A little service, please.

Let me say at the outset that I do not profess to be an expert on customer service. I am much better at it now than I was at seventeen, when the manager (and by manager I mean pimply-faced youth on a power trip with a mere three months more seniority than me) at a major McFood chain hauled me into the office to give me McShit, made me sign my file and suspended me for a week for not smiling at a customer. (May my nipples fall off if I'm making this up.) I lost a week's salary and a substantial chunk of my teenage dignity for not smiling at one jackass customer with nothing better to do with his Saturday afternoon than complain about the poor little girl at the counter just trying to make enough money to buy a pair of Nike All-Courts with the smurf-blue swoosh and a pair of red Lee painter pants. (Stop laughing! They were cool at the time.) You'd think he would have been happy that the burger he ordered without the sauce actually arrived on his tray without the sauce, but I guess that wasn't enough for him. He wanted an effing smile too. Bastard.

So, I've acknowledged that teenagers don't always get customer service bang-on, and that's understandable. Their minds are full of other things like the opposite sex and rock stars and film stars and zit cream and the opposite sex. I get that. But the little twerp who served me, and I use that term very loosely, at the cleaners the other night needs to have his ass fired, or he at least needs to be hauled into the office, given shit, forced to sign his file and suspended for a week.

I didn't go there to drop off or pick up clothing. I'm a firm believer that if it needs to be dry-cleaned or ironed then I don't need to wear it. I went in to see about a part-time job, because when you work in the non-profit sector and you don't have a roommate, you need a second job. I stood at the counter for at least a minute, maybe two, waiting for him to figure out that I was there. A minute doesn't sound like a long time but it is. Stop reading this and time one minute. Go.......See? It's a long time. Finally he came out from behind a door, presumably a washroom or a stockroom door, scratching his arse. And I mean that quite literally.

"Yeah?" he grunted. Not 'Hello, can I help you?' Not 'Hi, how are you?' Not even 'Yes?' Just 'Yeah?', with all the enthusiasm of Lindsay Lohan at a sobriety convention.

"Hi, I understand that you are looking for staff."

"Uh...I think we were? But the boss? Isn't, like, here."

He began to fidget with some invoices on the counter.

"You think you were?"

"Yeah, but we hired someone already. But, uh, maybe we need one more person."

'As soon as they fire your butt, you mean?' was on the tip of my tongue but I pulled it in. I might, after all, have to work with this guy at some point.

"Is there an application form I can fill out?" I said, positioning myself directly in front of him, trying to prompt him to look at me and give me his full attention, such as it was.

"Nope. You have to bring in a resume."

"Okay, to whom should I address the cover letter?"

"The manager."

Mental note to self: Do not slap this child, do not slap this child, do not slap this child...

"Does the manager have a name?" At this point, the bitchy was beginning to creep in but can you blame me?

"Fred." (Name changed to protect the idiots.)

"And Fred's last name?"

Idiot Boy looked at me as if I'd just asked him to mentally calculate pi to forty-six decimal places.

"Does Fred have a last name?" I asked. Slowly.

"Uh, just a minute." He opened the drawer under the till and riffled through the pages of an address book. This could take a while, I thought, since Idiot Boy doesn't know Fred's last name and therefore won't know what alphabetical section to look in first. Sooner than I expected, he said "I think it's Smith." (Name again changed.)

"Okay then. Thank you. I'll bring Fred a resume tomorrow."

"He won't be here tomorrow."

"His day off?"

"Yeah, but I'll be here tomorrow so you can just give it to me."

Not a hope in hell! "When will Fred be here next?"

"Monday, I think."

"Okay, I'll drop it off Monday then."

"Cool," he said, and resumed farting about with the invoices.

Like I said, I was no customer service genius at seventeen but if anyone had come into my McWork and said 'I hear you're looking for staff,' I'm reasonably sure I could have come up with 'I think so but the manager won't be in until Monday. Feel free to drop off a resume to the attention of Fred Smith.' Although there's no guarantee I would have smiled when I said it.


NB - It is not my intention to, in any way, denigrate the McFood chain alluded to in this post. They are splendid and I had some of the best times of my young life working for them. I don't mind denigrating the anonymous McDink who suspended me. You know who you are.