At some point in your life, customer service representatives who roll their eyes and snap their gums in irritation have probably frustrated you. But have you ever thought about what it’s like from their perspective?
For those of us who have endured these horrendous minimum-wage jobs, toiling away in retail or fast food industries, here are 10 annoying things that we can all relate to:
1. Spending hours arranging the perfect display by type, size, and color, only to turn your back for one second and then find:
2. When a customer asks you a question, and then turns around and asks your co-worker the same thing.
3. When a customer walks in five minutes before closing.
4. A customer who knows it’s THEIR fault but insists on creating a scene anyways.
5. When a customer is b*tching at you and you’re just dying to put them in their place, but alas, all you’re focusing on is payday, payday, payday, payday, payday.
6. The feeling after Boxing Day or Black Friday.
7. When you work so fast on autopilot that you become more machine than human.
8. When your whole lunch break ends up being spent on ranting and venting to your co-workers.
9. Those customers who ask a billion questions and you want to say, “I just work here. I didn’t invent the d*mn thing.”
10. That moment your patience finally breaks, so you tell a customer off and feel like this:
This was simply a preliminary attempt at tackling the issues that underpaid and underappreciated employees face worldwide, and I have a feeling that there is much more to come.
I want to request that people think about their behaviour while dealing with customer service representatives. Spending money does not give you the right to treat anyone badly. And to my fellow employees, we should keep the words of Josh Radnor in mind: “It’s not our job to play judge and jury, to determine who is worthy of our kindness and who is not. We just need to be kind, unconditionally and without ulterior motive, even—or rather, especially—when we’d prefer not to be.”
(A special mention goes to Braedon Palmer for helping me highlight how truly painful dealing with humans can be!)