Actually it *is* kinda purty except for all the warnings about possible Black Ice I was getting on my phone this morning. I didn’t totally believe them so I womanned up and drove the Ninja over to work *anyway* and I did not hit black ice anywhere. I saw some gorgeous sky vistas on my way there but couldn’t stop to get pics.

Customer service? I waited forever at the prepared foods counter at the Plum this weekend. A couple in front of me was buying multiple foil trays of stuff to take to some kind of event. They had about a billion questions, some of which required that the counter staff person leave for eons to get an answer. So I waited. Was I antsy? Yes. Did I get mad and blame the counter staff person? No I did not. As near as I could tell, she was dealing with high-maintenance customers. I mean, at one point I think they were asking something like “how do we heat this up”? Macaroni and cheese? Really? You have to ask that?

They left and the counter staff person kind of rolled her eyes as she apologized for how long I had to wait. I commiserated with her.

My first “career”? Running a cash register summers at “Your Tempo Store”. This was up in the yooperland back in the days of mechanical cash registers where you had to punch rows and rows of numbers in for the price and the department number and the tag number and you had to calculate the sales tax and make change in your head. My fingers *still* kinda remember the department numbers but not the tag numbers, which changed all the time. Man oh man, if you are working as a checkout gal (we were mostly female then), there will always be strangers that come in and something weird will happen that you can’t help them with and they’ll get angry. But I also got people that always came to my register if they saw me there because I was smart and fast and cheerful (and maybe even kinda purty, but that was a looooong time ago). Once an old farmer brought in all of his kids to meet me. I loved it!

And then I worked at That Darn EPA (for a gov’t contractor) and I spent a lot of time dealing with people’s IT problems at The Window. I was terrible for about a month and then I *owned* the place and even though my job evolved and someone else had the responsibility for The Window, I turned into the main Problem Solver and I always enjoyed solving problems for the window people.

Oh YAG how I loved you. As the administrator of a youth theatre guild, I saw it all. I loved the kids (most of them). I loved the parents (most of them). I will [almost] always cut a kid a break for bad behavior. Parents? OMG! “Why didn’t my kid get the lead role? He/she’s been acting in commercials since he/she was 2” (an exaggeration but still). [Disclaimer: There are YAG parents who I *still* occasionally hang out with because they were/are TOTALLY cool!]

So glad I do not have a client-facing job these days. We have some top-notch client support folks at Cubelandia. They are PAID WELL! HELLO! If they need to reach waaaaaay farrrrrr back enough to talk to a business analyst about a client need, they do and I do my best to help. But the unspoken rule is “the web development team does not deal with clients”. There are good reasons for that but… Whew!

One more. I will never forget the time at “Your Tempo Store” when a cashier a few stores down the plaza had a customer who exposed himself on her checkout counter. One of our managers told us that if that happened at our register, we were free to hit the “customer’s” male member with our stapler. We had big staplers made for stapling paper bags shut (with the receipt stapled onto it) and I don’t think most people would want to be hit by one of those.

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