actual Fiction, so I feel pretty good about the universe right now. I was supposed to spend the morning taking care of my last Act of Ridiculous Customer Service (why, sure, I’ll drive to Michigan and pick up the seat of your armless chair and drop it off at the leather reconditioning place so you don’t have to do it! Why not?) but the timing ended up not working out so I’m probably doing that tomorrow.

This will be the last time I drive anywhere for a customer, which pleases me. It probably seems slightly more unreasonable than it actually is, at least in my head; I don’t always have a lot to do on my days off and if I’m just going to spend the day on the couch playing video games or staring at HGTV I may as well drive for a bit and listen to some podcasts instead, y’know? Yeah, gas costs money, but so does everything else, so I’m not going to worry about it all that much.

Anyway. The world seems to be a bit more on fire than usual this week and there’s a Big Corporate Visit coming next week at work so I’ve been mostly keeping my head down. Anything going on out there that doesn’t involve disaster?

In which I melt down

On June 20, 2018June 20, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

dante-inferno

It has been an exquisitely crappy day.

From more or less the moment I woke up today, when I figured out nearly immediately upon waking up that our wireless connection wasn’t working, I have been thwarted in goddamn near every single thing I have tried to do today. It’s been the kind of day where I start swearing uncontrollably into my phone and hitting the star key over and over again because Comcast uses a fucking voice recognition computer for their “help” line and there are no options that remotely match what I need. It is the kind of day where I begin one conversation with a customer service agent by telling her in my most polite available tone of voice (which is, despite my best efforts, still not very polite) that I am aware that none of my problems are her fault and I’m going to try and avoid coming off as a complete asshole but that I am this close to losing my shit altogether with her company. It is the kind of day where I begin another conversation with another customer service agent for a different company by asking her what the main ingredient in tomato soup is, because I am completely exhausted by dealing with non-human-being agents and need her to literally prove that she is flesh and blood before I try and talk to her, and yes, ma’am, I am completely serious, I want the answer to my question please.

It is the kind of day where I take my son to McDonald’s for lunch, my son who is at home with me today because his day care is taking a field trip to a place where his allergies prevent him from going, my son who does not remotely deserve the surly, angry, stressed-out, swearing mess of a father that he has—it is the kind of day where I take my son to McDonald’s and McDonald’s is out of ketchup. Because of fucking course McDonald’s is out of ketchup, why would lunch be any different from anything else that’s happened today?

It is the kind of day where a former student who I have remained in near-constant touch with for the five years since she left my classroom– a student who I have referred to as “my daughter” in conversation with others before because our actual relationship is a trifle too complicated to explain—the kind of day where that student is having a Very Bad Day, and I find that I simply do not have the mental energy or emotional capacity to help her, and treat her with a coldness she does not deserve or need.

It is the kind of day where I find out that the brightest student I’ve ever had in my classroom, a student I have not kept in constant contact with, who has just graduated from high school, is moving in with his girlfriend and not into a college dorm room because he cannot afford college and has no one in his family to help him navigate through it.

It is a miracle that I’m ending the day by typing this into this Word document on my desktop—because my internet doesn’t work, and my phone is out of data, and I need to stay offline as much as possible so I’m writing it offline—and not ending it in jail. Because the fact that I made it through the day without assaulting anyone is frankly bordering on miraculous.

It is the kind of day where none of these problems are problems at all, because the monsters who we have allowed to take over our government are drugging children that they have kidnapped and are keeping them in concentration camps. Concentration camps run by for-profit prison companies, on American soil.

And right now I have no idea how the fuck to cope with any of it at all.

Adventures in customer service

On February 15, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Work3 Comments

The kid’s doing well, in case you were wondering. Also, the iPhone’s Portrait Mode is *ridiculous*.

So last weekend sometime I sold a sectional. I am absolutely religious about checking ETA dates whenever I order furniture, as you are probably aware if you’ve ever read any of my posts about my job before. I absolutely despise dealing with pissed-off people, which makes me the most honest salesperson on the planet, because I’ll lose a sale in a second before I’ll misrepresent when something is gonna come into the store. Because you’re gonna notice, and I’m not gonna want to deal with you when you do.

So. A bit of background: our company has two main warehouses. Our upholstered product is all supposed to come to us from one of them, but if that warehouse is out of a particular piece and the other warehouse has it, we can send an email and switch which warehouse it comes from and it still shows up on the same timeline. I do this a lot, as you can probably imagine. However, the person who responds to those emails works banker’s hours. So I was rather dismayed on Monday to discover that a particular piece had sold out from the secondary warehouse over the weekend and that I now couldn’t get it until– wait for it– June, when I told my customers to expect it in the store in 7 to 10 days.

June is farther away than 7 to 10 days.

No problem! I found one at our Lafayette store, and decided that rather than wait for a truck to come through from their store to ours and hope that they remembered to put the piece on that truck, I’d just go get it myself today. It’s like a two hour drive. I have a former student who I’m still in touch with and quite fond of who is a sophomore at Purdue, so I’ve got somebody to grab lunch with, too! I’ll go get the piece and have lunch and come back and drop it off at the store and nobody’s the wiser and I’ll lose a chunk of my commission on gas money but whatever. I like the occasional car trip.

Go ahead, check the weather report for today for northern Indiana. Because holy Christ, why did I do that stupid thing I did. I have never seen fog in my life like the Lovecraftean, Ravenloft-esque insanity that I had to drive through today. We’re talking maybe three seconds of visibility in front of the car, less on the heavy spots, for the first two thirds of the trip. I thought about turning back repeatedly, consistently falling prey to the sunk cost fallacy and reasoning that surely I was damn near out of the fog by now and that it would be, would have to be, gone by the time I was on my way home.

Also, once I got to campus, my GPS utterly shit the bed, trying at one point to send me the wrong way down a one-way street, then redirecting me to another street that it could have just left me on the entire time rather than taking me out of its way to nearly die, and then directing me into an alley between two buildings that abruptly turned into a bike path that just-as-abruptly turned into nothing, at which point I called my former student and described where I was as best I could, informing her that I wasn’t moving my car again and she needed to come find me.

(Also: I’m not a complete idiot. The other problem with Purdue’s campus is that there are damn near no signs anywhere. Signs that say things like “No Exit,” which one might put before a point-of-no-return road of some sort.)

Also, Logansport, Indiana is the worst place in the world and I don’t want to hear any different from any of you. I got directed through “town” for some reason and half of the place was utterly deserted and everyone in the rest of it had the Innsmouth look. I deliberately took a different route back to avoid the town.

We lingered over lunch, at any rate. I was the oldest person in the restaurant by at least 18 years and we were both vastly entertained by the literal hush that fell over the room when we walked in, as everyone tried to figure out if I was a sugar daddy or not. When the hell did college students get so Goddamned young?

I was planning on being home by 2:00 and didn’t bother leaving West Lafayette until after 1:00, figuring that the fog would have to have burned off by then.

Nope. Just as bad on the way home as on the way down there, except without the opportunity to turn back. Also, west central Indiana smells terrible. That sounds like I’m just being mean because of IU vs. Purdue regionalisms and I swear I’m not. It smells awful.

Point is, I think I deserve a tip for this one.

On the books I read, and where I get them

On December 29, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading1 Comment

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For the last several years, I’ve basically been boycotting Christmas. With the single exception of my son, I’m done buying gifts for anyone at Christmastime and I don’t want anyone getting anything for me either. I’m not a Christian. I’m a grown man with his very own job and in general if I want something I can get it for myself. The fact that the right wing has managed to make how I greet people during December into a shibboleth doesn’t help, either. Fuck it, all of it. I’m out.

My mother has had… some trouble with this concept.

I’ve tried to redirect her always-considerable Christmas energies (my list of “what I got” when I was a kid was regularly two or three times as long as anybody else’s, and we were never rich– Mom just really prioritized Christmas) away from my wife and I and toward my son, but “No, really, don’t get me anything” hasn’t sunk in. She’s still getting me things, although I’ve gotten her to tone it down to one or two smaller gifts. This year it was a Barnes and Noble gift card. Just that. And she practically begged me to use it.

I should not be surprised that my mother knows my weak spots. Okay, fine, I’ll bend my principles and go get some free books, geez.

She also got my wife a card, and my son had some free-floating cash around, so we piled into the car yesterday to go to Barnes and Noble, and Christ if I wasn’t reminded yet again why I get every damn thing I read from Amazon now. I used to shop at Barnes and Noble all the time and then they moved their store to the mall, and since then damn near every time I walk into the place it generates a blog post. The mall is seven million miles away and the weather was absolute shit yesterday and the crowds and the parking lot and jesus why the hell am I doing this to myself and my family.

A brief diversion: I have, for the last couple of years, been trying to aggressively diversify my reading, if not in subject matter than at least in terms of the authors I’m reading. I’m always on the lookout for new authors, and in particular I’ve been trying to focus on women authors and authors of color for the last couple of years. I wrote my top 10 books of the year post yesterday, and while part of me looked at it and went yeah, mission accomplished— eight of the eleven books were by women– another part of me noticed how blindingly white the list was. Nine out of the ten authors. In other words, white women, specifically, appear to be the beneficiary of this policy.

Okay, cool. So this year I focus more on authors of color, right?(*)

Y’all have any idea how hard it is to find authors of color in the science fiction/fantasy section at Barnes and Noble? Way harder than I thought it was going to be. I started by going through my Amazon wish list and trying to find some of those books. No luck on 90% of them. I wanted to just scan through the new books, but they’ve gotten rid of that section in SF&F recently and everything is spine-out now. Okay, start looking for authors with visibly ethnic-sounding names and/or using initials instead of first names, which is generally code for “woman author.” No luck. Hell, just finding books by women was difficult enough.

I mean, I eventually found three books, two from my wish list and one that I literally grabbed because I’ve heard of Wesley Chu and he’s Asian and I’ve never read anything by him. But the whole process was unpleasant and took much longer than it ought to have. Turns out discovery of new books is kinda complicated if all you have is the spine and the author’s name to go on.

And then we got up to the counter and the salesperson gave my wife her spiel about the membership card. And we’re cool with that! It’s your job, you go do it. And then I got called over by the salesperson next to her and she did the same thing, and my son made it obvious that he was standing in between his parents and the first lady realized we were together. And I didn’t have a card either, because the card costs $30 annually and I really don’t spend the $300+ every year it would take to make the card worth it at Barnes and Noble any more. I’m not arbitrarily adding $30 to my sale so that I can save money $300 worth of purchases later.

So she leans over to me and snarks, again, in a really shitty sort of tone, “You’d have saved nearly half the cost of the card already if you joined up!” And it’s at this point where you’re no longer just doing your job and you’re kind of being an asshole. I already said I don’t want your card. You’ve had the card for years. I get it. I have to spend $300 before I save any money and I’m not going to.

I opened my mouth, and alternate-universe me snapped “If I wanted to save money I’d have bought this shit from Amazon” back at her. This-universe me, luckily, has a bit more sense and just said “No, thanks” again and we left, driving another seven million miles in snow and over ice to get back home, and I resolved to let the Goddamn post office do the driving for me from now on. Because I’m in sales right now and I’ve worked a register plenty of times before and I try my very hardest to never be anything but perfectly nice to anyone on the other side of a register from me.

So quit making me work at it.

Also, lady? Did you notice we were buying with gift cards? Somebody else already spent that money. I’m not getting your loyalty card today. Between the two of us we got five or six books for like $10 and I don’t care about your card right now.

Ugh.

(*) Miss me with it if you have any plan to quibble with how I arrange my reading, okay? There are millions of books out there and I can’t read all of them, so I’ll use whatever the fuck criteria I want to decide which ones I spend my time on. Thanks.

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world

On May 8, 2017May 8, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Work7 Comments

This post’s got nothing at all to do with Walt Whitman, mind you, other than that line is running through my head at the moment. Well, actually, it’s running through my head in my preferred alternate version, which is “I sigh my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” Why I think it’s okay for me to rewrite Whitman I don’t know, but that’s how that line always goes in my head until I remember it’s wrong, and for some reason I really prefer the sound of my version better.

I think he’ll forgive me. He’s dead and famous and I think it’ll be okay if I mangle his immortal poetry a bit from time to time.

Today kinda sucked, speaking of barbaric yawps and the reasons for same. Two members of the sales team/management staff are out of town, a critical warehouse guy is at National Guard training for two weeks, and… well, that’s actually more than enough given that the size of our staff isn’t that big to begin with. Plus my printer stopped working for the entire day until an hour before close when it decided it was the right time to print every single document that I’d either deliberately or accidentally sent it for the entire day. That meant that every invoice I wrote today meant I had to make at least one trip to the other side of the store. Our store is big, and this is annoying.

Oh, also we hired a new fourth delivery guy last week for like the eighth time, and then today… hahashow.php.jpeg

No, we’re not allowed a second delivery crew no matter what we do. Even when they get hired they disappear. Woohoo!

I had two interactions with customers that burned my ass today, too, and I’m going to gripe about them even though I’m certain I’ve griped about other versions of them before.

The customer who actually had the gall to get pissed when I told her we’d be able to deliver her stuff to her in three days. This never ever happens, and was only possible because we had a couple of cancellations last night. I tell every single customer I have to expect a 7-10 day wait for delivery until we get that second crew in place, and I put it on the invoice. And you’re bitching about three? She actually asked me if I was kidding. I should have told her to go to hell.
One guy (this one wasn’t mine) who got all kinds of pissed at me because his bed wasn’t in. It was day 8. I tell my customers to expect their stuff to be in the store within two weeks; I’ve heard people say 7-10 days, which is usually true but is not true frequently enough that I tend to just round up. He went on a long rant about how if it wasn’t here by Thursday he was going to cancel. Oddly, the fact that I told him several times that it was highly unlikely that his stuff would arrive by Thursday (if it ain’t on a truck on Monday, it’s probably not going to be here by Thursday) did not actually lead him to cancel– just to continue to threaten to cancel. Like, are you literally just bitching at me to hear the sound of your voice? I don’t care if you cancel. I really don’t. You’re not my customer and I’m only putting up with your shit because you’re bitching at whoever answered the phone instead of asking for your salesman, and I don’t have the energy for that when I’m the only person on my entire half of the floor and my printer doesn’t work. Fuck off. Other days I may have some patience for you; today is not that day.
Same guy, in an entirely separate sin, made a big deal about how he’d already paid for his furniture and we’d “cashed his check.” First of all: fuck you for writing a check. It’s 2017, goddammit. Second of all, find me the retail place that gives you shit before you pay for shit? There are literally none of those. Granted, some places give you your shit quickly after you pay for it, but every single retail establishment on the planet makes you pay for your stuff before you get it. Third, the staff doesn’t get paid until stuff is delivered. So nobody has gotten the– wait for it– $15 commission on the bed you bought, which is literally the cheapest bed we offer in the store. Piss on fifteen dollars. Okay, there’s $300 in a company account somewhere that used to be yours, assuming the check’s actually cleared by now. So the hell what? We’ll give it back if you cancel. So please cancel? Thanks.

Just not in the mood for dicks today. I was running from the second I got to the store until maybe half an hour ago. I picked the boy up from my parents at 8:30, already half an hour past his bedtime, and came home and fed the pets and changed the bed and made him put his pajamas on and got him into bed and wrote a blog post and now maybe I can read and relax for a bit before I go to sleep. Will I be any more tolerant toward entitled assholes tomorrow? No, I will not.

(Note, because I feel like I should: the vast majority of my customers are really nice people. I interacted with way more than two people today, but damn if I wasn’t surprised that I got through those two interactions without blowing my stack. It was a really long day.)

Adventures in customer service

On September 19, 2016September 18, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Work5 Comments

I seriously don’t remember if I’ve mentioned this around here– I probably have– and you may have heard about it already, but: some Southeast Asian shipping company recently went bankrupt. At this moment, or at least at a reasonably recent moment and the last moment where I have current news about it, at least one of their barges is stranded somewhere between Vietnam and the West Coast, its contents in legal limbo due to the bankruptcy.

On that barge is several tons of furniture. Among that several tons of furniture is furniture that I, personally, have already sold to several different people. And over the course of the last week or so I’ve had to make contact with all those people and have a conversation where I tell them that I have, literally, no idea when we might receive the furniture they purchased, if ever, and that I’m very very sorry and please be willing to be patient while the lawyers work all this out.

I said at work the other day that it was difficult to conceive of a situation that was more clearly not my fault. My boss, who sort of specializes in this sort of one-up, looked me in the eye and immediately replied that four or five years ago we lost a cargo ship to fucking pirates. I shit thee not.

I have three different customers who were affected by this issue. One of them shrugged and said they’d get back to me in a few weeks and see if we had better information. One of them cancelled their order more or less immediately, but without any real rancor. One of them hit the roof, ranting and raving that they were going to come in and cancel immediately and by God I had better be willing to sell them the floor model. Yes, both of those things, in more or less the same sentence.

I can’t sell them the floor model. Chief among these reasons were they were not the first people to be affected by this; we have a customer who purchased these pieces in June and has been awaiting them for a while, and they’d get first dibs– if we sold floor models at all, which typically we don’t.

Anyway. These people– I’ll call them the Nelsons– came in Saturday. I spent forty-five minutes not selling furniture to other people while I talked them down off the ledge and made sure they understood what was going on and presented several other “let’s not cancel this right now” options, including the popular “let’s just be patient for a bit and see what happens” gambit.

Along with the specific pieces that they can’t have, the Nelsons ordered an end table. The end table has arrived and was in our warehouse. They initially regarded this with suspicion; if the end table was there, how come the other things weren’t? This was initially regarded as evidence of some sort of lie on my part. But eventually I managed to convince them to take their end table, go home, and give me a couple of weeks to see what else might happen.

Pull around back; the end table is in the warehouse somewhere; I’ll find it and bring it to you since our warehouse guy has gone home for the day. Note that the warehouse is way more stuffed than usual because the immense amount of Hot Furn ™ that we sold over the Labor Day sale has started to come in.

Twenty-five minutes later, having enlisted the help of three other employees and our truck driver, I had to tell these poor bastards that I couldn’t find their fucking end table anygoddamnwhere. This, after 45 minutes of patient please-come-down-from-the-ledge talk.

“I will bring the motherfucker to you tomorrow myself,” I said, except not quite. Because at this point the bullshit was my bullshit, and as far as I could tell it was my fault that I couldn’t find the fucking end table, and I was fairly convinced that had our warehouse guy been there he’d have had it in under five minutes. He’s one of those guys. He knows where every loose bolt and piece of mouse shit is in that warehouse, and if you move something, he’ll know.

Mr. Nelson actually appeared fairly touched by this gesture, insisting that they’d come back and I didn’t have to. I stayed firm. Fuck it.

“Where do you guys live?”

“Niles.”

Well. Shit. Niles is in Michigan, for those of you who don’t know, and it’s a bit of a hike. Not a hugely unreasonable one, but a bit of a hike. Well, I was the dumbass who made a promise before looking at their address. I’m still bringing them the damn thing tomorrow once Warehouse Guy finds it.

And then it was the next day, and Warehouse Guy couldn’t find the end table, and the manager couldn’t find the end table, and it was eventually determined that no one had any idea how or when the damn thing got received in the first place, and I howled like a monkey and threw shit at the walls until the manager agreed that I could– wait for it– sell them one of the floor models. Because we had three, and we really didn’t need three of these round end tables on the floor, so fuck it, but call them and tell them that’s what they’re getting so they don’t throw a shit fit when it arrives and it’s not in a box.

I was not looking forward to that conversation, but at least it went well; I spoke to Mr. Nelson again, and he appeared to gloss over the “floor model” part. Of the two, he was the less adamant that they should be sold the floor model anyway.

So. Flash forward several hours later, and I am in a fucking trailer park behind a Wal-Mart in rural fucking Michigan trying to find a street address that is not there. Wal-Marts are terribly depressing places; most of you have been in one and can probably attest to this. I am here to tell you that if Wal-Mart is depressing, the trailer park behind that Wal-Mart, a trailer park that is surrounded by a wooden palisade like a fucking eighteenth-century fort, is ever so much more depressing than that Wal-Mart could ever possibly be.

Especially when you’re looking for 1234 Strawberry Street, and your GPS in your phone is insisting that yeah, you’re there, only you can’t find Strawberry Street on a sign anywhere– there’s Cherry Street and Mango Street and I don’t know, fucking Alpaca Street or some shit, only none of them are streets so much as gravel paths, and the local feral children have all immediately grokked that you don’t belong there and they’re literally following your car, and also you’re looking for 1234 and none of the trailers have addresses with more than two digits and holy shit this is not worth it for a $600 sale.

So. Yeah. When I get to work tomorrow, I’m gonna figure out whose ass I need to whup, and then I’m gonna find that person– which may involve leaving work, because they may not work for us anymore– and I’m gonna whup somebody’s ass. Because somebody got told that these folks live at 1234 Strobberie Street, and put 1234 Strawberry Street into the fucking computer, which doesn’t exist, and while I figured it out eventually I’m pretty sure at least one of those kids I had to run over to get out of the trailer park is dead now and that’s just inconvenient for everyone involved.

The moral of the story: homophones suck.

The end.

In which I’m really seriously not Amazon

On August 9, 2016August 9, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Work9 Comments

I’m starting to develop some ridiculous not-actually-PTSD form of PTSD about the word “delivery.” I don’t wanna hear it anymore and I’m starting to encourage my people to do whatever the hell they need to do to pick their shit up so that it cuts down on the bullshit I have to put up with to schedule deliveries.

Short version: we need another truck and no less than three new delivery guys. But we do not have them, at least in part because corporate has not yet been convinced to invest in the truck, which the employees are not about to pool their money to buy. We have one truck, one delivery guy and a series of temps who keep quitting, some (including today’s) who quit in the middle of their goddamned shifts. These types of things have detrimental effects on getting everyone the furniture they want and deserve in a proper amount of time. Then people call me. And they yell at me. Even though I had nothing to do with any part of this. It’s getting tiring.

And these things have a cascade effect, so right now for various reasons we’re scheduling deliveries about a week and a half out. It can get worse if you live in the middle of gatdamb nowhere, as lots of people in northern Indiana and southern Michigan do. We might only get out to your neck of the woods (literal fucking woods) one day a week, and if that day is already full for some reason you get to wait for the next one.

I understand it’s inconvenient. It’s also inconvenient that I don’t get paid until your shit is in your house. So believe me when I say that I want your shit in your house as much as you do, because I don’t get paid until it is, okay? But I don’t drive the damn truck and I can’t put twenty-five goddamn deliveries on it on the same day because then ten of those people don’t get their shit and this starts all over again.

Motherfuckers are spoiled by Amazon, is what I’m saying. People are conditioned to think that they can get goddamn anything within two days. And if I had distribution centers all over the damn country and UPS and FedEx and the US Postal Service at my disposal, I might be able to make that shit happen.

I don’t.

Deal with it. Thank you.

Today’s highlight: calling a guy listed as picking up two nightstands to tell him his nightstands that he was going to pick up were there and that he should come to pick up his two nightstands.

The second I started telling him the warehouse hours he started yelling at me. Bitching and yammering about how he’d “spoken to the truck driver that morning” and that he was supposed to get his shit delivered tonight. I know for a fact he didn’t talk to our damn delivery driver, who was going to Chicago this morning because jesus fuck I don’t even want to to get into it.

He probably ranted for three solid minutes until I got a damn word in edgewise and he realized that I was calling about the nightstands he was going to pick up GEE ASSHOLE WHERE DID YOU GET THAT IDEA and not the other furniture that he’d ordered from somewhere else, at which point he transitioned directly into interrogating me about warehouse hours (which was when he interrupted me, remember) without a single syllable of apology about the yelling and cussing.

I got raised better than this. I thought everyfuckingbody got raised better than this. Clearly not.

Wednesday whatevs

On June 22, 2016June 22, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Work1 Comment

I read t fc,220x200,lemon.jpg wo full books at work today.

Reading books as part of your training at a new job is kind of weird, right? There’s a break room, but it’s kind of desolate and way too hot– when I was up there yesterday going over some stuff I found myself dangerously close to falling asleep after about half an hour, and that is not what we want– so the best solution is to find a place on the floor where I’m mostly out of the way when there’s printed material of some kind that they want me to go over.

(I should point this out: the books are interesting! I actually ordered one from Amazon today because I’m reading a store copy and want my own.)

The problem, of course, is that from the way I’m dressed and, well, the name tag, it’s painfully obvious that I’m an employee. And the place is understaffed– there’s a reason they were hiring– and so frequently when a customer walks in there’s no one to welcome them in right away. And I know nothing, and have no access to anything, so I’m not super helpful– but the customers don’t actually know that. So I’ve been in this weird position for the last couple of days where my options are one of the following:

To walk up to a customer and say Hi, I’m Luther, and I work here, but I don’t know anything yet and can’t really help you or sell you anything, but I’ll be happy to find someone who CAN help you if you have a question, except that chances are the reason that person isn’t here right now is because they’re already with someone else in the first place so you’ll probably have to wait. But hi!
Or, like, sit there in my chair, reading my book, running the serious risk that a customer who actually needs something is going to leave a Yelp review or some shit like that saying one employee literally was sitting and reading a book instead of helping customers. Which is bad for a whole host of reasons. It ain’t like I have TRAINEE on my hat or anything. Hell, I’m not even wearing a hat. Maybe that would help.

But yeah. I really am looking forward to getting started with, like, actually doing stuff, if for no better reason than it would give me something to talk about when I get home at the end of the day beyond I watched training videos and read three hundred pages of stuff. The job’s going to be fun! And I’m going to be good at it! But there’s going to be another, like, week and a half of oh god, training is going to kill me before that happens. I just hope I don’t lose every reader I have before then. 🙂

Speaking of: I feel like not enough of you have bought The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 lately. It’s 99 cents! You can find that in your couch. Spend your couch money and buy my book! It’s more entertaining than my blog.