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adventures in customers and customer service

aaaaaaaah. Saturday at last. Go for breakfast on the way to do some errands. At the next booth, the customer from Hell. When we first sat down, I thought WWIII was a possibility over there. More than an edge or tone in the voice, if you know what I mean. The man, who is doing all the talking is facing me. His companion never makes a sound as far as I can tell and is the recipient of all the tone. But before you knew it, nothing about the food there was right, and the waitress was making multiple trips with more and more fresh platings of everything. No! I want my homefries on a separate plate. blah blah blah. The manager made two trips there as well. It was a relief when they finally left. No amount of cajoling or apologizing makes someone like that happy. I told the waitress that I recognized that sort of customer right away.

From there we went to a national-chain truck rental place to rent a truck for a couple of hours. No truck, only a van available. Fine. It went downhill from there, as the counter person demanded an “alternate contact phone number” (uh, a what? – someone else’s phone number – why? Well, if people didn’t break the contract all the time we wouldn’t need it.) and the amount of deductible on our auto collision insurance. Ron had gone out for the insurance card. I allowed that if the counter person had told us we needed the insurance card at the beginning Ron would have retrieved it right away. “I didn’t know you wouldn’t get the collision coverage” was the reply. Ron comes back and is asked for the amount of collision deductible again. At that point Ron grabbed our license, insurance card and credit card from the fellow and said no thank you very much. We’ve done this lots of times and have never been treated like this or asked for information like this. Bye bye.

Ok, it was U-Haul.