I have no idea where today went. I didn't sleep very late, and lazed around for a couple of hours in the morning before napping while Malaya was at the gym. When she got back we ran errands for a few hours, and then I went to the gym after that. I cooked after my workout, making a huge vat 'o refried beans and some roasted chicken for super burritos tomorrow and the next day, then read a bit before making dinner; stirfried portobellos with green pepper and onion on a bun. And after some light Kali and talk and such it was damn near midnight. Malaya went to bed, I tucked her in and did some surfing and now it's fricking 2am, and it's like I just got up an hour ago, for all I've actually accomplished.
And writing a painfully overlong and pointless introduction to my one blog post of the day isn't helping things.
Moving right along, I wanted to comment on two salesclerks we encountered today.
I often bitch about the ineptitude of store employees, and with good cause; most of them are pretty damn inept, either out of ignorance, indifference, or outright hostility towards their shit jobs. Today we've got one story of a case that definitely falls under the "ignorance" heading, and then for a radical change we've got a story of a store clerk who was actually good at his job.
Salesman #1, the dumb one. Malaya needed some touch up paint for her Toyota, to cover up a little ding she got in a parking lot. Easy enough, right? We looked up the color of her '05 Toyota, we went to a nearby Toyota dealer, and while she looked at steering wheel covers and such to avoid talking to the salescleark, I told him her car model, year, and the color. He asks my name and writes it down on a little pink receipt, which I thought strange, but whatever.
We continue browsing, expecting him to look up the color, since there was no way to do it ourselves. See they had a huge display of touch up paint in little pen-shaped dispensers, but they were all plain white and had letter/number codes, rather than color names, and there wasn't any paint color catalogue available. He's busy tapping away on the computer though, so we figured it was computerized rather than in a three-ring binder or whatever. More time passes, and finally he calls me over and asks for my name again. I'm not in the system, you see.
I tell him that it's not my car, and that we don't need to access Malaya's account, we just need to know which of those paints is Impulse Red, or whatever the ridiculous paint name was (I remembered it then.) That didn't compute with Mr. Salesman though, and since Malaya had come over by then she gave him her name, then waited for a good two minutes while he mashed keys before announcing that he couldn't find her listing either. So she gave him her mom's name, since maybe they set it up on her account, and surprise surprise, he couldn't find that either. This is after he's asked her to spell her last name like three times, getting it wrong each time, and spending a lot of effort frowning at the monitor.
Now keep in mind that there was no reason whatsoever to put anything into the computer. We told him what color paint we wanted; we didn't say, "We can't remember, can you look up the car purchase records to check for us?" Finally he gives up on finding her car "in the system" a phrase he uttered several times, as though it possessed talismanic power, and begins flipping through a big three-ring binder, looking over pages of paint colors and their corresponing codes. This goes on for a while, until he asks, "You said it was what, Starburst Yellow?" or something like that. "No, it's Impulse Red." I said, trading the dozenth look Malaya and I had thus far shared during this quarter hour ordeal.
Finally, mercifully, the parts manager, or someone, walks in from the direction of the service area, takes the binder, looks in it for five seconds, closes it, walks over and picks out one of the paints, and hands it to us. He then leaves, all the while being careful not to show any expression on his face.
Capping off the experience, the paint is like $10 for about a tablespoon in a squeeze tube, and since Malaya didn't have enough cash to buy it in the little parts store, he couldn't sell it to us there since he wasn't authorized to take payment from a debit card. So he gives us the tiny tube of paint, and the receipt, and asks us to go down the hallway to the cashier. We did, and we even went in and paid there, though of course we were down the hall, out of the store, and out of sight of the dim salesman, and could have simply walked off without paying.
To recap, did he do anything right other than not actually insulting us or breaking something? He wasn't some brand new kid either; he was maybe 40, white, male, and not drooling or anything.
Salesman #2. After that depressing experience, we headed over to Target to pick up a few random household items. We would have picked up
Constantine too, but since we missed the debut day (when it was on sale for $15) and it's now $21, we decided to wait a month until it's on sale used at Blockbuster for $10. We got some other stuff though, and as we were walking up to the cashiers Malaya asked if they'd try to stuff the new and very large dirty clothes basket into a bag. Knowing cashiers, we expected a slow, hilarious, and ultimately disastrous effort to insert the large plastic rectangle into a slightly less large plastic bag.
I didn't even reply to her, since well duh, it was a retail store in the US. Of course we'd get some idiot cashier who would waste three minutes trying to put the hamper into a bag. And if not he/she would at least put the few smaller items into a bag, and then awkwardly hand that to us, rather than just sticking it back into the hamper where we were logically carrying the items to begin with.
We picked a line with no one in it, and got an older white guy for our cashier. He was maybe 65, obviously working there since he'd been fired or laid off of some other job and needed the money, and obviously wasn't too happy about it. He wasn't nasty or anything though, and shocking, he made several correct decisions.
He didn't start off that well, since we had like five small things in the hamper, and he reached into it, stretching his arm over the top, and picked them out one at a time. Simply tipping the hamper over sideways would have been a better idea. He got the stuff out pretty quickly though, and quickly noticed that the bathroom caulk strips (they look like rolls of tape) had the SKU (barcode) printed on the back of the packaging, partially beneath the roll of stuff, which made them impossible to scan.
A panic situation for most clerks, and we expected him to call for the manager, or call for a price check that would never have been carried out. Instead he showed us the problem with the bar code, said he'd have to open one up, pulled a pair of scissors out of the drawer beneath his cash register, cut off the side, and pulled out the label enough to scan it. Better yet, he knew how to hit the code to charge us for two more of them, and did that, rather than fumbling around and trying to cut open the other two packages as well. He even stuck all the stuff back into the hamper and just handed it to me, without wasting anyone's time with all "Would you like that in a bag?" bullshit. Bravo, I say. Bravo.
Malaya and I were duly impressed, and laughed as we went out, chattering about the fact that we'd have been there for a good ten minutes if we'd had some eighteen year old on the register. I've got to give the old guy credit; he's clearly smart enough to work in a real job, and probably did for many years, and has brought his common sense along to Target. It's got to be a lonely damn job for him; being surrounded by typical retail store idiots, most of them forty years younger than him, but at least he hasn't been completely beaten down yet. And his competency certainly made our day.
