When Customer Service Goes Awry
– OR –
There’s a Fine Line Between Good Customer Service and Being a Creeper
I’ve been a magnet for bizarre customer service this week.
Granted, the first one I kind of had coming. That doesn’t make it any less creepy. I mean, just because a young couple in love falls asleep on a raft that carries them hundreds of yards out to sea doesn’t make it any less creepy when a giant squid wraps its suckers all up around that thing and turns the doomed lovers into squid-chow. Am I right?
First, there was the LensCrafters redux, in which their online creeping turned into real world creeping. Okay, I’m the one who put out on the Internets that everyone at LensCrafters was acting huffy and I wanted to punch out our helper guy. So, despite the fact that I didn’t include their @, and therefore they didn’t actually “get” my tweet, because I never sent it to them, I accept the fact that they wanted to save face by sending me a polite public reply.
However, having someone from the local store call me, that’s creepy. And when it happens, I start thinking about all that information they have on me, like how they know the measurements of my eyes and my prescription, so if they wanted to frame me for a crime, they could totally fake a retinal scanner and create circumstantial evidence that would link me to their crazy, creeper shenanigans.
Next, we were at Kohls, huntin’ for a rug to cover the stain on the living room floor in an effort to prevent the lip of one anticipated early-next month visitor whose life mission is to find signs of lax housekeeping and point them out with a ‘tsk.’ Even though the stain was already there. And even though the carpet is not dirty, it’s just stained.
Anyway, differences in opinion on housekeeping aside, the point is we had to scoot around this small herd of aisle-blocking employees, and, as we did so, the only ovary-bearing person in the group moved aside with gratuitous-graciousness, turning completely around to watch us walk past with this quasi-psychotic grin. At last, she was like “Are you finding everything okay?” which, you know, was actually pretty nice.
Except for the extraordinary lag time between when she turned around and when her mouth actually made words. In the interim, my mind had already gotten to “What in the hell are you looking at?” and my survival instinct was trying to remember all 101 ways to escape a cannibal.
Not that she eats people. Probably, she doesn’t.