The nicest thing a customer has said to me

I heard over the walkie that a customer needed help by the pillows.  I was in a neighboring department so I responded.  The customer was looking for king size pillows but we didn’t have any.  She of course asked if we had any in the back.  I knew for a fact that we don’t have any pillows in the back.  I told her, “No we don’t have any in the back, I’m sorry.”  I apologized like I’ve been trained to anytime a customer doesn’t get what they want or if I’m too slow or if the sky is cloudy.  It’s just something we as customer service are expected to do.  Most people either don’t acknowledge it or dismiss it with , “It’s all right.”

This woman however said, “It’s ok, it’s not your fault.”  It’s not my fault.  I can’t remember the last time a customer said that to me.  It was shocking to hear that.  It’s not my fault that we’ve sold all the king size pillows and haven’t received any more in our shipments.  These events, totally out of my control, that I routinely apologize for are not my fault.

It’s nice to be reminded that, as much as I say sorry for things out of my control, I really am not at fault.

This was weird

So, at my work we have small rolling racks in the fitting room for clothes that customers decide they don’t want and we roll the racks out and put them back in the proper place. I was working on the sales floor so part of my job today was running out the fitting room racks. I had already run out a couple of rack before I grabbed the men’s rack. I took it over to the men’s department and started putting the clothes up.

I checked the display racks first and put a few pants back on them.  At this point, I’m left with a two men’s buton downs, two young men’s t-shirts, two pairs of jeans and a three pairs of shorts. (Yes I remember eactly how many of each because I’ve gone over these events several times in my head.) I put up the shirts and walk around with the rack to the next aisle. Here I put up the jeans. I’m left with the pairs of shorts. I pick them up off the rack and look around for where to put the them.

During the summer, we have them separated on the wall but right now we don’t have many, if any, shorts. So, I was looking to see if we had them mixed in with the pants or separated nearby. I don’t see any shorts any where. When I’m looking for where to put something or looking for a matching item to price the one I have, I’ll stop looking, look at the item for a couple of seconds and then continue looking. This seems to help somehow a lot of the time.

So, I look at the shorts in my hand and they’re pants. I have a huge, silent WTF moment because I was sure I had shorts in my hand a few seconds ago. Then I look up and see where the rest of those pants are hung on a display rack right in front of me.

I’m really confused about what happened. The easiest answer is I just confused the pants for shorts. Maybe the jeans cast a shadow and I thought I saw shorts until I took a good look at them. I’ll ignore the fact that they were in full view when I took them off the fitting room rack. Maybe I just wasn’t fully paying attention. It’s easy to think that and for my own piece of mind I have to.

Later when I went to check out the pants again, I picked them up, the same three pairs, and they felt heavier than when I had picked them up from the fitting room rack. Maybe I’m just imagining that too, though.

New Website

Welcome to www.Gillian-Ybabez.com, my very own website for my fiction and blogging. It’s very bare bones at the moment but I’ll be working on it.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to start reposting my completed stories over there. Uncompleted stories, like my zombie series, will remain up on my fiction tumblr until I finish them.  New stories will be post here and cross posted to tumblr.