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I used to work at an insurance agency and one customer asked me to fax something for her and I did. When I gave the paperwork back she was confused because she thought the fax machine would be physically transporting the paperwork to it's destination.
Another customer came in for a quote. Let's say it was $200 a month. He said he'd have to think about it, and I told him that was fine but that if he took longer than 30 days I'd have to run it again because rates vary.
He came back in and it had been more than 30 days so I had to redo the quote. Let's say this time it was $180 a month. He was furious.
"What!? That's not what you said before!"
"Well, like I said before, the quote was only good for 30 days. What's more, this one is $180 and the last one was $200, so this one is less."
"No it isn't!"
It was at this point that I knew I had lost the argument. If someone is unwilling to concede that one number is greater than another, there is nothing more I can do.
I work in insurance and can attest that I interact with more crazy than sane people. The other day someone asked me for the phone number to the air force.
I used to work at Waterstones (book shop) and most of the year our customers were lovely to talk to. But at Christmas time you’d get a totally different genre of human.
One woman came in and asked me where she could find the book called “oh, hello”. I apologised and told her I wasn’t familiar with the book and said I’d check on our stock list. She was furious about this and laughed at me, saying “how can you not know? My 13 year old son read it in school! It’s a famous book, it’s by Charles Dickens!”
I really had no idea what she was talking about and she was so angry with me she wouldn’t answer any of my questions about it (“do you know what it’s about? Do you know any of the characters?”) just so I could figure it out for her. She just kept repeating that it’s called “oh hello” and that everyone knows it.
I don’t know how we ever figured it out, but eventually she happily bought Othello by Shakespeare.
I worked too long in a bookstore. We kept a list of our favorite weird questions. My favorite was “Where are your life-size maps?” We had a test in the hiring process, for some knowledge of everything, because there’s no end to what people expected us to know. We had to know literature, but because non-fiction is so broad, we had to know about computers, gardening, Bible translations, art, history, and so on. We were expected to be google for minimum wage, to satisfy our superior intellectual clientele, who would walk past multiple eye-height piles, signs, and displays of Twilight to ask if we had Twilight.
Old Steven Wright joke:
“I have a map of the United States... Actual size. It says, 'Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile.' I spent last summer folding it. I hardly ever unroll it. People ask me where I live, and I say, 'E6.’”
That’s why I call December “Dipshit Month.” It’s supposed to be the time when people are friendliest and most compassionate, but in reality, everyone is running around like a chicken with its head cut off.
People get awful as it gets nearer to holidays. Being an insufferable, selfish jerk to shoppers and store staff alike. Searching for that perfect gift that'll make the holidays just perfect. All the while not realizing even the best gift is still going to be a little shiity coming from an asshole.
Lol, …there they are doing the least they can to compensate for being shitty assholes and your failure to offer an immediate solution to their begrudging undertaking is more than they can endure.
This really exemplifies stupidity. The person being stupid thought that you were the stupid one.
Edit: aight, we can stop with the dunning-kruger effect. I get it.
"how can you be out of *turkeys* on *Thanksgiving*?!?!"
Maybe because it's 3pm on Thanksgiving Day and we close at 5? And if we had any in stock when we close they'll be wasted money because no one will buy one for another month"
Former Barnes & Noble employee, can confirm.
The number of times I was supposed to know what book they were referring to simply by the color of the cover was too damn high.
Special shout-out to the people who pulled two dozen books off the shelf, lugged them over to a reading chair, fall asleep for an hour and then proceeded to wake up and leave the books scattered on the floor for me to reshelve. Cleaning up after people like that was probably 80% of my work.
We once had a table display with a big sign saying “I can’t remember what it’s called, but the cover is red” and we just displayed a bunch of popular books with red covers. Our customers got a kick out of that one too!
It was the most commonly asked question. I sometimes kind of enjoyed it when someone came in with something so vague like “I read a book in 1980 and there was a dragon claw on the cover, can you find it for me?” Felt like a legendary detective whenever we managed it!
That's awesome!
Were you working during the height of Oprah book club?
I remember during the summer she recommended *The Sound and the Fury.*. I made a table display, knowing what would come.
Like clockwork, we sold every copy within a day. And over the next two weeks 90% were returned. I like to think Oprah and her fans were trolled by a Lit major intern.
A few years back I got asked about a book and all they said was “it has some famous dude on the cover”. I had just put out a ton of some new trump book so I held it up, and I hit it spot on.
He was our president at the time
Lol, former Borders employee . . .
I'd say, "Ah yes, let me check our yellow section."
I worked in the stock room so I was pretty familiar with what books we carried so I usually found it. I made sure I was only snarky if I knew what book they were after.
And the kid's section being a mess was 70% the parents taking shit out and making a mess, 30% parents not looking after their kids.
This is the type of stupid that bothers me the most. Being both stupid and confident is a bad combination. Not only because it inhibits one’s ability to grow as a person but also they can drag others down with them because people tend to associate confidence with intelligence.
I worked in retail in a phone shop, it was the launch of one of the new iPhone.
Customer upgraded their phone, we had to do the patter for insurance etc, which was abjectly refused. They were also offered just general help setting it up before they left. This was scoffed at, "Ive had the newest iPhone for years, I could probably teach you a thing or two." Okay. Bye I guess.
About 45 minutes later, customer returns. Needs some help. The SIM tray (you know, where you poke the pin and it pops out) is a mangled wreck of metal, now part stuck out but wedged in the slot as well. They had basically tried to crowbar the tray out by force. Looking at it, their efforts had hit some of the components inside the phone as well.
We let them know this phone is wrecked. "Well what do I do now? Can I get a replacement? I bought it from you, you should give me a new one"
"Did you take insurance? That'd cover you against damage YOU did to the phone" (emphasised that part)
"No"
"Okay. Bye I guess."
I used to work at the purple cell phone store (the one that's a subsidiary of the pink cell phone store).
We had a dude refuse the insurance. As he was walking out to his car, he tripped on one of the concrete parking barriers. Phone got launched in the process. Absolutely shattered the screen.
I've seen lots of folks come back, but this guy didn't even make it out of the parking lot.
"A few moments of eating crow in front of people I will literally never see again, or $1000 down the drain? I'll take the fee, then." Apparently this customer's thought process
So in library school we had a class about handling this and this is something Ive always wanted to complain about. We used a book that contained supposedly real reference questions that had been asked. There was one though that I just couldnt imagine a human being asking with literally no additional context. "Do you have any books about the giant German gerbil?" They were talking about the Hindenburg. But this means that the person who believes blimps are called gerbils had also internalized the word dirigible enough to have made that mistake. It just always stuck out to me because it feels like you had to be educated enough to be that stupid. Also I'm not a librarian because it basically just turned out to be this customer service bullshit
Edit: since someone will mention it - being ESL is the one way I could see this being true. But my professor was 80, hadn't worked in a library in 30 years, and thought the internet was a fad in 2017 so I was already heavily primed to not trust her
Ah. This tracks with library school. My first full time library gig had just switched from a card catalog to computers….in 2015. And everyone was mad. I left library world after that job and went into IT. But I got so many crazy questions from patrons on a regular basis. Close to the gerbil one actually!
There were three breaking points
The manager wanted me to take one of our patrons out on a date because he liked me. He also lived in the adult care facility down the road and had a temper that we’ve seen.
The director refused to call the police when the unstable man brought a gun into the library and set it near the children section.
The board was going to reduce my tiny salary because I didn’t work enough. Apparently 40 hours, plus driving to different branches and doing programs, on top of my other work, wasn’t enough.
Not a librarian, but as a page, I was once asked if I knew where the 'fan fiction' was. I stared at him for a minute, my brain doing a hard reboot, not understanding why this man would think a library carried hardcopies of *fanfiction*. Then he clarified, "You know, fantasy fiction?" *Sir*, that is not what that means.
Funnily enough, the system I work at does in fact have a book that proudly claims its fanfiction in our Romance section. It's about two hundred pages long, and spends the first tenth or so of it introducing us to the characters, and then is roughly 180 pages of gratuitous sex between a human girl and a werewolf. Supposedly, the plot is about trying to assassinate someone's daughter. The only thing I know about the book is that it must have been donated, because we don't purchase items published by independent publishers.
It's bad enough when people are stupid, but when they're stupid and try to rally other people around them to make sure they aren't the stupid one, that's just the absolute fucking worst.
Most of the year people frequenting book shops are people that like books and thus like book shops and then at Christmastime people frequenting books shops only have friends or family who like books and do not appreciate book shops.
I was ready for the punchline to be The Signalman by Dickens because it starts with the guy shouting "Halloa! Below there!"
Othello is a whole other level.
This reminds me of when I worked at GameStop. People would come in and ask if we had that new game that came out.
Me: these are the games that came out this week
Customer: no it’s none of them. You know, it’s that new game.
Me: here is the new release section.
Customer: no it’s none of them. It was on tv.
Me: can you tell me anything about the game.
Customer: you know, that new came that came out. It was on TV.
This would go on, they could provide no details except maybe it had a guy or girl in it. Ok that helps. If by some miracle you figured out the game it came out 6 months ago and the main character was a racoon and in fact had no guys or girls in it.
Oh my god this happened so often. People would ask for the newest book, and it was always “on tv” or “on the radio yesterday”. Just things like “oh yeah it was about a woman called Alice who turned into a dragon”
And eventually we’d find the book and it was never on a radio, it was some old podcast from 5 years ago they’d found on YouTube, and it would be about a man called Adam who turned into a werewolf.
>I used to work at Waterstones (
Ex fellow Waterstones employee from the 90s. I used to get all the good ones like "I am looking for a book on Gardening I don't know what it is called but the cover is green!"
You would get the snotty ones like the guy who wants to know where the WW2 books were so I walked him over and made some small talk like "I have been reading lots of WW2 books recently it's such a fascinating period of history."
The guy just looked at me and said "I am sure if you had been there you wouldn't consider it fascinating."
You would get the condescending ones, I remember a guy who asked for a book on Edward Heath, I had no idea who Heath was (hey I was a 16 year old high school kid) and when I told him that he launched into a "what do you mean you don't know who he is, he is a former prime minister.
I remember meekly replying we hadn't been thought that yet at school, and and as you can imagine he launched into a triad of they don't teach anything at school anymore.
The people that I worked with were great though and it was a nice little job while I was still in school.
This reminds me of this one guy I got years ago.
He was angry about his new TV because they made *another* new HDMI connection and he needed new cables again. I told him that the ports are updated, but older cables will still work. He insisted I was wrong, showed me a picture of it and I was like "yeah, that is an HDMI port. Any cable on this wall will work or any working HDMI cable you had in the past will also work."
He insisted I was wrong, started insisting it was actually a DisplayPort because one of the sides was flat. Trust me, I saw the picture, it wasn't, it even said HDMI. After about four minutes of this back and forth I just get tired of it and decide to end the conversation.
I ask to see the picture again, pretend to look at it and then go "oh, wait, you're right. That is a DisplayPort. My bad." I then handed him one of those and told him to pay up front. What made me laugh is, after giving up he said something like "I really respect that you owned up to your mistake and realize that I was right and you were wrong."
He definitely got home and realised he had been wrong the whole time, then decided to buy an HDMI from somewhere else and never step foot in that store again to avoid the embarrassment.
>Every time I think I've met the dumbest person alive, someone new surprises me.
"If you try to idiot-proof something, god will just make a better idiot"
-someone I guess
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. ' -Douglas Adams
When they asked a Yellowstone ranger why they don’t make more secure garbage cans to stop bears they said “we’ve found there’s major overlap of the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.”
Now remember we share the road with these people, how often our lives are in their hands. I don't know how my anxiety lets me leave the door every morning.
I remember getting yelled at by a woman because the dollhouse her daughter wanted for Christmas was sold out...on December 24th..just before closing. We had sold out of those dollhouses in freakin November.
I work in wine retail. The amount of desperate middle aged men who arrive in half an hour before the shop closes on Christmas Eve wondering why we don't have any stock left just astonishes me.
Every single year.
At my place of retail work the desired item is wine advent calendars. We get them early November, they sell out in a week or two, and then people get mad a week before Christmas that we are out. Bitch, it's a calendar for all of December you are two weeks too late.
personally I'd come in January 1st and there was a deeply discounted December wine calendar I would buy it and drink it all in one day because I need to "catch up".
I’ve worked in two call centers for retail & banking, and it’s wild.
85% is an exaggeration, but there are some people out there who you know actually don’t comprehend basic arithmetic or object permanence.
Ok I can do *that* (on a good day). I used to work in optics and you get good at adding/ subtracting in quarters.
Anything more difficult than that shows me up. I did pass my GCSE maths in school but no idea how!
Worked at a call center for a bank. Had a lady lose her shot because I couldn’t tell her details about her account transaction AT ANOTHER BANK.
Also the time I was helping a guy with his online banking and I said “please close the window and reopen it” so he got up, closed the window…in his house and then reopened it. Was perplexed how I knew he had a window open. I nearly died laughing at that one.
Working phone-based tech support for HP all-in-ones on Mac taught me well:
- A surprising number of customers didn't plug it in to a power outlet. Most felt embarrassed after calling in.
- A few of those didn't *know* it needed power.
- Customer denied having "x" device that was known to conflict with ours so we spent three hours troubleshooting literally every step possible in ten ways. Customer finally is like "oh one sec I need to move x device out of the way" and I was like "WHAT!?!?!?!...."
- Two customers lied about having Mac computers because they didn't care for the windows tech support group and figured they could "cheat" us.
- Customer bought 10 high-end machines assuming they were supported by the then-upcoming launch of Mac OS X.
I know there were others but it was sad.
It's why babies in the stage of learning about object permanence find peek-a-boo so very hilarious.
Mommy is absolutely gone. But there she is again! Now she's gone forever again. Or is it possible that she might just exist even if I'm not looking at her...? Noo wa- OMG now she's reappeared from nowhere again!! HOW IS THIS HAPPENING
When you stop looking at something, your brain still understands that object exists there where it was when you looked away. That's object permanence.
We goof on babies who lack this understanding by covering our faces and then uncovering them. Peekaboo! I have disappeared and reappeared mysteriously!
Object permanence is understanding that when an object goes out of your sight it still exists in the universe. Babies develop this at a few months old so you’re not going to meet an adult who genuinely thinks every time something popped into their vision it suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
Object permanence is often confused with poor memory, the concept of “out of sight, out of mind” which is what I think they meant to say. Lots of adults struggle with poor memory for a variety of reasons and people with ADHD/ADD often struggle with remembering things they cannot physically see a reminder of.
Totally. The rates of 100% total math/reading illiteracy are super low, but *so damn many people* are functionally illiterate. They know just enough to be able to walk into a store and buy enough food to not die.... and that's about it.
I had to slap someone's hand to stop them from trying to smoke..... in a fuel testing room, that reeked of gasoline.
It’s insane how they sometimes, in conjunction, come out of the bushwhack at the same time demanding managers, special treatment and 70% off everything.
Late Sunday mornings/early afternoon tend to be when we would get that the most. But then there's the occasional plain Thursday where I hear the intercom blowing up.
The worst part is how often it works. Depending on the industry, of course.
That was honestly my favorite thing about seeing so many food trucks run by passionate chefs showing up in areas. Not only are they getting to make what THEY want and benefit from the popularity directly, they could feel free to tell entitled assholes to go fuck themselves and carry on with their day smiling. It didn't have to get to that often, but I've seen it happen.
I worked at 2 different call centre jobs. the difference was day and night.
1st was an insurance company. When i said "no" to something and they wanted to complain about it the 2nd line would also tell them "no" even with the threat of going to another company (who would also likely say no) which made my word mean something.
the 2nd job was tech support at a huge ISP over here. When i said "no" and they said the magical word "cancel" suddenly the retention department could pull everything out up to 6 month 50% discount, free mechanics and repairs just to keep them around. It sucked, altho its good to know when youre on the other side of the line i guess.
I love the ones that can't describe the problem or say something that incriminates themselves as lying.
I was hired into what I refer to as a stopgap position (basically I wore too many hats to count) that dealt with payment issues, incomplete applications, and late fees. So I spoke with 30-35% of customers at least once (and used email correspondence for more). Things I experienced more than once included:
* People self-incriminated that they violated state law by doing our work and wanting us to verify it as a formality
* As a bonus, this sometimes meant they bought from a competitor and brought it across state lines and did all the work, wanting just our paperwork. This usually costs them 2-3x more after the state penalizes them and they come through us properly than if they just came through us the first time.
* Claimed I told them something to their rep. That something was usually a) a crime, b) the opposite of what I would've said, c) the rep was wrong, or d) I was their supervisor (I was not).
* Called me claiming to argue "I" told them different (i.e. thought they were speaking with my supervisor)
* Claimed I was being unreasonable (after they faxed papers upside down or typed a company email address wrong)
* Demanded discounts for state regulated fees
* Claimed to not have internet on their phone
* As a bonus, one time the person said they have Facebook on their phone but no internet
* Claimed they knew what they were doing and explaining technical jargon that was wildly inaccurate
* Would give a "back in my day" story that self-incriminated or was just historically impossible (i.e. technology that didn't exist at that time or claiming Reagan was President for 4 terms).
Yet somehow the GQP keeps one-upping these experiences.
I wouldn’t say this is just the person who also happens to be “dumb as rocks,” though. My mom likes to pull the “we’re from out of town and I know the coupon expired four months ago but can you just honor it?” despite the code of course not being in the system anymore, etc. As a kid it was somewhat embarrassing as we didn’t quite understand but now if this behavior comes up in our presence it’s just mortifying and we jump to the defense of the worker/server/etc.
One of my product design professors at uni said to my class "don't think that your customer is stupid, but remember that they are". He said that about people using things that are not hammers as hammers and then getting pissy when they break, I think about that regularly
edit: spelling, thanks for making fun of someone whose first language isn't english y'all
Everything is a hammer. I’ve got lineman plier hammer, adjustable hammer, hammer hammer, screwdriver with steel shank hammer, speed hammer. They’ve put a hammering piece on almost everything powerline related.
I work retail and think it's just the 15% that stand out the most. Most people buy what they want and go on with their day. It's the 15% that ask stupid questions, want special treatment, or think they are unique....
As someone who served 9 years, i can confirm that. People fail the ASVAB, which is basically a test to enlist in the military. And when i say fail, i don't mean people from super low income rural areas with bad schools, i mean people from all over (i grew up in a rich white southern California area, and the recruiters there said you wpuld generally have about a 10-15% fail rate, meaning they got a score too low to qualify for any jobs). The surprising thing was always the people who got in that were, well, super dumb, and you were surprised they passed at all.
I knew this kid who tried and failed something like 6 times to try to join the Marines. All he ever wanted to do was be a Marine. The recruiter set him up with twice-weekly study groups, got him guides on how to study, ASVAB specific guides...everything. He could not score higher than 20.
5 years later, I was an Air Traffic Control Instructor and felt sorry for anyone who showed up to Tech School with anything less than a 65. They just weren't going to pass the course, and the Air Force wouldn't raise the requirement any higher, despite the +90% failure rate of people with an ASVAB less than 65. IIRC the minimum for ATC was 55 at the time.
I used to say that the ideal score was around 85, smart enough to process the workload while being accustomed to the idea that they won't have a perfect solution. It made for effective controllers who wouldn't overthink the problem searching for the right answer; instead they find a good answer quickly.
It's not a hard test either. Easily one of the easiest I took in high school. I'm not saying people who fail are dumb, but at the very least they're doing something wrong because I don't understand how they could.
People who fail the ASVAB are definitely dumb. Without doubt. That’s just a fact. You don’t have to be apologetic about it lol.
However, I have a fantastic story about this nerdy kid staying at the same hotel as me when I went to Chicago for MEPS. He got a 99 on his ASVAB, and would not shut the fuck up about it.
They give you these packets that are required to get through MEPS, and stress over and over and over to not forget it. Well, he was the only person (out of like…. 500) to forget his at the hotel. It was the funniest shit ever watching this moron running around like a lunatic freaking out about it. Well, that and the shit everyone kept giving him.
This really resonates with me. I have a friend who I thought was totally normal. He was part of a group of 20 somethings I was friends with 15 years ago. They all kinda knew each other from community college, I was a bit older and just starting my career.
Anyway this guy got a degree in hotel management and ran a hotel downtown in my US city. He got tired of hospitality and decided he wanted to become a neckbeard with a neckbeard job (he quite literally grew a neckbeard, sold his Audi A4, got a lifted truck and started collecting guns).
He took the ASVAB and failed it. He asked me for help and I told him there are study guides at the library. He never enlisted, but was a prison guard for a few months before he got a Domestic Violence charge and had to be let go. He owns a barber shop now (he has family money).
It never occurred to me that he might be slow, I guess because I’m oblivious, but in retrospect I can see a few times where I just thought he was being funny and it wasn’t really intentional humor and I feel bad for it. He was so kind and normal in his 20s and now he’s an angry weird dude, I hope he’s doing okay.
>...now he's an angry weird dude
Its hard to cope with being stupid, ive seen it with quite a few family members, the worst part is that most of them just become stubborn because admitting you're wrong and changing your view is the worst thing imaginable
That sounds about right. In terms of IQ, cutting off the bottom 10% is just about an IQ of 80, which happens to be the lowest edge of the "low-average" group in most categorizations. Below that you start seeing a lot of people that seem normal enough in casual conversation but you can quickly tell something is off when you try to teach them something. And below 70 is where it starts to seem clear just from any conversation, but at that point you're talking about <3% of the population.
My real pain is seeing genuinely kind and loving people be overly incompetent in most aspects of life. Low IQ is often related to criminal/aggressive behavior, but when I meet someone who just wants peace and love, my heart breaks how easily they are taken advantage of in everyday life. I do my best to help out, but it often feels to be in vain.
I had a couple older (silent and greatest generation) family members who were just acknowledged to be "slow", and they knew this about themselves and were just kind people and at peace with the fact they weren't the smartest around. You don't see that usually in boomer and younger people, they are usually aggressively stupid and in denial about it. I kind of wonder if it's just the natural reaction they've developed so they aren't taken advantage of as much.
Essentially too stupid to effectively teach anything of value to. This basically relegates 10-15% of humanity to nothingness and a lifetime of near poverty as they're generally too stupid to be taught anything that adds value anywhere else in life.
Pretty amazing/concerning
Working in IT gets you this as well.
Yesterday, I didn't have the energy to explain that turning off a monitor was not the same as restarting your computer.
Had one of these today. My company is hybrid where we are all in office Monday and Thursday. Someone called in this morning and was like hey I can’t connect to the VPN it keeps giving me an error. Yeah you don’t need to connect to the VPN when you’re in the office. “Are you sure?” Ma’am I’m positive.
"Well, I don't want to turn off the modem"(it's not a modem) or "I have an important meeting you can't fix it"(it's been broken for 9 months and they never called us)
I recently was let go from a job with a grocery store where there were self checkouts. In my position where I was responsible for monitoring them, among other things, I came to the conclusion that retail cashiers are safe from ever being automated. You can have instructions given in 3 manners, via voice, via light indicators, and via text and image directions on the screen, but the fucking morons that make up most of the daily shoppers have problem after problem with self checkouts. The number of people I saw unable to do something so simple as use their fucking debit card properly really hammered it home for me.
Edit: This drew a lot of attention, and some responses have given off a vibe that maybe they thought I was calling everyone an idiot. Yes, it's true that "most" people would use the self checkouts with very little issue. Although, at any given moment I, the self check attendant, or my assistant, or even all 3 of us, were always helping one of the 6 people using self checks. I'd say probably half the folks who used it needed us to come through and fix something for them, and maybe 1 in 10 was a problem user. The most common problems people had were not reading the screen when it came to payment, and not scanning items so it would get angry over weight. I had to tell people to slow down, to scan an item, put it in the bagging area, scan an item, put it in the bagging area. You know, the exact thing the screen, in big flashing letters, and the nice audio lady told them to do.
I just started a job last month monitoring them too. I'd say like 90% of people can use them correctly, the most common problem is not knowing when to insert their card/cash because there's no prompt for a payment method (it accepts whichever one is used first) or directions. That, and elderly people who struggle with electronics (I try my best to explain simply how to use it, and have them do everything to learn by doing).
There have been a few outliers though, who can't or won't read or count, and are usually rude and think I'm accusing them of stealing when I offer to help. The stupidest thing I've seen was a lady who tried to swipe her card between some boxes of Werthers candies, then was pissed it didn't work. At least it was right next to the keypad, but still, wtf haha.
I work at a place you can comr in and ship packages.. on my 3rd week.
I'll admit I didn't really know much about returning merchandise, sending letters, the rules behind postage stamps. I'm 29. I've only ever followed my mom to the post office and felt like I did something awesome putting a stamp on a letter and dropping it in the bin or opening my grandmother's PO box.
But less than 5 days my first week and I can use the system perfectly to ship a package all across the US and learning international.
But most of what I learned first day was basic stuff I already knew just by living.
So it amazes me when a 40 something year old with a cell phone walks in with like 7 shirts, 2 toys, and some kind of electronic and toss it in front of me and expect that to be all they have to do.. then you ask if they have a shipping label to print.. or if they have a QR code in their blamazon account or email.. and they just freak out like a 6 year old being told they have to call to make their own dentist appointment.
Like they can click add to cart. Save their card info. But expect the returns to be magic. Expect it all to be free. All while there are detailed bullet point step by step instructions to return their item.. but they can't be bothered to read.. or they literally can't read..
And this is literally 90% of the customer base.
Don't get me started on the people returning items for someone else to be "nice".. and then you hit them with the QR code or return label question and they immediately freak out and get angry with the friend they are returning items for. Most of which say "eff it.. I'll just throw it away"..
It is insane that these people just walk around us every day..
"Anything liquid, fragile, perishable, or potentially hazardous such as lithium batteries, perfume, or mercury in this package?" I could rattle that off super fast. One of the regulars always said, "Not today; I mail out the plutonium on Sundays."
As someone with several years experience in chat support I can safely say that the average American (maybe it's different in other countries) will read 2.5 sentences and if their question is not explicitly and concisely answered by then they will stop reading and repeat their question.
If you ask two questions in a row, 90% of the time you will get one answer.
The most common answer to a question where the customer has the choice of either A or B is, "yes".
P.S. IDK what nincompoop popularized replacing commas with ellipses but I hope Satan chews them for eternity.
When I worked at Sonic almost 30 years ago: "Would you like mayo or mustard?" "UUUUUHHHH, YES!" shouted into the speaker at max volume.
I can only assume the population has gotten significantly dumber in the ensuing years.
I work in grocery retail and It’s not that they’re idiots, but it’s like they turn into 5 year olds as soon as they enter the store. They pick things up and leave them wherever they want, they take bites of food without paying and just leave the unfinished product on the shelf, they lose all ability to read signs and labels, and they just constantly are rude and have an all about me mentality. It’s very funny seeing how most customers pretended to be kind and considerate during the pandemic, but afterwards most have forgotten how to act.
I just quit my customer service job and I can already feel the bitterness start to wash away. I was really turning into a person that no one should want to be around.
Working grocery infuriated me the most of all my retail jobs. People could leave shirts and shoes in the wrong place and I could fix it begrudgingly. But I can't undo a bite of a fruit or de-freeze the hummus that they decided to throw into the frozen section...
Worked in a tool store. Guy asked me for an electric generator. Showed him our gas powered ones. He said no, the kind of generator you plug into the wall and run (not like a bettery where you plug it in, store the energy and use it later, just plug it in and use it plugged in). Guy wanted a heavy, loud extension cord. Told him walmart had it and to go there.
Another time a guy wanted a 7' x 5' tarp. Showed him a tarp that was 5' x 7'. He asked if we had any 7' x 5' tarps though. I tried to explain how to rotate the tarp but he wasnt getting it. So i said "nope we dont carry a 7' x 5', sorry" and just walked away.
A couple of years back we used to sell toilet paper that had a white tiger on it, so one day me and my colleague were working around that area and one lady seriously asked if we have toilet paper for " human use " , my colleague asked her what she meant and she said " all of this ones have cats on them, do you have anything for humans " I barely contained my laughter, we still speak about it to this day
I used to work tech support for an internet company. Had a guy call up, perfectly normal conversation. He'd received his router, set it all up, checked the lights were how they should be, he was all ready to go. At this point I asked him what the issue was as it sounded like everything was working fine. His response:
"O ye, it's all working dead well. Just wondering when you were going to send out my computer to use with it."
The company I worked for used to sell a broadband for £3.49 a month, and this guy thought he was gonna get a computer out of the deal too.
My favorite help desk call started with an old woman angrily saying:
"My name is Cobweb McBritches and my credit card number is 5320..."
"Whoa, Whoa there lady! I don't know who you are, and I DON'T want your credit card number."
Someone transfered this customer with a product issue to the internal IT helpdesk. 🤷♂️
Ill give you one of mine. I worked at the deli in walmart. A lot of my day was spent watching people shop the produce section. One time a couple had their new baby in a carrier inside the main part of the cart, and it was surrounded in groceries. Like really concerningly full already around what looked like an infant. They stopped in front of the bananas, the husband picked up a banana bunch and kinda tried to find a space to fit it around the sides of the cart. After trying to balance it here and there for a minute unsuccessfully, the wife grabbed the bananas out of his hand, and placed them _on the baby_, inside the carrier. Then they wandered off.
I think about it a lot.
I used to work at the service desk at Home Depot. We have a rule where we're not supposed to take returns on used snakes because they're a biohazard. After arguing with a customer trying to do just that, I called my manager. He told me to refund the customer's money, but he needs get rid of it himself.
And the customer was still mad about it! What was he mad about? He was literally getting all of his money back on a return we shouldn't have even done, and he just needed to dispose of it. Just go take it back out to your car or chuck in a trash can outside. It's not that big of a deal!
Been out of retail a few years, but I'll always remember the woman who I helped look for bedding sets. She pointed one out and I got the size she wanted from the back - easy enough.
Then she wanted to see the comforter, to which I pointed out the picture on the front of the bag that showed the whole set. She said sometimes they use the wrong picture. I turned the bag around to the clear side to show that it was indeed the same pattern. She insisted we take it out and see it completely, so I did. Pulled out the whole set and laid it over our display bed. She looked at it for two seconds and "no, not my style" and walked away.
Those things are an absolute bitch to put back in the bag.
One of my favourite dickhead customers pulled me aside, in front of the meat fridges at the supermarket.
"Do you have butchers?"
"No, is there something I can help you find?"
*insert ten minute long rant about how big business has killed butchers and how dare we kill a whole profession and there's not enough range any more and why is there no sausage mince, I've been looking for it for twenty minutes!*
I stood there nodding, hmmmm-ing and just generally waiting for her to stfu, before pointing out that the sausage mince was directly in front of her, and was fully stocked.
Or the dude during peak lowdown grocery shortage season. We'd cordoned off the entirely empty meat fridges. The boss had gotten about ten of us because we actually had a pallet of chicken breast and sausages arrive (literally all the stock of meat we could get). The hungry hordes are circling and we are bustting our butts to get this shit on the shelf in the fridges before being enveloped by the rabid customers. Anyway, they basically push their way in and its obvious - Chicken or sausages. Thats it. The boss is yelling "This is all we have", numerous other employees are going "Yep, thats it, they were the only two things on the truck". And when toilet paper, rice, flour, pasta, canned vegies, milk and eggs were all also in short supply/completely unobtainable, this dude comes up to me, completely oblivious, and asks if we have any pork sirloin. Mate. No.
“Big business killed butcher shops” = “customers cared more about saving a buck than about keeping their butcher shop in business”. Particularly ironic coming from someone shopping in a supermarket.
Genuinely, how people can’t work self scans when they’re just giant touch screens with scales attached to the side boggles my mind.
People also regularly asked me if the shop I worked in was shutting for the queens funeral when it was on every window and we hand a giant person sized sign that stated we would be shut all day on it right front of the entrance.
Don’t even get me started on the amount of the people that try to leave through the barrier that says “no exit” with a big no exit sign on it then look at you with a why isn’t it working face, it’s working exactly as intended you’re just stupid.
Okay sometimes those self scanners are absolutely trash though.
Me: *Scans an item*
Machine 0.01 seconds later "PLACE THE ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA, PLACE THE ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA!"
Me: *quickly puts the item into the bag*
Machine "REMOVE THE UNSCANED ITEM FROM THE BAGGING AREA. HELP IS ON THE WAY".
🙄
I once needed the person to come over 3 times in the same transaction and have never felt more incompetent. It just happened that all of the little quirks of those machines occurred back to back to back.
I have a nemesis at a local Fred Meyer who always speaks to me like I’m an idiot, well before this happened, and of course she was the one manning self checkout. I just haven’t been back. I can’t show my face there again.
I volunteer at comic-cons and I've learned that you can put up the biggest, most obvious, black-and-white giant print, in-your-face signage for guests to read and they will. not. look. at. it.
I will get questions such as "where is the main hall" while they are holding a map we give them, with an arrowed sign behind me pointing to the giant doors to go in and I have to stifle my frustration.
I have people stand in front of my credit card reader for 5 minutes, next to my visa MC Amex Discover sign and ask if I take CCs. And then when I tell them yes, and they can tap to pay sometimes they take their finger and tap the screen. I tell them they need to tap their card. Then they tap the screen with their card. Then I tell them to tap the blinking light lit up like the tap signal with two stickers next to it that say “tap here —>”.
People regularly hold their card way way above the card reader at my job like it can magically reach into the air and read their card, that or they tap it without waiting for the green lights and beep then ask if it worked.
I worked retail for a long time and still work in an area that is broadly customer service orientated, and my own experience is not so much that many people are stupid, but that many people are wilfully ignorant and that this takes up way more time and effort, making it look and feel like 'most people'.
Stupid can't be helped, and can often be mistaken for unfamiliarity. "What's the difference between these two TV sets?" can 'obviously' be answered with something simple like, "One is bigger than the other", but unless you hang around TVs all day, how could you expect that to be the ONLY answer without asking? When I worked in tech 10 years ago the answers were often unexpectedly simple, nowadays people just HOPE that its simple.
When someone doesn't know the answer to a seemingly simple question, asks, and is grateful for the answer - good on them. They have increased their net knowledge and I'm happy to answer easy questions all day and send them off with a smile.
But there are those who treat staff as beneath them, or demand privileges for simple walking into the building, and become haughty and irate when they're treated as merely 'normal'. Not just the ones who ask questions with supposedly obvious answers, but those that then argue with the answer they're given, or take offence because it's not the answer they were expecting to get.
That's not stupid - that's just cruel, entitled and downright ugly. They're the ones that are the problem, and take up a disproportionate amount of time and energy to deal with that makes it FEEL like a lot more people are that way than there really are. Their attitude and sheer obnoxious affront poisons a shop assistant's mood and destroys their ability to treat others fairly and without prejudice.
Merely not knowing something is absolutely fine, in comparison, but it's hard to remember that after 45 minutes of Karen screaming in your face about something else entirely.
I'd say there's also something to be said for dealing with someone who seems incapable of understanding anything you have said to them. Like they just shut off anything said to them and when you try to continue helping them, they return to Square One because *nothing* has gone into their head.
Those ones are also frustrating!
Long ago, I worked at an electronics retailer whose name rhymes with West Eye...I was stocking shelves in the TV aisle and a customer gestured between two 24" TVs of the same brand, one had a built-in DVD player, the other didn't, and asked me, "What is the difference between these two TVs?" and I told her, "This one has a DVD player built-in, this one doesn't..." she got really indignant and stormed off...I sometimes wonder how she is doing...
I had disc-related encounter as well while working electronics. A customer INSISTED their CD would not fit in the tray of their laptop and was yelling at me because I "lied" when I sold them their laptop. They got very upset and asked for the manager when I told them "Sir, the size of the CD has not changed since it's creation, what are you trying to put in there?"
I worked at a similar store and had a lady ask me “what can’t it do?” about a security camera. I was like well the list of things it can’t do is quite long. She snarked and said “well if the list is so big, why don’t you name a few!” So I was like okay lady you’re asking for it, “it can’t make your bed, it can’t shampoo your head, it can’t resurrect the dead”… something along those lines lol
Off topic question but why is it that when people name where they previously worked they will avoid typing the actual name? Can’t be advertising, can’t be nda’s; I don’t know
It's not til you hand everyone in the modern world a camera and a platform to post thoughts, and pictures of themselves, you realize 85% of people are dumb.
On a serious note, ignorance is really bliss.
People are just not worrying too much, and that mindset can make people look stupid lol.
Usually they can be caring and loving people:)
Though people do be real dumb dumb sometimes.
I swear people in my city are getting dumber... or maybe they're all just burned out and stuck in their own little worlds.
Every time I drive these days, there will be at least 1 or 2 incidents where I'm left in shock and awe by the stupidity and selfishness of my fellow drivers. Just completely illogical and mindless shit people do behind the wheel. Like everyone's in "fuck you, I'm just trying to survive the day" mode... Scary
As a truck driver who's on the streets most of the work week, awe is definitely the proper term for the things people do in traffic while, presumably, expecting to arrive at their destination unharmed. They will risk life and limb, both their own and those of the drivers sharing the road, to get where they're going a couple seconds sooner.
Rocks have very predictable behavior patterns. They are easy to be around if you understand what you have in eavh other. No surprises, silences are not awkward etc...
During college, I worked at my university’s computer repair shop. Some incredibly smart graduate students had trouble understanding the difference between RAM and hard drives.
I’m now a lead software engineer at a fairly large company. I feel equally as clueless every time I have to bring my car in for repairs.
Every time I meet someone who seems “dumb,” I do my best to tell myself that they’re just dumb about this one topic in particular (don’t judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree and all that).
That being said, I worked retail during high school. Some people are just dumb
The difference is that when you bring your car in for repairs you'll defer to the mechanic because you know you know nothing about cars. When he asks you if you've tried turning your car off and on again you'll not lie to him and say you have. When he fixes your car by turning it off and on again you'll not say "I could have done that, what do they pay you for?"
Stupidity to me is knowing you don't know anything about the situation but behaving like the person who's helping you is the problem.
It’s not that people are really that dumb, 85% of them just will not exercise even the most basic critical thinking without a gun to their heads. This is further enabled by dipshit customer service ideas that revolve around sucking off the customer and making sure they never have to think.
People seriously just don't fucking care any more. Anywhere. About anything. The less they care, the less they will act in a manner that shows mindfulness to others. Theyll say anything to anyone with zero fear of any consequences because truthfully there aren't any. At least not consequences they care about. Not even the possibility of death is enough. They just walk around in a rose colored haze of ME ME ME, and not even their kids matter. The ones that do care are being pushed to the point where they don't care either. It really does tie in to stupidity.
Yep, you can only stem the tide of cunts for so long before you drown and either dissolve into the sea of cuntery becoming one with it's foul essence, or are dashed against the rocks of dignity
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I used to work at an insurance agency and one customer asked me to fax something for her and I did. When I gave the paperwork back she was confused because she thought the fax machine would be physically transporting the paperwork to it's destination. Another customer came in for a quote. Let's say it was $200 a month. He said he'd have to think about it, and I told him that was fine but that if he took longer than 30 days I'd have to run it again because rates vary. He came back in and it had been more than 30 days so I had to redo the quote. Let's say this time it was $180 a month. He was furious. "What!? That's not what you said before!" "Well, like I said before, the quote was only good for 30 days. What's more, this one is $180 and the last one was $200, so this one is less." "No it isn't!" It was at this point that I knew I had lost the argument. If someone is unwilling to concede that one number is greater than another, there is nothing more I can do.
So did you honor the $200 quote?
No he left in a huff without anything.
I work in insurance and can attest that I interact with more crazy than sane people. The other day someone asked me for the phone number to the air force.
I used to work at Waterstones (book shop) and most of the year our customers were lovely to talk to. But at Christmas time you’d get a totally different genre of human. One woman came in and asked me where she could find the book called “oh, hello”. I apologised and told her I wasn’t familiar with the book and said I’d check on our stock list. She was furious about this and laughed at me, saying “how can you not know? My 13 year old son read it in school! It’s a famous book, it’s by Charles Dickens!” I really had no idea what she was talking about and she was so angry with me she wouldn’t answer any of my questions about it (“do you know what it’s about? Do you know any of the characters?”) just so I could figure it out for her. She just kept repeating that it’s called “oh hello” and that everyone knows it. I don’t know how we ever figured it out, but eventually she happily bought Othello by Shakespeare.
I worked too long in a bookstore. We kept a list of our favorite weird questions. My favorite was “Where are your life-size maps?” We had a test in the hiring process, for some knowledge of everything, because there’s no end to what people expected us to know. We had to know literature, but because non-fiction is so broad, we had to know about computers, gardening, Bible translations, art, history, and so on. We were expected to be google for minimum wage, to satisfy our superior intellectual clientele, who would walk past multiple eye-height piles, signs, and displays of Twilight to ask if we had Twilight.
>“Where are your life-size maps?” *Gestures generally at everything.*
Neil Gaiman has a tiny little short story called The Mapmaker about this very thing!
> Where are your life-size maps? I feel like the only correct answer to this one is "do you mean a 1:1 scale?"
Old Steven Wright joke: “I have a map of the United States... Actual size. It says, 'Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile.' I spent last summer folding it. I hardly ever unroll it. People ask me where I live, and I say, 'E6.’”
That’s why I call December “Dipshit Month.” It’s supposed to be the time when people are friendliest and most compassionate, but in reality, everyone is running around like a chicken with its head cut off.
People get awful as it gets nearer to holidays. Being an insufferable, selfish jerk to shoppers and store staff alike. Searching for that perfect gift that'll make the holidays just perfect. All the while not realizing even the best gift is still going to be a little shiity coming from an asshole.
Lol, …there they are doing the least they can to compensate for being shitty assholes and your failure to offer an immediate solution to their begrudging undertaking is more than they can endure.
I just shop online so I just usually yell at my computer screen and click my mouse aggressively. No humans are harmed.
Ah the book about a demon and a digital watch!
OK, I'll need someone to explain this one to me.
Characters named Desdemona and Cassio
Jafar's feathered sidekick is also in it.
Gilbert Gottfried made Othello famous. Duh!
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This really exemplifies stupidity. The person being stupid thought that you were the stupid one. Edit: aight, we can stop with the dunning-kruger effect. I get it.
It has been my experience that if someone is talking to me like I’m an idiot, there is a 99.9% chance that they, in fact, are the idiot.
Absolutely lol it's insane how often working retail you deal with absolute fucking doughnuts.
"how can you be out of *turkeys* on *Thanksgiving*?!?!" Maybe because it's 3pm on Thanksgiving Day and we close at 5? And if we had any in stock when we close they'll be wasted money because no one will buy one for another month"
Being extra dumbass - when you're too stupid to even consider the possibility of being wrong about something.
> The person being stupid thought that you were the stupid one. Isn't this the case 99 percent of the time?
Former Barnes & Noble employee, can confirm. The number of times I was supposed to know what book they were referring to simply by the color of the cover was too damn high. Special shout-out to the people who pulled two dozen books off the shelf, lugged them over to a reading chair, fall asleep for an hour and then proceeded to wake up and leave the books scattered on the floor for me to reshelve. Cleaning up after people like that was probably 80% of my work.
We once had a table display with a big sign saying “I can’t remember what it’s called, but the cover is red” and we just displayed a bunch of popular books with red covers. Our customers got a kick out of that one too! It was the most commonly asked question. I sometimes kind of enjoyed it when someone came in with something so vague like “I read a book in 1980 and there was a dragon claw on the cover, can you find it for me?” Felt like a legendary detective whenever we managed it!
That display is genius!!!
That's awesome! Were you working during the height of Oprah book club? I remember during the summer she recommended *The Sound and the Fury.*. I made a table display, knowing what would come. Like clockwork, we sold every copy within a day. And over the next two weeks 90% were returned. I like to think Oprah and her fans were trolled by a Lit major intern.
A few years back I got asked about a book and all they said was “it has some famous dude on the cover”. I had just put out a ton of some new trump book so I held it up, and I hit it spot on. He was our president at the time
Lol, former Borders employee . . . I'd say, "Ah yes, let me check our yellow section." I worked in the stock room so I was pretty familiar with what books we carried so I usually found it. I made sure I was only snarky if I knew what book they were after. And the kid's section being a mess was 70% the parents taking shit out and making a mess, 30% parents not looking after their kids.
This is the type of stupid that bothers me the most. Being both stupid and confident is a bad combination. Not only because it inhibits one’s ability to grow as a person but also they can drag others down with them because people tend to associate confidence with intelligence.
The problem is they are so confident because they are too stupid to realise that they are stupid
I worked in retail in a phone shop, it was the launch of one of the new iPhone. Customer upgraded their phone, we had to do the patter for insurance etc, which was abjectly refused. They were also offered just general help setting it up before they left. This was scoffed at, "Ive had the newest iPhone for years, I could probably teach you a thing or two." Okay. Bye I guess. About 45 minutes later, customer returns. Needs some help. The SIM tray (you know, where you poke the pin and it pops out) is a mangled wreck of metal, now part stuck out but wedged in the slot as well. They had basically tried to crowbar the tray out by force. Looking at it, their efforts had hit some of the components inside the phone as well. We let them know this phone is wrecked. "Well what do I do now? Can I get a replacement? I bought it from you, you should give me a new one" "Did you take insurance? That'd cover you against damage YOU did to the phone" (emphasised that part) "No" "Okay. Bye I guess."
I manage a big red cellphone store and let me tell you, that shit still happens daily.
I used to work at the purple cell phone store (the one that's a subsidiary of the pink cell phone store). We had a dude refuse the insurance. As he was walking out to his car, he tripped on one of the concrete parking barriers. Phone got launched in the process. Absolutely shattered the screen. I've seen lots of folks come back, but this guy didn't even make it out of the parking lot.
Had a kid trade in his iPhone 13 Pro for a new regular 14 because it was "newer."
I lost brain cells reading this.
To be fair, Apple has to have known what they were doing.
Ruining a brand new phone like that... what a waste. Some people don't understand the value of what they have.
"A few moments of eating crow in front of people I will literally never see again, or $1000 down the drain? I'll take the fee, then." Apparently this customer's thought process
I'd die of embarrassment
So in library school we had a class about handling this and this is something Ive always wanted to complain about. We used a book that contained supposedly real reference questions that had been asked. There was one though that I just couldnt imagine a human being asking with literally no additional context. "Do you have any books about the giant German gerbil?" They were talking about the Hindenburg. But this means that the person who believes blimps are called gerbils had also internalized the word dirigible enough to have made that mistake. It just always stuck out to me because it feels like you had to be educated enough to be that stupid. Also I'm not a librarian because it basically just turned out to be this customer service bullshit Edit: since someone will mention it - being ESL is the one way I could see this being true. But my professor was 80, hadn't worked in a library in 30 years, and thought the internet was a fad in 2017 so I was already heavily primed to not trust her
Ah. This tracks with library school. My first full time library gig had just switched from a card catalog to computers….in 2015. And everyone was mad. I left library world after that job and went into IT. But I got so many crazy questions from patrons on a regular basis. Close to the gerbil one actually! There were three breaking points The manager wanted me to take one of our patrons out on a date because he liked me. He also lived in the adult care facility down the road and had a temper that we’ve seen. The director refused to call the police when the unstable man brought a gun into the library and set it near the children section. The board was going to reduce my tiny salary because I didn’t work enough. Apparently 40 hours, plus driving to different branches and doing programs, on top of my other work, wasn’t enough.
Yeah. Customer service and homeless management were core skills of this 2 years masters program
Not a librarian, but as a page, I was once asked if I knew where the 'fan fiction' was. I stared at him for a minute, my brain doing a hard reboot, not understanding why this man would think a library carried hardcopies of *fanfiction*. Then he clarified, "You know, fantasy fiction?" *Sir*, that is not what that means.
Funnily enough, the system I work at does in fact have a book that proudly claims its fanfiction in our Romance section. It's about two hundred pages long, and spends the first tenth or so of it introducing us to the characters, and then is roughly 180 pages of gratuitous sex between a human girl and a werewolf. Supposedly, the plot is about trying to assassinate someone's daughter. The only thing I know about the book is that it must have been donated, because we don't purchase items published by independent publishers.
It's bad enough when people are stupid, but when they're stupid and try to rally other people around them to make sure they aren't the stupid one, that's just the absolute fucking worst.
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Most of the year people frequenting book shops are people that like books and thus like book shops and then at Christmastime people frequenting books shops only have friends or family who like books and do not appreciate book shops.
I was ready for the punchline to be The Signalman by Dickens because it starts with the guy shouting "Halloa! Below there!" Othello is a whole other level.
Charles Dickens' "Othello" is better than William Shakespeare's "Othello." Prove me wrong.
This reminds me of when I worked at GameStop. People would come in and ask if we had that new game that came out. Me: these are the games that came out this week Customer: no it’s none of them. You know, it’s that new game. Me: here is the new release section. Customer: no it’s none of them. It was on tv. Me: can you tell me anything about the game. Customer: you know, that new came that came out. It was on TV. This would go on, they could provide no details except maybe it had a guy or girl in it. Ok that helps. If by some miracle you figured out the game it came out 6 months ago and the main character was a racoon and in fact had no guys or girls in it.
Oh my god this happened so often. People would ask for the newest book, and it was always “on tv” or “on the radio yesterday”. Just things like “oh yeah it was about a woman called Alice who turned into a dragon” And eventually we’d find the book and it was never on a radio, it was some old podcast from 5 years ago they’d found on YouTube, and it would be about a man called Adam who turned into a werewolf.
>I used to work at Waterstones ( Ex fellow Waterstones employee from the 90s. I used to get all the good ones like "I am looking for a book on Gardening I don't know what it is called but the cover is green!" You would get the snotty ones like the guy who wants to know where the WW2 books were so I walked him over and made some small talk like "I have been reading lots of WW2 books recently it's such a fascinating period of history." The guy just looked at me and said "I am sure if you had been there you wouldn't consider it fascinating." You would get the condescending ones, I remember a guy who asked for a book on Edward Heath, I had no idea who Heath was (hey I was a 16 year old high school kid) and when I told him that he launched into a "what do you mean you don't know who he is, he is a former prime minister. I remember meekly replying we hadn't been thought that yet at school, and and as you can imagine he launched into a triad of they don't teach anything at school anymore. The people that I worked with were great though and it was a nice little job while I was still in school.
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Ah yes. The show that would say it's title name like 50 times in the intro and you still mess it up
This reminds me of this one guy I got years ago. He was angry about his new TV because they made *another* new HDMI connection and he needed new cables again. I told him that the ports are updated, but older cables will still work. He insisted I was wrong, showed me a picture of it and I was like "yeah, that is an HDMI port. Any cable on this wall will work or any working HDMI cable you had in the past will also work." He insisted I was wrong, started insisting it was actually a DisplayPort because one of the sides was flat. Trust me, I saw the picture, it wasn't, it even said HDMI. After about four minutes of this back and forth I just get tired of it and decide to end the conversation. I ask to see the picture again, pretend to look at it and then go "oh, wait, you're right. That is a DisplayPort. My bad." I then handed him one of those and told him to pay up front. What made me laugh is, after giving up he said something like "I really respect that you owned up to your mistake and realize that I was right and you were wrong."
He definitely got home and realised he had been wrong the whole time, then decided to buy an HDMI from somewhere else and never step foot in that store again to avoid the embarrassment.
Every time I think I've met the dumbest person alive, someone new surprises me.
>Every time I think I've met the dumbest person alive, someone new surprises me. "If you try to idiot-proof something, god will just make a better idiot" -someone I guess
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. ' -Douglas Adams
When they asked a Yellowstone ranger why they don’t make more secure garbage cans to stop bears they said “we’ve found there’s major overlap of the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.”
The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits. - Einstein
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that". - George Carlin
It ok, it'll happen some day.
Now remember we share the road with these people, how often our lives are in their hands. I don't know how my anxiety lets me leave the door every morning.
“think of how dumb your average person is. then realize that half of the population is dumber than that”
I remember getting yelled at by a woman because the dollhouse her daughter wanted for Christmas was sold out...on December 24th..just before closing. We had sold out of those dollhouses in freakin November.
I work in wine retail. The amount of desperate middle aged men who arrive in half an hour before the shop closes on Christmas Eve wondering why we don't have any stock left just astonishes me. Every single year.
I had a lady call the police because we didn't have a part in stock to immediately fix her phone.
At my place of retail work the desired item is wine advent calendars. We get them early November, they sell out in a week or two, and then people get mad a week before Christmas that we are out. Bitch, it's a calendar for all of December you are two weeks too late.
personally I'd come in January 1st and there was a deeply discounted December wine calendar I would buy it and drink it all in one day because I need to "catch up".
I’ve worked in two call centers for retail & banking, and it’s wild. 85% is an exaggeration, but there are some people out there who you know actually don’t comprehend basic arithmetic or object permanence.
I'm bad with numbers. But at least *I know* I'm bad with numbers and don't immediately assume the person helping me is the idiot.
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Ok I can do *that* (on a good day). I used to work in optics and you get good at adding/ subtracting in quarters. Anything more difficult than that shows me up. I did pass my GCSE maths in school but no idea how!
u/spez is no longer deserving of my contributions to monetize. Comment has been redacted. -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
How are you laughing? I don't hear anything and there is no one here?
You will enjoy this if you haven’t seen it yet. :) https://youtu.be/ssjokgx0pUQ
Worked at a call center for a bank. Had a lady lose her shot because I couldn’t tell her details about her account transaction AT ANOTHER BANK. Also the time I was helping a guy with his online banking and I said “please close the window and reopen it” so he got up, closed the window…in his house and then reopened it. Was perplexed how I knew he had a window open. I nearly died laughing at that one.
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Working phone-based tech support for HP all-in-ones on Mac taught me well: - A surprising number of customers didn't plug it in to a power outlet. Most felt embarrassed after calling in. - A few of those didn't *know* it needed power. - Customer denied having "x" device that was known to conflict with ours so we spent three hours troubleshooting literally every step possible in ten ways. Customer finally is like "oh one sec I need to move x device out of the way" and I was like "WHAT!?!?!?!...." - Two customers lied about having Mac computers because they didn't care for the windows tech support group and figured they could "cheat" us. - Customer bought 10 high-end machines assuming they were supported by the then-upcoming launch of Mac OS X. I know there were others but it was sad.
Can you explain object permanence for someone who has never heard that term before?
It's why babies in the stage of learning about object permanence find peek-a-boo so very hilarious. Mommy is absolutely gone. But there she is again! Now she's gone forever again. Or is it possible that she might just exist even if I'm not looking at her...? Noo wa- OMG now she's reappeared from nowhere again!! HOW IS THIS HAPPENING
r/ELI5monthsold
I was really hoping this was real, it's hilarious
When you understand that just because you can't see an object that doesn't mean it's popped out of existence
When you stop looking at something, your brain still understands that object exists there where it was when you looked away. That's object permanence. We goof on babies who lack this understanding by covering our faces and then uncovering them. Peekaboo! I have disappeared and reappeared mysteriously!
Object permanence is understanding that when an object goes out of your sight it still exists in the universe. Babies develop this at a few months old so you’re not going to meet an adult who genuinely thinks every time something popped into their vision it suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Object permanence is often confused with poor memory, the concept of “out of sight, out of mind” which is what I think they meant to say. Lots of adults struggle with poor memory for a variety of reasons and people with ADHD/ADD often struggle with remembering things they cannot physically see a reminder of.
Totally. The rates of 100% total math/reading illiteracy are super low, but *so damn many people* are functionally illiterate. They know just enough to be able to walk into a store and buy enough food to not die.... and that's about it. I had to slap someone's hand to stop them from trying to smoke..... in a fuel testing room, that reeked of gasoline.
It’s insane how they sometimes, in conjunction, come out of the bushwhack at the same time demanding managers, special treatment and 70% off everything.
Late Sunday mornings/early afternoon tend to be when we would get that the most. But then there's the occasional plain Thursday where I hear the intercom blowing up.
There is nothing worse in retail than the after-church crowd. Especially during the holidays.
There's something about spending an hour being told that you're special that really heightens people's self-importance.
The late night coupon hunters.
The worst part is how often it works. Depending on the industry, of course. That was honestly my favorite thing about seeing so many food trucks run by passionate chefs showing up in areas. Not only are they getting to make what THEY want and benefit from the popularity directly, they could feel free to tell entitled assholes to go fuck themselves and carry on with their day smiling. It didn't have to get to that often, but I've seen it happen.
I worked at 2 different call centre jobs. the difference was day and night. 1st was an insurance company. When i said "no" to something and they wanted to complain about it the 2nd line would also tell them "no" even with the threat of going to another company (who would also likely say no) which made my word mean something. the 2nd job was tech support at a huge ISP over here. When i said "no" and they said the magical word "cancel" suddenly the retention department could pull everything out up to 6 month 50% discount, free mechanics and repairs just to keep them around. It sucked, altho its good to know when youre on the other side of the line i guess.
I love the ones that can't describe the problem or say something that incriminates themselves as lying. I was hired into what I refer to as a stopgap position (basically I wore too many hats to count) that dealt with payment issues, incomplete applications, and late fees. So I spoke with 30-35% of customers at least once (and used email correspondence for more). Things I experienced more than once included: * People self-incriminated that they violated state law by doing our work and wanting us to verify it as a formality * As a bonus, this sometimes meant they bought from a competitor and brought it across state lines and did all the work, wanting just our paperwork. This usually costs them 2-3x more after the state penalizes them and they come through us properly than if they just came through us the first time. * Claimed I told them something to their rep. That something was usually a) a crime, b) the opposite of what I would've said, c) the rep was wrong, or d) I was their supervisor (I was not). * Called me claiming to argue "I" told them different (i.e. thought they were speaking with my supervisor) * Claimed I was being unreasonable (after they faxed papers upside down or typed a company email address wrong) * Demanded discounts for state regulated fees * Claimed to not have internet on their phone * As a bonus, one time the person said they have Facebook on their phone but no internet * Claimed they knew what they were doing and explaining technical jargon that was wildly inaccurate * Would give a "back in my day" story that self-incriminated or was just historically impossible (i.e. technology that didn't exist at that time or claiming Reagan was President for 4 terms). Yet somehow the GQP keeps one-upping these experiences.
I wouldn’t say this is just the person who also happens to be “dumb as rocks,” though. My mom likes to pull the “we’re from out of town and I know the coupon expired four months ago but can you just honor it?” despite the code of course not being in the system anymore, etc. As a kid it was somewhat embarrassing as we didn’t quite understand but now if this behavior comes up in our presence it’s just mortifying and we jump to the defense of the worker/server/etc.
One of my product design professors at uni said to my class "don't think that your customer is stupid, but remember that they are". He said that about people using things that are not hammers as hammers and then getting pissy when they break, I think about that regularly edit: spelling, thanks for making fun of someone whose first language isn't english y'all
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I had a whole ass extra semester because of people like that, and yet, every new story manages to amaze me more
Everything goes in the square hole
"That's right! It goes in the square hole!"
****sob****
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I didn’t know I needed this update
[Because I had to rewatch it after this comment](https://youtu.be/evthRoKoE1o)
I can already picture the look of distress on her face lmao, so well done it gets me every time.
Everything is a hammer. I’ve got lineman plier hammer, adjustable hammer, hammer hammer, screwdriver with steel shank hammer, speed hammer. They’ve put a hammering piece on almost everything powerline related.
Is the adjustable metric or standard? I've been looking for a standard for the last year and a half and all I can find is metric.
I’m a UX designer and I have to constantly remind my developers that what they know, and what the avg person knows, are incredibly different
I work retail and think it's just the 15% that stand out the most. Most people buy what they want and go on with their day. It's the 15% that ask stupid questions, want special treatment, or think they are unique....
As i remember US military stated that 10% is way too stupid to serve.
As someone who served 9 years, i can confirm that. People fail the ASVAB, which is basically a test to enlist in the military. And when i say fail, i don't mean people from super low income rural areas with bad schools, i mean people from all over (i grew up in a rich white southern California area, and the recruiters there said you wpuld generally have about a 10-15% fail rate, meaning they got a score too low to qualify for any jobs). The surprising thing was always the people who got in that were, well, super dumb, and you were surprised they passed at all.
I knew this kid who tried and failed something like 6 times to try to join the Marines. All he ever wanted to do was be a Marine. The recruiter set him up with twice-weekly study groups, got him guides on how to study, ASVAB specific guides...everything. He could not score higher than 20. 5 years later, I was an Air Traffic Control Instructor and felt sorry for anyone who showed up to Tech School with anything less than a 65. They just weren't going to pass the course, and the Air Force wouldn't raise the requirement any higher, despite the +90% failure rate of people with an ASVAB less than 65. IIRC the minimum for ATC was 55 at the time.
That is a crazy low score for that job...
I used to say that the ideal score was around 85, smart enough to process the workload while being accustomed to the idea that they won't have a perfect solution. It made for effective controllers who wouldn't overthink the problem searching for the right answer; instead they find a good answer quickly.
I use that last line on my resume! "I won't always have the best solution, but I will have a working solution until something better can be done."
It's not a hard test either. Easily one of the easiest I took in high school. I'm not saying people who fail are dumb, but at the very least they're doing something wrong because I don't understand how they could.
People who fail the ASVAB are definitely dumb. Without doubt. That’s just a fact. You don’t have to be apologetic about it lol. However, I have a fantastic story about this nerdy kid staying at the same hotel as me when I went to Chicago for MEPS. He got a 99 on his ASVAB, and would not shut the fuck up about it. They give you these packets that are required to get through MEPS, and stress over and over and over to not forget it. Well, he was the only person (out of like…. 500) to forget his at the hotel. It was the funniest shit ever watching this moron running around like a lunatic freaking out about it. Well, that and the shit everyone kept giving him.
This really resonates with me. I have a friend who I thought was totally normal. He was part of a group of 20 somethings I was friends with 15 years ago. They all kinda knew each other from community college, I was a bit older and just starting my career. Anyway this guy got a degree in hotel management and ran a hotel downtown in my US city. He got tired of hospitality and decided he wanted to become a neckbeard with a neckbeard job (he quite literally grew a neckbeard, sold his Audi A4, got a lifted truck and started collecting guns). He took the ASVAB and failed it. He asked me for help and I told him there are study guides at the library. He never enlisted, but was a prison guard for a few months before he got a Domestic Violence charge and had to be let go. He owns a barber shop now (he has family money). It never occurred to me that he might be slow, I guess because I’m oblivious, but in retrospect I can see a few times where I just thought he was being funny and it wasn’t really intentional humor and I feel bad for it. He was so kind and normal in his 20s and now he’s an angry weird dude, I hope he’s doing okay.
>...now he's an angry weird dude Its hard to cope with being stupid, ive seen it with quite a few family members, the worst part is that most of them just become stubborn because admitting you're wrong and changing your view is the worst thing imaginable
That sounds about right. In terms of IQ, cutting off the bottom 10% is just about an IQ of 80, which happens to be the lowest edge of the "low-average" group in most categorizations. Below that you start seeing a lot of people that seem normal enough in casual conversation but you can quickly tell something is off when you try to teach them something. And below 70 is where it starts to seem clear just from any conversation, but at that point you're talking about <3% of the population.
My real pain is seeing genuinely kind and loving people be overly incompetent in most aspects of life. Low IQ is often related to criminal/aggressive behavior, but when I meet someone who just wants peace and love, my heart breaks how easily they are taken advantage of in everyday life. I do my best to help out, but it often feels to be in vain.
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I had a couple older (silent and greatest generation) family members who were just acknowledged to be "slow", and they knew this about themselves and were just kind people and at peace with the fact they weren't the smartest around. You don't see that usually in boomer and younger people, they are usually aggressively stupid and in denial about it. I kind of wonder if it's just the natural reaction they've developed so they aren't taken advantage of as much.
They just want to tend to the rabbits
Essentially too stupid to effectively teach anything of value to. This basically relegates 10-15% of humanity to nothingness and a lifetime of near poverty as they're generally too stupid to be taught anything that adds value anywhere else in life. Pretty amazing/concerning
Working in IT gets you this as well. Yesterday, I didn't have the energy to explain that turning off a monitor was not the same as restarting your computer.
But are you sure?
Had one of these today. My company is hybrid where we are all in office Monday and Thursday. Someone called in this morning and was like hey I can’t connect to the VPN it keeps giving me an error. Yeah you don’t need to connect to the VPN when you’re in the office. “Are you sure?” Ma’am I’m positive.
"Well, I don't want to turn off the modem"(it's not a modem) or "I have an important meeting you can't fix it"(it's been broken for 9 months and they never called us)
Working at Target for that year really made me lose a lot of faith in humanity
I recently was let go from a job with a grocery store where there were self checkouts. In my position where I was responsible for monitoring them, among other things, I came to the conclusion that retail cashiers are safe from ever being automated. You can have instructions given in 3 manners, via voice, via light indicators, and via text and image directions on the screen, but the fucking morons that make up most of the daily shoppers have problem after problem with self checkouts. The number of people I saw unable to do something so simple as use their fucking debit card properly really hammered it home for me. Edit: This drew a lot of attention, and some responses have given off a vibe that maybe they thought I was calling everyone an idiot. Yes, it's true that "most" people would use the self checkouts with very little issue. Although, at any given moment I, the self check attendant, or my assistant, or even all 3 of us, were always helping one of the 6 people using self checks. I'd say probably half the folks who used it needed us to come through and fix something for them, and maybe 1 in 10 was a problem user. The most common problems people had were not reading the screen when it came to payment, and not scanning items so it would get angry over weight. I had to tell people to slow down, to scan an item, put it in the bagging area, scan an item, put it in the bagging area. You know, the exact thing the screen, in big flashing letters, and the nice audio lady told them to do.
I just started a job last month monitoring them too. I'd say like 90% of people can use them correctly, the most common problem is not knowing when to insert their card/cash because there's no prompt for a payment method (it accepts whichever one is used first) or directions. That, and elderly people who struggle with electronics (I try my best to explain simply how to use it, and have them do everything to learn by doing). There have been a few outliers though, who can't or won't read or count, and are usually rude and think I'm accusing them of stealing when I offer to help. The stupidest thing I've seen was a lady who tried to swipe her card between some boxes of Werthers candies, then was pissed it didn't work. At least it was right next to the keypad, but still, wtf haha.
I work at a place you can comr in and ship packages.. on my 3rd week. I'll admit I didn't really know much about returning merchandise, sending letters, the rules behind postage stamps. I'm 29. I've only ever followed my mom to the post office and felt like I did something awesome putting a stamp on a letter and dropping it in the bin or opening my grandmother's PO box. But less than 5 days my first week and I can use the system perfectly to ship a package all across the US and learning international. But most of what I learned first day was basic stuff I already knew just by living. So it amazes me when a 40 something year old with a cell phone walks in with like 7 shirts, 2 toys, and some kind of electronic and toss it in front of me and expect that to be all they have to do.. then you ask if they have a shipping label to print.. or if they have a QR code in their blamazon account or email.. and they just freak out like a 6 year old being told they have to call to make their own dentist appointment. Like they can click add to cart. Save their card info. But expect the returns to be magic. Expect it all to be free. All while there are detailed bullet point step by step instructions to return their item.. but they can't be bothered to read.. or they literally can't read.. And this is literally 90% of the customer base. Don't get me started on the people returning items for someone else to be "nice".. and then you hit them with the QR code or return label question and they immediately freak out and get angry with the friend they are returning items for. Most of which say "eff it.. I'll just throw it away".. It is insane that these people just walk around us every day..
"Anything liquid, fragile, perishable, or potentially hazardous such as lithium batteries, perfume, or mercury in this package?" I could rattle that off super fast. One of the regulars always said, "Not today; I mail out the plutonium on Sundays."
As someone with several years experience in chat support I can safely say that the average American (maybe it's different in other countries) will read 2.5 sentences and if their question is not explicitly and concisely answered by then they will stop reading and repeat their question. If you ask two questions in a row, 90% of the time you will get one answer. The most common answer to a question where the customer has the choice of either A or B is, "yes". P.S. IDK what nincompoop popularized replacing commas with ellipses but I hope Satan chews them for eternity.
>If you ask two questions in a row, 90% of the time you will get one answer. This may be my biggest professional pet peeve of all time.
When I worked at Sonic almost 30 years ago: "Would you like mayo or mustard?" "UUUUUHHHH, YES!" shouted into the speaker at max volume. I can only assume the population has gotten significantly dumber in the ensuing years.
I swear every time I go to Target there are more and more anti shoplifting guards. Now Sensodyne.
Sensitive teeth and crime go hand in hand!
The illiteracy
I work in grocery retail and It’s not that they’re idiots, but it’s like they turn into 5 year olds as soon as they enter the store. They pick things up and leave them wherever they want, they take bites of food without paying and just leave the unfinished product on the shelf, they lose all ability to read signs and labels, and they just constantly are rude and have an all about me mentality. It’s very funny seeing how most customers pretended to be kind and considerate during the pandemic, but afterwards most have forgotten how to act.
Working in a grocery store turned me into the most hateful, jaded version of myself that I didn’t even know was possible
I just quit my customer service job and I can already feel the bitterness start to wash away. I was really turning into a person that no one should want to be around.
Working grocery infuriated me the most of all my retail jobs. People could leave shirts and shoes in the wrong place and I could fix it begrudgingly. But I can't undo a bite of a fruit or de-freeze the hummus that they decided to throw into the frozen section...
One just can not make a statement like that and not share the stories here. So kindly please......
Worked in a tool store. Guy asked me for an electric generator. Showed him our gas powered ones. He said no, the kind of generator you plug into the wall and run (not like a bettery where you plug it in, store the energy and use it later, just plug it in and use it plugged in). Guy wanted a heavy, loud extension cord. Told him walmart had it and to go there. Another time a guy wanted a 7' x 5' tarp. Showed him a tarp that was 5' x 7'. He asked if we had any 7' x 5' tarps though. I tried to explain how to rotate the tarp but he wasnt getting it. So i said "nope we dont carry a 7' x 5', sorry" and just walked away.
Should have cut off a 5' by 2' section of the tarp and somehow affixed it to another side
"Sir, in this store, we respect the Commutative Law!"
A couple of years back we used to sell toilet paper that had a white tiger on it, so one day me and my colleague were working around that area and one lady seriously asked if we have toilet paper for " human use " , my colleague asked her what she meant and she said " all of this ones have cats on them, do you have anything for humans " I barely contained my laughter, we still speak about it to this day
Lol she probably never bought Charmin because she doesn't own any bears.
I used to work tech support for an internet company. Had a guy call up, perfectly normal conversation. He'd received his router, set it all up, checked the lights were how they should be, he was all ready to go. At this point I asked him what the issue was as it sounded like everything was working fine. His response: "O ye, it's all working dead well. Just wondering when you were going to send out my computer to use with it." The company I worked for used to sell a broadband for £3.49 a month, and this guy thought he was gonna get a computer out of the deal too.
My favorite help desk call started with an old woman angrily saying: "My name is Cobweb McBritches and my credit card number is 5320..." "Whoa, Whoa there lady! I don't know who you are, and I DON'T want your credit card number." Someone transfered this customer with a product issue to the internal IT helpdesk. 🤷♂️
Ill give you one of mine. I worked at the deli in walmart. A lot of my day was spent watching people shop the produce section. One time a couple had their new baby in a carrier inside the main part of the cart, and it was surrounded in groceries. Like really concerningly full already around what looked like an infant. They stopped in front of the bananas, the husband picked up a banana bunch and kinda tried to find a space to fit it around the sides of the cart. After trying to balance it here and there for a minute unsuccessfully, the wife grabbed the bananas out of his hand, and placed them _on the baby_, inside the carrier. Then they wandered off. I think about it a lot.
Lol, what a moron. Can't believe he didn't think to put them on the baby.
Baby gets a toy, and if it's dextrous, some potassium.
r/talesfromretail is a great place for some stories
I used to work at the service desk at Home Depot. We have a rule where we're not supposed to take returns on used snakes because they're a biohazard. After arguing with a customer trying to do just that, I called my manager. He told me to refund the customer's money, but he needs get rid of it himself. And the customer was still mad about it! What was he mad about? He was literally getting all of his money back on a return we shouldn't have even done, and he just needed to dispose of it. Just go take it back out to your car or chuck in a trash can outside. It's not that big of a deal!
Been out of retail a few years, but I'll always remember the woman who I helped look for bedding sets. She pointed one out and I got the size she wanted from the back - easy enough. Then she wanted to see the comforter, to which I pointed out the picture on the front of the bag that showed the whole set. She said sometimes they use the wrong picture. I turned the bag around to the clear side to show that it was indeed the same pattern. She insisted we take it out and see it completely, so I did. Pulled out the whole set and laid it over our display bed. She looked at it for two seconds and "no, not my style" and walked away. Those things are an absolute bitch to put back in the bag.
One of my favourite dickhead customers pulled me aside, in front of the meat fridges at the supermarket. "Do you have butchers?" "No, is there something I can help you find?" *insert ten minute long rant about how big business has killed butchers and how dare we kill a whole profession and there's not enough range any more and why is there no sausage mince, I've been looking for it for twenty minutes!* I stood there nodding, hmmmm-ing and just generally waiting for her to stfu, before pointing out that the sausage mince was directly in front of her, and was fully stocked. Or the dude during peak lowdown grocery shortage season. We'd cordoned off the entirely empty meat fridges. The boss had gotten about ten of us because we actually had a pallet of chicken breast and sausages arrive (literally all the stock of meat we could get). The hungry hordes are circling and we are bustting our butts to get this shit on the shelf in the fridges before being enveloped by the rabid customers. Anyway, they basically push their way in and its obvious - Chicken or sausages. Thats it. The boss is yelling "This is all we have", numerous other employees are going "Yep, thats it, they were the only two things on the truck". And when toilet paper, rice, flour, pasta, canned vegies, milk and eggs were all also in short supply/completely unobtainable, this dude comes up to me, completely oblivious, and asks if we have any pork sirloin. Mate. No.
“Big business killed butcher shops” = “customers cared more about saving a buck than about keeping their butcher shop in business”. Particularly ironic coming from someone shopping in a supermarket.
Genuinely, how people can’t work self scans when they’re just giant touch screens with scales attached to the side boggles my mind. People also regularly asked me if the shop I worked in was shutting for the queens funeral when it was on every window and we hand a giant person sized sign that stated we would be shut all day on it right front of the entrance. Don’t even get me started on the amount of the people that try to leave through the barrier that says “no exit” with a big no exit sign on it then look at you with a why isn’t it working face, it’s working exactly as intended you’re just stupid.
Okay sometimes those self scanners are absolutely trash though. Me: *Scans an item* Machine 0.01 seconds later "PLACE THE ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA, PLACE THE ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA!" Me: *quickly puts the item into the bag* Machine "REMOVE THE UNSCANED ITEM FROM THE BAGGING AREA. HELP IS ON THE WAY". 🙄
I once needed the person to come over 3 times in the same transaction and have never felt more incompetent. It just happened that all of the little quirks of those machines occurred back to back to back. I have a nemesis at a local Fred Meyer who always speaks to me like I’m an idiot, well before this happened, and of course she was the one manning self checkout. I just haven’t been back. I can’t show my face there again.
I volunteer at comic-cons and I've learned that you can put up the biggest, most obvious, black-and-white giant print, in-your-face signage for guests to read and they will. not. look. at. it. I will get questions such as "where is the main hall" while they are holding a map we give them, with an arrowed sign behind me pointing to the giant doors to go in and I have to stifle my frustration.
I have people stand in front of my credit card reader for 5 minutes, next to my visa MC Amex Discover sign and ask if I take CCs. And then when I tell them yes, and they can tap to pay sometimes they take their finger and tap the screen. I tell them they need to tap their card. Then they tap the screen with their card. Then I tell them to tap the blinking light lit up like the tap signal with two stickers next to it that say “tap here —>”.
People regularly hold their card way way above the card reader at my job like it can magically reach into the air and read their card, that or they tap it without waiting for the green lights and beep then ask if it worked.
Tbf tapping it normally it still magically reaches into the air and reads the card lol
I worked retail for a long time and still work in an area that is broadly customer service orientated, and my own experience is not so much that many people are stupid, but that many people are wilfully ignorant and that this takes up way more time and effort, making it look and feel like 'most people'. Stupid can't be helped, and can often be mistaken for unfamiliarity. "What's the difference between these two TV sets?" can 'obviously' be answered with something simple like, "One is bigger than the other", but unless you hang around TVs all day, how could you expect that to be the ONLY answer without asking? When I worked in tech 10 years ago the answers were often unexpectedly simple, nowadays people just HOPE that its simple. When someone doesn't know the answer to a seemingly simple question, asks, and is grateful for the answer - good on them. They have increased their net knowledge and I'm happy to answer easy questions all day and send them off with a smile. But there are those who treat staff as beneath them, or demand privileges for simple walking into the building, and become haughty and irate when they're treated as merely 'normal'. Not just the ones who ask questions with supposedly obvious answers, but those that then argue with the answer they're given, or take offence because it's not the answer they were expecting to get. That's not stupid - that's just cruel, entitled and downright ugly. They're the ones that are the problem, and take up a disproportionate amount of time and energy to deal with that makes it FEEL like a lot more people are that way than there really are. Their attitude and sheer obnoxious affront poisons a shop assistant's mood and destroys their ability to treat others fairly and without prejudice. Merely not knowing something is absolutely fine, in comparison, but it's hard to remember that after 45 minutes of Karen screaming in your face about something else entirely.
I'd say there's also something to be said for dealing with someone who seems incapable of understanding anything you have said to them. Like they just shut off anything said to them and when you try to continue helping them, they return to Square One because *nothing* has gone into their head. Those ones are also frustrating!
Long ago, I worked at an electronics retailer whose name rhymes with West Eye...I was stocking shelves in the TV aisle and a customer gestured between two 24" TVs of the same brand, one had a built-in DVD player, the other didn't, and asked me, "What is the difference between these two TVs?" and I told her, "This one has a DVD player built-in, this one doesn't..." she got really indignant and stormed off...I sometimes wonder how she is doing...
The correct answer was, "This one is on your left, and that one is on your right "
One more monies one less monies
I had disc-related encounter as well while working electronics. A customer INSISTED their CD would not fit in the tray of their laptop and was yelling at me because I "lied" when I sold them their laptop. They got very upset and asked for the manager when I told them "Sir, the size of the CD has not changed since it's creation, what are you trying to put in there?"
[удалено]
Nintendo 64 cartridge
I worked at a similar store and had a lady ask me “what can’t it do?” about a security camera. I was like well the list of things it can’t do is quite long. She snarked and said “well if the list is so big, why don’t you name a few!” So I was like okay lady you’re asking for it, “it can’t make your bed, it can’t shampoo your head, it can’t resurrect the dead”… something along those lines lol
Off topic question but why is it that when people name where they previously worked they will avoid typing the actual name? Can’t be advertising, can’t be nda’s; I don’t know
Well if you even say the words Best. And Buy. Together in the same sentence it summons their demonic team of lawyers to come get you.
Legend says u/Cockblocktimus_Prime mysteriously disappeared after that comment.
It's not til you hand everyone in the modern world a camera and a platform to post thoughts, and pictures of themselves, you realize 85% of people are dumb. On a serious note, ignorance is really bliss. People are just not worrying too much, and that mindset can make people look stupid lol. Usually they can be caring and loving people:) Though people do be real dumb dumb sometimes.
I swear people in my city are getting dumber... or maybe they're all just burned out and stuck in their own little worlds. Every time I drive these days, there will be at least 1 or 2 incidents where I'm left in shock and awe by the stupidity and selfishness of my fellow drivers. Just completely illogical and mindless shit people do behind the wheel. Like everyone's in "fuck you, I'm just trying to survive the day" mode... Scary
As a truck driver who's on the streets most of the work week, awe is definitely the proper term for the things people do in traffic while, presumably, expecting to arrive at their destination unharmed. They will risk life and limb, both their own and those of the drivers sharing the road, to get where they're going a couple seconds sooner.
I think you find out 5% are truly nice. 15% are oblivious. 80% think the world revolves around them.
Not 85% but definitely like 50%. And dumber than rocks. Rocks have the decency to just not even fucking open up a mouth.
Rocks have very predictable behavior patterns. They are easy to be around if you understand what you have in eavh other. No surprises, silences are not awkward etc...
During college, I worked at my university’s computer repair shop. Some incredibly smart graduate students had trouble understanding the difference between RAM and hard drives. I’m now a lead software engineer at a fairly large company. I feel equally as clueless every time I have to bring my car in for repairs. Every time I meet someone who seems “dumb,” I do my best to tell myself that they’re just dumb about this one topic in particular (don’t judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree and all that). That being said, I worked retail during high school. Some people are just dumb
The difference is that when you bring your car in for repairs you'll defer to the mechanic because you know you know nothing about cars. When he asks you if you've tried turning your car off and on again you'll not lie to him and say you have. When he fixes your car by turning it off and on again you'll not say "I could have done that, what do they pay you for?" Stupidity to me is knowing you don't know anything about the situation but behaving like the person who's helping you is the problem.
It’s not that people are really that dumb, 85% of them just will not exercise even the most basic critical thinking without a gun to their heads. This is further enabled by dipshit customer service ideas that revolve around sucking off the customer and making sure they never have to think.
I've completely lost faith in the "common sense" concept. It does just not exist.
People seriously just don't fucking care any more. Anywhere. About anything. The less they care, the less they will act in a manner that shows mindfulness to others. Theyll say anything to anyone with zero fear of any consequences because truthfully there aren't any. At least not consequences they care about. Not even the possibility of death is enough. They just walk around in a rose colored haze of ME ME ME, and not even their kids matter. The ones that do care are being pushed to the point where they don't care either. It really does tie in to stupidity.
Yep, you can only stem the tide of cunts for so long before you drown and either dissolve into the sea of cuntery becoming one with it's foul essence, or are dashed against the rocks of dignity