Extreme Couponing: A Public Service Announcement

Greetings everyone! It has been far too long, and since I worked a grueling 8-hour shift at the cash registers yesterday, I was reminded of the many ways in which ways people are capable of pissing me off. During my shift yesterday, I fell victim to about three different transactions involving women who refer to themselves as "extreme couponers". In my opinion, this was three too many. This despicable mental disorder has gone out of control, and I feel obligated to share this public service announcement with the world. Only through awareness (and aggressive therapy) can we defeat this terrible disorder.

EXTREME COUPONING. This phenomenon is sweeping the nation and affecting overweight, depressed housewives everywhere who are so dissatisfied with their lives they literally have nothing better to do than repeatedly save 75 cents on a bottle of hand soap. Now, don't get me wrong - I am all for clipping a few coupons out of newspaper ads on a Sunday afternoon and going out for a nice, slightly cheaper shopping trip. However, it is beyond me how this menial task turned into a nationwide hobby.

It all started, as many asinine fads do, with a television show. However, let me explain something to you. The show "Extreme Couponing" is just like "Extreme Hoarders" - it is a documentary TLC produced to showcase a DISORDER. This is not a hot new trend, folks. It doesn't significantly improve one's quality of life, nor does it do anything awesome, like cure cancer. It's a form of ACUTE MENTAL ILLNESS.

My first encounter with an extreme couponer involved a woman who wasted about 20 minutes of my life doing about 35 separate transactions, each involving one bottle of hand soap and a dollar-off coupon. During this waste of life, I was treated to her entire fucking life story about how her sister loves this scent, so she's getting her ten bottles, and her mother loves this scent, and this soap is great for her cuticles, and blah-de-fucking-blah. 

My encounter today was particularly nasty. She comes to my lane with a cartload of Nabisco cookies and 90-calorie Skinny Cow chocolate pellets. Seems like a bit of an oxymoron to me, but what do I know? Seriously though, what kind of normal, mentally-stable person buys a cartload of that shit? After piling her loot on my counter, she heaves a bible-sized stack of coupons into my hands. She literally has a coupon for every single item she purchased, and doesn't hesitate to remind me that it's "double coupon week" and everything should be doubled. 

To make a long story short, her twenty-eight dollar purchase is brought down to a grand total of $3.17. Sounds like the bargain of the century to me, but of course that's not enough.
"Where's my $3 coupon?" she barks at me.
"Excuse me?" I say dubiously. It doesn't sound like I'm speaking to someone who's mentally sound, and that's because I'm not.
"I bought ten Nabisco products. The ad said if I did that your register would take $3 off." She is starting to literally panic. Sweat is beading on her forehead, and her eyes are darting nervously. "My mom and sister and aunt all did it earlier, and they all got $3 coupons."
"Do you have the ad that advertises this?" I ask her.
"NO," she snaps defensively, "but it worked for them earlier. It's supposed to. That's how it works."
"I mean, if the register doesn't print anything, there's really not anything I can do without documentation," I say firmly.
"I'm not leaving here without my $3 taken off," she says frantically. Oh, is that so? What are you going to do, cut my jugular with your massive stack of coupons? Take $3 in blood?
"Count them," she says frantically. "Count the coupons you scanned, and count how many items I have. I must've been off somewhere. There needs to be a $3 coupon."

After wasting about 25 minutes counting and re-counting everything, the only conclusive evidence I found is that she is batshit fucking insane. Surprise!

I have decided that when I become rich and famous, my blog is syndicated, and I am able to have Lewis Black-esque rants on national television about things that piss me off, I will donate some of my riches to build a rehab center for both extreme couponers and the cashiers they have scarred. Just remember, everyone: together, we can defeat this tragic disorder.

I thought I'd be safe behind the pharmacy glass...

Greetings everyone! Once again, I have neglected my blog, but I have an assload of stories, and since I finished my test early and have a couple hours before my next class, I figured it was high time I updated this thing.

As many of my friends and coworkers know, I have since transferred from the cash registers to the pharmacy. It's fitting, considering I'm pursuing a career in nursing and not retail customer service. Another side benefit of working in the pharmacy is the large glass window that runs the length of the room, successfully blocking me from creepers and minimizing my contact with the general public that I love so dearly. I was anticipating a steep decline in the amount of creepers I would encounter, but as you will see in these two stories I have to share, I was gravely mistaken.

The first creature I will discuss is at the pharmacy on almost a daily basis picking up meds for his ailing mother. A noble act, certainly, but that does not excuse his overall vileness, nor the fact that he is probably living in her basement, mooching off her social security while surviving on Mountain Dew and WOW. He is a portly little man, maybe 40, who is balding yet still somehow insists on wearing a long, scaly ponytail down his back. It's not as epic as Devin Townsend's skullet, but it's close. He comes up to the window with his beady little eyes and stares intently while I gather his prescriptions. WHY do they always have to stare? 

When I return to the register, he regards me deeply, then says in an intense, ominous tone, "It's not just you, is it?"

"Excuse me?" I say, giving him my surliest death glare.

"You have a cat hair on your shirt," he replies creepily. "You have a furry friend at home, don't you?"

"You could say that," I reply sarcastically, while he continues to stare.

SERIOUSLY? What the fuck? Somehow, the freak show managed to find me in the pharmacy. I think I'd be a little pissy with Mommy, who clearly failed in teaching him how to socialize in society.

The next freakazoid is (unfortunately) another regular at the pharmacy window. It's nearing the end of the night after a frightfully busy day, and I'm about at my wit's end when an enormous Jamaican woman wearing what looks like Jerry Seinfeld's puffy shirt with track pants appears at the window. She's getting about $500 worth of tramadol, a pain medication, for roughly eighteen bucks. I don't know about you, but that sounds like a hell of a bargain to me.

When I tell her the price, she spazzes out on me. "I don't have a copay!" she snarls. "I don't have to pay anything!"

"That's not what the insurance company says, ma'am," I say, trying my hardest not to reach through the window and smack her obviously fake red wig off her thick head. "Honestly, that's not a bad copay..."

"NO! I don't pay anything! I don't have any money with me and I need my medicine tonight. I'll get sick, and you really don't want that to happen," she roars threateningly. Oh, I see. She's one of those.

I pretend to mess around on the computer, even though there is nothing I can do. "Just give them to me," she says. "I don't have money with me because I never pay anything."

"Ma'am, I can't just give you a narcotic," I say as condescendingly as possible. "And because I'm not the decision-making power of your insurance company, I can't do anything."

At this point she has puffed herself up to literally fill the entire pick-up window. There is a line of people behind her, but there's no way in hell they're getting through the wall of Jamaican fury.

"Can you just loan me thirty bucks?" she asks me quietly. "I need my medicine tonight."

At this point, all I can do is laugh in her face. "Seriously? You know I can't do that. Plus, I work at Hellmart. Do I look like I have money?"

She tried this shit with the pharmacist, who at this point was cowering in the corner trying to make me deal with her. I all but grabbed him by the balls and threw him at her while I busily started filling prescriptions.

When she didn't get her way, shit got ugly. She managed to puff herself up even more, regarded us both with rage, and began cursing in some bizarre language.

Yep, that's right. I just got straight-up voo-doo'd.

If I end up dying some horrific death, or my organs fall out or something, tell my family and friends I love them dearly, and please make sure the "furry friend" I obviously have at home gets taken care of.

It's an Amish thing...

Hey everyone. As I sit here at Denny's because my internet is dead at my apartment, I figured I should enlighten everyone with updates about America's favorite little Amish boy.

So, it didn't take long after his first few texts for him to inform me that he had an "exciting job opportunity" for me. Oh shit, the moment I've been waiting for! I had several hunches about what it could be... a missionary, perhaps? A well-paid sex slave? However, he wasn't planning to divulge this information without a fight.

"What kind of work is it?" I asked, legitimately curious.
"Umm...it's hard to explain in a text. It might confuse you. Can we meet up for dinner sometime and I'll just show you?"
Is this kid serious? I mean, I'm sure he's lived a sheltered life, but are you fucking kidding me? There have been three murders and cases of missing persons in Bloomington this week alone. Hell. No.
"Why don't you just tell me?" I ask. "I mean, I have a near-genius IQ. I think I can handle whatever you're trying to explain."

Well, as I'm sure you can imagine, that got me nowhere. I finally got him to divulge a little bit of what he does - he gets paid to recruit people to his "team" and sell things for companies. After telling my tale to a coworker, they approached what is probably the most likely story: he works for Amway.

Amway, which is notorious for scandals and utilizing "cult-like" techniques to recruit and maintain its distributors. Oh hot damn. Flypaper for freaks strikes again.

We actually had a reasonably pleasant conversation, until he would continue bringing up the fact that this cult of his changed his life and that I should join him in his revelries.
At this point, I felt obligated to tell him that I'm about a hundred and fifty percent sure that I'm not his type. I told him, in not quite so many words, that cults aren't my thing, and that I'm a filthy sinner: I have eight piercings, two tattoos, I curse like a sailor, I'm all for premarital sex...

But that's ok, he says. We can still be friends.
Praise the lord.

Take me to your leader...

Tonight, a hot Amish guy asked me for my number so he could "shoot me a text".

Wow. There are so many things that don't fit in that sentence, I don't even know which one to address first.

What fits even less than that sentence is that I actually gave it to him. He was lacking those god-awful mutton chops, which definitely gave him points in my book. I was honestly so shocked that some Amish motherfucker was requesting to "shoot me a text" that how could I not give him my number, at least for the sake of research and entertaining blog stories. Keeping in mind, of course, that the last time one of my coworkers conversed with Mennonites, the men basically asked her to be their sex slave while the women hid merchandise in their skirts.

He's been "shooting" me texts all night, and I haven't quite figured out whether he wants me to become his sex slave or not. He seems pleasant, although I don't know what we'll have to talk about, seeing as I'm an Atheist who's not into the whole "sex slave for God" thing . Only time will tell, and I will definitely warn you all if my blog must be discontinued due to a forced change in occupation.

Pet Peeves of Customer Service: Part 1

Hello again! It's been a long day and I am feeling particularly ranty, so I figured now was an excellent time to begin my list of my biggest customer service pet peeves. I haven't been posting much lately anyway, so it's high time I caught up.

Trust me , I have collected an exorbitant amount of these over the years, so I'll break my list down into different segments of 5 peeves per post. They aren't in any particular order - I tried, but attempting to rank these into a list of which ones irritate me the most has proven to be too difficult a challenge. So sit back and enjoy - if you've ever worked customer service, I'm sure you'll commiserate. If you haven't, NEVER act like this, because if you do, I'll probably blog about you, and it probably won't be pretty.
But anyway, without further ado, the first portion of my list:

1. Customers who come up to me on their cell phones, broadcasting to the world about how Bubby got a new tractor, or how Papaw's hemorrhoids are healing. That's fantastic - tell Bubby I said congratulations, and give Papaw my condolences - but seriously, there are few things more rude than this. I will blatantly refuse to speak to anyone who comes up to me on a cell phone - if you can't give me the courtesy of hanging up your phone, I can't give you the courtesy of speaking to you. Bubby and Papaw can wait five minutes until you're done at the register. 

2. "Mart Karts" and the destruction they cause. It's not mother-fucking bumper cars, so the point is NOT to crash into as many displays as you can. Also, nine times out ten they're not disabled, they're just fat. Get out of the damn scooter and walk - trust me, you need it.

3. Those people who pull their food stamp card out of their ridiculously huge Prada bag, then proceed to drive away in their even more ridiculously huge Hummer.

4. Those people who stand there and watch me painstakingly bag their entire order of cumbersome, difficult objects, only to say at the end, "Oh, that's okay, I don't need a bag." Well, you know what? You're going to take the bag, and you're going to like it. Also, you know those people who put everything in a plastic bag, which is then put inside their "green" cloth grocery bag, thus defeating the purpose of said "green" bag? Yeah, I don't like them either.

5. Wet money, sock money, bra money, jock strap money... you get the picture. Many perfectly lovely cows have sacrificed their lives to provide leather to make wallets. We sell plenty here in our store at a reasonable price, so there is no reason in the world why one should use their sweaty sock, bra, or crotch as a currency holder. You're at a department store, not a strip club.

That's all for now - I've gotten it out of my system for the moment - but there are plenty more where those came from, so stay tuned. :)
      

"Worst Customer Ever": A Retrospective

Hi everyone. As you know, it's drawing closer to memorial day, the time where we remember those who have been important to us. I figure this is as good a time as any to remember my personal "worst customer ever". So far, anyway. While I wouldn't consider her to be important to my life, persay, she certainly helped me become even more disillusioned with the state of our society. Read on.

It's late in the evening on a winter night, sometime this past January. I'm the only cashier (surprise, right?) and I'm standing at my register trying to look busy when this woman approaches me.
"Hi, how are you?" I ask, trying to be friendly. Why I still continue to try is beyond me.
At this point I notice that her purchase consists of three articles of clothing, which she has artfully taken the time to fold into a cube. No, I am not exaggerating - no clue how she did it, but these clothes were artfully folded all together like some sort of demented clothing origami. I can already tell I'm not going to be a fan of her.
In return to my friendly greeting, all she does is bark, "Don't mess it up," and motions to her cube.
"I'll do my best ma'am, but I need to find the tags if you want to buy these," I say as politely as I can muster. I'm met with another stony glare.

Somehow, I manage to painstakingly gain access to the tags without destroying her masterpiece. I think this warrants a thank-you, but all I get is some bitching about the prices.
"That was supposed to be 10-something," she snaps, grabbing my register screen and pulling it toward her.
"It is," I explained, "but it's 11 with the tax."
"No, it's supposed to be 10. I did the math," she argues, as if her obviously superior brainpower makes her some sort of divine being.
"In the state of Indiana," I say, trying my hardest not to raise my voice, "we have a 7% sales tax that applies to most purchases..."
"MA'AM," she interrupts. "MA'AM. NO. Stop talking!"

At this point I'm so angry I'm having trouble keeping my mouth shut. I take her cube and start putting it into a medium-sized bag, which, due to the compact nature of her origami, would fit perfectly.
As I do this, she grabs my arm and snaps, "NO. Don't be stupid. Put it in a big bag."
"Excuse me?" I say, rounding on her. I could say something nasty, but decide that silence and some well-placed destruction would be a much better weapon.
I lay the cube on the counter, tear it apart as much as I can, and throw it sloppily into the biggest bag I can find. She gawks at me, open-mouthed, as if she has just watched me brutally murder a busload of babies, puppies, and grandmothers all in one fell swoop. That's right, bitch. I messed up your cube.

As her receipt and coupons print, she starts tapping her foot impatiently. "Oh my God, HURRY UP!" she screams. I give her a concerned look resembling one might give to someone in a straitjacket, and begin moving as slowly as I can muster.
When her coupons print, there are about 20 of them, and I start slowly tearing them apart and putting them in a neat pile for her.
"GIVE THEM TO ME NOW!" she shrieks, and you can almost see the smoke coming out of her ears.
"Don't you want them torn apart and neat? I'm trying to help you," I say, at the end of my rope.
"I don't want them torn apart, JUST GIVE THEM TO ME!" she roars.
"With pleasure," I say, and throw the massive, unorganized pile of coupons at her face.

I suppose I should be used to people being this rude to me, but this bitch was just appalling. However, this town has been voted one of the rudest cities in America, and for good reason. Perhaps I was a bit out of line, since "the customer is always right", but she should've considered the well-being of her clothing cube before she called me stupid.

Creepy, crawly scumbags

Hi everyone. I apologize for the lack of posting - you can forward any complaints to my professors. However, in light of recent events, it's time to start blogging again, and the most recent, relevant topic in my retail career is the presence of what I lovingly refer to as "creepers".

Creepers. They walk among us, often undetected. However, because I am undeniably flypaper for freaks, I seem to attract an overwhelmingly large number of them. Tonight I'll discuss two of the more frightening creatures I've had the displeasure of encountering.

The first incident happened when I first began working at Hellmart. I was about 16, it was late at night, and I was the only cashier, when I was approached by a man in what looked to be his mid-50s. He was portly, balding, and absolutely repulsive looking, and the tattoos of cheetahs and serpents playing or fucking, or whatever, on his arms definitely didn't do him any justice. He saunters up to me and leans in close across the counter.
"Hey there gorgeous. When do you get off?" he drawls.
"Umm, later?" I reply sarcastically, hoping he'll get the hint. Surprise - he doesn't.
"How'd you like to go out for a drink with me after work?" he tries again, clearly not sensing my disinterest.
"Um, I'm 16," I reply coldly, hoping to set him straight. No such luck.
"Really? Well, you certainly look 21. You got a phone number I can have? I'll call you later."
At this point, I didn't care how rude or ridiculous I sounded - he had to go.
"I'm sorry, I don't believe in phones," I say, pouting a little for dramatic effect.
"Hmm." He scowls for a second, then still won't get the message. "You got an e-mail address or something?"
"Nope, I don't believe in e-mail either."
"Well damn, don't you like to have fun?" he winks at me.
"No, fun sucks. I hate fun," I say with a glare. I'm honestly surprised I was able to keep a straight face.
"Hmm. Well, I'll see you later," he says as he leaves, with an ominous look that, to be quite honest, freaked me the fuck out. It was several days before I would walk to my car alone at night. I saw him in the store a few more times, but he never spoke to me again.

 The next incident happened sometime last week. It was a similar situation - late at night, I'm the only cashier. Are we detecting a pattern here? Anyway, I've started wearing polos to work so maybe this kind of shit won't happen to me as much, but apparently even an increased amount of chest-covering fabric isn't enough to keep the creepers out.
I'm at my register, minding my own business, when a scrawny, white-trash crusty bastard approaches me. He's buying three bottles of pop, so I am relieved to notice that our encounter should be relatively short-lived.
As is customary, I offer him one of our store's loyalty cards, because I'll probably be waterboarded by management if I don't enroll a certain number of them. He gets one, probably so he can stare at my tits for five minutes longer, and I learn that his name is Randall. After spending a good few minutes eye-raping me, Randall gets his shit and leaves, and I'm like, 'Great! Good riddance! Buh-bye, Randall."

The following morning, I leisurely get out of bed and check my Facebook. There's a new friend request, and I think, "Hey! Maybe it's someone cool!" Nope - it's Randall.
Randall and I have no mutual friends. His profile picture is dark, grainy, and taken upwards, like he has a camera on his you-know-whats. He's included a personal message with his request: ";P"
How eloquent of you, Randall. What a way with words.
Whatever. Denied.

I don't get it. Yes, Randall, I enrolled you in our loyalty program last night. Fantastic. Congratulations. However, if you read the fine print, you will find that membership in this fine program does not entitle you to stalk me.
And I assume you're asking yourselves how he got my last name? Easy. He searched for all the Sams in my town and looked until he found my profile picture. This is no easy task, as there are over ten thousand of us in this town alone. But trust me, they do that. It has happened to me before.
So consider this my best attempt at a public service announcement. Creepers are everywhere and can strike at any time, even when you're wearing a polo.