I’d thought I’d deleted this, but my old Livejournal account is still, um, live.

You could describe it as a window to a time of… Well, I’m not sure. A time when I lived in Stevenage and not Basildon, a time transitioning between towns and careers, and some observations of my life and work at the time. I’m not altogether sure about sharing the link to it, as some of it is surprisingly personal, but on the other hand, I’ve already out that stuff out there once, and I’m not going to hide the link either.

It is reflective of an earlier me (much like my old sothis5 site), and needs to be viewed through that lens. As we get older we (hopefully) learn, and hopefully develop a better understanding of ourselves and how we can treat others. I’ve found myself reading stuff from my time working at Staples – and recalling some customer experiences that highlight precisely why the customer is not always right.

To bring a piece of this history to life, here’s an entry dated 25th March 2010 – my daughter wasn’t born yet, to illustrate how long ago this was.

As a follow on from my earlier little rant, a rant on a slighter bigger scale…

A couple of weeks ago a woman came into the store wanting to have some documents scanned and then emailed- ok, fine, not a problem- except there were over EIGHTY pages to scan and we only have a flatbed scanner- which means one page at a time- and guess which lucky chap got to sit there and go through all of that?

Anyway, I’m proceeding with the scanning, which after the tenth page starts to get REALLY tedious, and this woman asks one of my colleagues to copy some of the documents for her as well. My colleague takes the documents from her, runs them through the document feeder (the copiers themselves can, thankfully, bulk copy), and hands them back. She starts muttering about how he’s messed up the order of the documents (which is remarkable, seeing as they were in the same order as they were given), but does not confront him directly about this.

Anyway, after listening to her whinge, the scanning is finally completed, and the email is sent. It comes up in our sent folder at least, and we get no messages back to say it’s failed to send.

Now, she’s complaining that the email was never received at the other end, and complaining about the work being out of order too. Why she has waited two weeks to start complaining about this is beyond me. As it happens, we KNOW the email was sent successfully- if it was not received…. well, either she gave us the wrong email address, or the recipient’s email cannot handle large files (although it was only 2MB, so no idea what was up there).

What she should have done was check with the recipient (ie, phone them) to confirm the email had been received whilst she was still in the store. That way, we could have checked the email address, and re-sent it. She should have also drawn attention to the apparent re-ordering of her documents at the time. As it is, we are now in an ‘our word against her word’ situation.

Having read the entry, I find myself recalling this incident (not in any great detail mind). There are a few such moments from that particular workplace, and they serve as a demonstration that customer stupidity and ignorance is timeless.

There’s loads of material I could lift, but for now I won’t. I’ll take a look through it and see what would be best to add to Meerkat Musings.

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