Today was my last day at OfficeMax. Though I won’t miss the place, I’ll certainly miss the people. The people who work there. The customers can go to hell.

Hector, whose super secret Internet handle is Hector, and who is an OfficeMax lifer and the coolest guy in the world, said something today which I will now try to reproduce in my best written Hector impression. “Hey, you know,” Hector said, “you wouldn’t really think about retail as being stressful, you know. But, hey, I’ve worked a lot of jobs, you know, and after eight hours here I just want to sit down in my chair and go to sleep, you know. And not just because I’m on my feet for eight hours. It’s those customers, man. They treat you like dirt, you know.” And I do know. Most customers are harmless (and helpless) but the 10% or so who seem to visit our store only to act like jackasses really ruin it for everyone else. It used to bother me a lot more in the beginning. Whenever some grouchy old woman would yell at me or some middle-aged man decked out entirely in Gap clothing who still referred to himself as a hippie would directly insult me I would take it personally. Then I learned you just got to insult them first.

Working retail you quickly learn to distinguish the bad customers from the good ones from miles away. Surprisingly enough, age has a lot to do with it. I can’t remember a single high school or college student who wasn�t completely friendly. I can remember dozens and dozens of middle-aged to super fucking old people who were rude, insulting, and assholes of the highest degree. This is really the opposite of how things should function if THE MEDIA is to be believed.

Give them the chance and the customers will walk all over you. That’s why it’s essential to let them know that you’re in control from the start.

Whenever I’d get the “do you work here?” I’d usually respond with a simple “yes” and then continue with whatever I was doing beforehand. I answered their question; they shouldn’t need any more of me. By the time they had to clarify their position with an “excuse me” or a “can I ask you a few questions?” I was in complete control.

There’s also a no more satisfying feeling in the world than selling some jackass a ridiculously expensive piece of shit. Want to treat me like ass? Fine, go ahead, but you’re walking out of here with a $300 printer that’s worse than that $99 one you were just looking at. And in case you wondering, no, we don’t sell the ink it takes here. But if you ask, I’ll be more than happy to tell you that we do. By the way, you’ll need an extra USB cable if you plan on hooking it up. I’ll be sure to remind you of this after you drive home, find yourself USB-less, and are forced to return to our store. I seemed to have forgotten to give you your mail-in rebate form too. Oops.

All of our printers, phones, PDAs, digital cameras, and furniture have these little white pulltags nearby. These cards’ primary purpose is to relieve customers of the trouble of carrying that pound and a half printer up to the register themselves and to have one of us do it instead. However, they also display any information relevant to the product (print speeds, widths, feature sets) in easily readable lists. And in case you’re wondering, the number of pulltags available for a certain product does not in any way correspond to the number of those items we have in stock. How someone would even arrive at that conclusion in the first place is beyond me.

Most of the time that I spent helping customers I spent reading the information on the pulltags to them. What’s the difference between these two printers? I’d remove two of the cards, read the two lists to them, and then ask if there was anything else I could help them with. If there wasn’t, I found something less stupid to occupy my time with. Often times customers seemed upset that I just read everything they could possibly want to know about a product from little white cards which had sat directly in front of them for the past ten minutes. I’d get a lot of the “can I speak to someone who knows more about /someone from this department?” Such a question has a multitude of perfectly acceptable responses such as we don�t have departments,” “I know more about this product than anyone else here,” and “maybe you could just read the information on the little cards rather than wasting my time, you clueless bitch.” Sadly, I never got to use the third option.

Which reminds me, RETAIL EMPLOYEES ARE NOT TECH SUPPORT. Especially when we didn’t sell you whatever you’re too stupid to use. I’d always have to answer calls (”Electronics, line one”) from random people who decided that they should call the local office supply store for all their tech support needs. They should be talking to people in India who’re getting paid to deal with them, not me. At first I would actually try and help them to the best of my ability. Then I realized it just wasn’t worth the effort. If they were having a problem with their CD-ROM drive, for example, I would ask them, “did you buy the drive from us?” If the answer was no, I’d tell them to call the manufacturer. If the answer was yes, I’d tell them to call the manufacturer.

Then there were all the people who had decided they were computer experts. People would tell me how they were setting up a network in their home and therefore needed lots of USB cables. Sometimes I could convince them that they were wrong. Other times I let them buy six USB cables and thoroughly enjoyed selling them six ethernet cables a few hours later. People would spout random computer terms to demonstrate just how much they knew. I’d hear people say things like, “my computer has megabytes,” “I need floppy zip disks,” or “do you have Internet modems?” (are there any other kind?). Also fun were the responses I’d get to questions like “does your computer have a free USB port?” “what operating system are you running?” and “is the drive a DVD reader or writer?” These types of questions always got the same answers, such as “I have a Dell,” or “my computer is three years old.” I know! Let’s try and be less helpful!

Right. So I’m done now. That update was all over the place. Tense shifts for fun and profit, as they say. This takes WEWATC~1.doc to page 313.

Also, no replays tonight. Ha! Take that!