The renowned WWII General George S. Patton, once said "Do your damnedest in an ostentatious manner all the time." The lady who works at this place on Saturdays is the George S. Patton of terrible service.
I don't expect these people to love their jobs or to fight with each other for the High Privilege and Distinct Honor of printing out my boring, 60-page spiral-bound document. But I also don't expect to feel like a concussed quarterback who just got sacked, wrenching himself up off the grass, fighting double vision and struggling to remember his own name, only to see the opposing linebacker running around the field, dancing the Charleston and doing John Cleese's goose-stepping Hitler impression to primal hoots of adulation from his own home crowd. Yet that's what it felt like to deal with this woman.
The background:
At 10:30 on a Saturday morning, I upload a document to UPS's online thingy, to pick up at the store later in the day. The website said the document wouldn't be ready until 5, which is also the time they close on Saturday. A devilish riddle, my friends. But whatever, I was not in a huge rush.
Around an hour later, I got bored and decided to see if they had printed my document yet. I realized I still had 5-6 hours to go, but UPS stores are pretty dead on Saturdays, and maybe if they were as bored as I was, they would have just printed it. They have very fancy multi-function printers, and a 60-page document would take them about 2 minutes, plus 30 seconds to put the little spiral thing on. What the hell, it was worth a shot.
I get in there, walk up to the counter like a human, and say "I ordered a document printed online, I know it's not supposed to be ready until 5, but I just want to see if you'd had a chance to do it." One guy, who you have probably seen before, exchanging high-fives with an audience after being told he is NOT the father, was sitting behind the counter on top of a box that probably contained an antique urn with somebody's grandmother's ashes. He just looked at me, blinked, and said "huh?" It was a pretty emphatic "huh?". Remember Conan O'Brien's impression of George W Bush? It was like that, only no parody could approach this level of genuine vapidness and confusion about why he is wearing a brown shirt in a room full of boxes and who these people are who have the audacity to keep asking him to do stuff.
Then the door to the bullpen opened and out charged a raging, hulking, Assistant-Managing humanoid mutant, awakened from her slumber by an unlucky serf foolish enough to have wondered if maybe she had done something to justify her paycheck. "5 means 5! You can read? You can count to 5? Don't come back until 5!"
Ah, but you see, if I come back "at 5," you will make eye contact with me, lock the door, and walk away just before I come within arm's reach of the handle. This is not my first rodeo. I am no one's clown.
After tending to my soiled trousers and visiting a shrine to channel my warrior ancestors for strength and courage, I come back at 4:45. My choice of this time was three-fold. First, nobody's clock is an entire 15 minutes off. There is no way she could claim to a Regional Customer Experience Manager that she made an honest mistake closing that early. Second, even if she ate Regional Customer Experience Managers for breakfast, she wants that 1/4 of an hour on her paycheck, but does not have the attention span to sit in a closed store for 15 minutes until she could clock out. Third, it was pretty late and she must have--MUST have--planned ahead so that she's not dealing with printing orders right before she has to close.
As I re-enter The Pit, I am ambushed by a brazen frontal assault on my dignity and my pitiful expectation that I should be able to receive a product at its promised delivery time after having already tendered payment. She uttered the following sentence at a conversational volume, but I'm putting it in all caps so you can all let it sink in for a minute: "I DIDN'T WANT TO LOG IN, SO I DIDN'T DO IT." "Log in" to what, she didn't say. The words came out of her mouth with an alchemistic combination of blitheness and ice-cold, cutting hostility that evinced a sadistic pride in how devoid she was of any trace of f*cks to give about her job.
It froze me in my tracks. In all seriousness, I probably stood there for a solid 5 seconds before I could muster a response. "Well, can you do it now?" "No, I can't do it now," she replied in the tone a child uses to annoy a sibling through mimmic, "we close in 5 minutes." False. You close in 15 minutes. But using words on her is like shouting words into a wormhole, to be absorbed and sublimed into anti-matter and spat out in a parallel universe. Somewhere on a distant planet that Earthbound man will never visit, an alternate version of Gerard Depardieu heard a faint echo of "Can you do it now?" while checking his email on the Oval Office toilet.
In other words, the service at this place is bad. read more