What's the weirdest thing that's happened to you at your non-writing job? This evening, I got mooned by a customer at the paint desk at the Big Blue Box Store. Yes, mooned. It was one of those customers who gets you started doing one thing for him then pulls you off the task to fetch him something else. The kind who comes behind the desk to look over your shoulder like he knows better than you do how to perform your job. The kind who keeps up a spate of talk running mostly to digs implying that you, the sales associate, are either incompetent or trying to put something over on him. Through all this I'm managing to stay cheerfully detached, focussing on the problem of getting him the custom color match he wanted and not taking any of it personally. But of course the laser scanner on the computer would choose this customer's order to misread the color sample and tint the first gallon of paint way too dark . . . It happens sometimes. That's why I had suggested we do a sample can first and not all of the five gallons he wanted at once. Despite his distracting comments, I succeed in manually adapting the formula so it's pretty darn close. Add maybe two shots (1 shot = 1/48 ounce) of black and it should be a match. Most customers would be thrilled at this point and thank me for my effort. Not this guy. This is when he goes, "I don't have time for this! I can't wait for you to fool around with that and do four more cans! I've been here an hour"---he hadn't--- "and you still haven't got this done for me. I've had back surgery! I can't put up with this! Just mark the first can down and that can, too, and I'll mix them with the rest of the five gallon bucket I have when I get home." I tell him I sympathize with his back issues, but say, "I'm not authorized to do that kind of mark down, not without a manager's permission." And I'm not. I can give him the volume discount I promised, where I sell him five individual gallons for the price of a five-gallon bucket, seeing that the tint base he needs isn't available in the larger size. And if someone brings paint back they don't like the color of, we can mark it down and resell it. To someone else. And only after changing the color. You can't tell us you hate the color we've mixed for you but you'll take it off our hands if we sell it to you at 75% off. I try to explain this, nicely. But no, he says, someone else last week marked something down for him like that and what's wrong with me that I can't? and I must be trying to kill him, he can't stand this, and yes, call a manager, he wants to tell him how much of his time I've wasted, etc., etc. For a second I consider saying, "I can't take this," and walking out. But what then? Thank God, the manager on duty answers. "Frank [not his real name], we have a situation at the Paint Desk." Frank shows up. I try to tell him what the customer wants of him and why. Customer continues to interrupt with how incompetent I am. I'm keeping my cool and trying to be sympathetic, considering the guy's back pain. Frank the manager tells the customer to please wait till I can tell him what's going on. Customer continues to talk and talk. "She doesn't know what she's doing! She's wasting my time not getting that color right! It might be the computer, it's probably her own fault! No one cares that my back is killing me!" And so on and so forth, all the way to charging me with trying to make his sore back worse. I keep my mouth shut. I don't know Frank that well, but I think he knows my work ethic well enough to realize this is BS. He tries to tell the customer he'll give him a discount. He isn't listening. "No one believes I've had back surgery!" he yells. "Yes, I do," I say. He ignores me. "Here, let me prove it to you!" He turns his back to Frank and me (and to the other customers waiting at the other end of the desk) and lifts up his shirt. Sure enough, there's a scar maybe 7" long on his spine, maybe three or four inches above his waist. Point made. But then, he takes the waistband of his trousers and pulls them right down! Oh, my. Square, flat, flabby white middle-aged butt. Right there at the Paint Desk at the Big Blue Box Store. "I don't need to see that," I comment, and turn around. You know, the way you'd turn your back on a misbehaving dog. "No talk, no touch, no eye contact" (as recommended by Cesar Millan). Don't encourage the behavior. I'm facing the other waiting customers now and the lady I'm looking at is like, "Now I've seen it all!" Frank convinces him to pull his pants back up. And agrees to mark the paint I'd mixed down to $10 each. And tells him yes, I do need a manager's permission to do that, despite the customer's continuing to assert that some other employee had done it for him last week on their own authority. Here's your paint, sir, thank you, goodbye. I go to serve the next customer. She says, "If I'd been your manager, I would have thrown that guy out on his rear." Frank the manager sticks around to help me take care of the customer backlog. "Best thing, for me to mark the paint down for him and get him out of here." I say, "It could have been worse. He could have come in when Liz [not her real name] the trainee was here by herself. . . . And he could have flashed us from the front." ************* So. What's your story from Day Job Land?
I teach English as a Foreign Language at a university in Japan. One year I'd assigned an essay as homework to a freshman composition class, don't remember what the topic was, but it was something fairly generic. When I collected them up, one of the essays was very, very good. Native speaker level good. High native speaker level good. It wasn't, however, on the topic I'd assigned. So I chucked it into Google (my school hasn't sprung for a plagiarism checking service) and found that it was a sample essay from an online essay-writing site. The kind of site that you pay to do your work for you. The student had plagiarized from a cheating service. But it gets better. When I confronted her about it and told her she would be losing the maximum value of the assignment (my policy at the time, there's a stricter policy in place at the institutional level now) she said that it wasn't fair. When she'd turned the exact same essay in the previous year, her high school teacher had given her a good score on it. Which explains why it was on the wrong topic. She didn't even have the courtesy to plagiarize something fresh for me.
