There were two large signs, one on each side of the window where you placed your order. The signs said that they would not replace food items stolen by seagulls or dropped in the sand. Have you seen the photo of the sign currently doing the rounds on social media? They’ve had to explain that the seagulls don’t work for them. Very funny.
I used to work in a curtain shop when I was at school. Net curtains were sold by the drop, so you could buy any width you wanted, but you’d have to measure the height of your window and buy the corresponding drop. I was 14 years old and grasped this concept pretty quickly. I lost count of the number of times I had to explain to adults who had their own homes that there was no such thing as a standard size window as far as curtains went. And every single one would roll their eyes and demand to speak to an adult, who would then have to explain the concept of architecture to them. Like they’d never looked at any other houses on the way home to theirs, or noticed the different sized windows in any of them.
Or the people who told me they lived on a particular street (in a fairly large town) so I should know off the top of my head what size their windows were and who would then get annoyed and complain to my manager that I’d never heard of the street, let alone be familiar with their window sizes. Like it was me being lazy by not going round the town on a Sunday, knocking on people’s doors with a tape measure.
One woman wanted to put chicken wire around a wooden frame, fit the frame into her window and poke the net through the holes in the chicken wire, so it looked like net bubbles. She absolutely could not understand why she couldn’t just buy the shortest drop (and the cheapest) because she was adamant that she didn’t need a drop, as it was being poked through the holes. I tried explaining that if her window was very large, poking net through chicken wire would cause the net to rise up the window, so she needed to buy a larger drop if she wanted the whole window to be covered. She accused me of trying to con her. And what annoyed me most of all was that I’d even pretended to be impressed at her creativity, rather than telling her what a bloody awful idea it was.
Or having to explain to one woman in between her screeching at me that if she’d measured all the windows in her house by cutting bits of string for the width and drop, and had then just jumbled all the bits of string up in the same bag, then I wouldn’t be able to work out which two bits of string went together because I didn’t know what her windows looked like.
There was another curtain shop (different company) just up the road (8 shops away, so not miles to walk) and we would regularly get returns for the other shop and vice versa. Obviously not a problem and a fairly easy mistake to make, so we’d just tell them it wasn’t us and point them in the right direction. It was staggering the amount of people who would demand that we refunded them for an item we didn’t sell as curtains and duvets were all the same sort of thing and they were too busy to walk 100 yards.
Or the call centre I worked in when I gave a man the price of the tickets we sold, I asked him if he would like to purchase, he confirmed he would, he gave me his credit card details and then when I confirmed that the tickets would now be sent to him, he was surprised because he hadn’t wanted to buy them right then. At this point I’d run out of patience and had half a foot out of the door as I was working my notice, so asked him what he thought ‘would you like to go ahead with the sale’ meant and why he’d given me his credit card details if he only wanted to know a price on the non exchangeable, non refundable tickets he’d just bought. He couldn’t give me an answer but created a massive stink until his money was refunded.
I don’t work with the general public any more. It is wonderful.