Fool Resistant

A little off-topic for the discussion I posted it in, but possibly of interest for anyone who might want to complain about employee rudeness at a store:

Something that managers-- good ones-- will take into account when deciding how seriously to take a rudeness complaint is the no/yes politeness divide. An employee can use equally blunt wording to tell one customer yes and another customer no, and the “yes” customer won’t think anything more about it, but the “no” customer will complain. In most cases the complaints can be prevented by training the employee to be more polite when telling people no, but some customers will complain no matter how nice, polite, apologetic the employee is because they feel like “there ought to have been something they could do.”

So, many managers will keep track of “told me no and was rude!!” reports, educate, and only act if they see a pattern, but a “did what I wanted BUT was rude” report demands immediate action.

On the flip side, employees who are a little bit less than perfectly polite may get better results, because some customers/clients like to be scolded a little bit. It can reinforce the effect that they truly care about the service they're giving you-- a hairdresser who grumps at you for cutting your own bangs, for instance, can make you feel that they’re really invested in making your hair look good.

Aren't our brains weird?

That's two weeks in a row that I was supposed to get off work early, and didn't.

Oh well, another couple of hours won't hurt the paycheck.

My hair is not your business. It's my business.

I do not like to hear you comment about it, even to say it looks nice, because that implies that you notice when it does not look nice. I especially do not like to hear you comment about it twice in one day.

It's not that I'm uptight-- I've had a few instances where I got a new bra with extra uplift, walked up behind a seated co-worker, they turned around, and VISIBLY reacted. "Whoa!" Yeah, they're big, if you nearly do a drive-by motorboat, it's all right to react. But I'd be upset if the exact same people said something every time they saw me, and that's kind of how I feel about my hair, too.

Come to think of it, I'm also annoyed whenever I wear a different pair of pants or a shirt to work, and get asked if I lost weight. For the record, I haven't lost weight, I'm not trying to lose weight, I eat healthy crap because it's good for me, not because I'm convinced I'm a porker and will only find love at size 10.

So, in conclusion, you're not a bad person, I like you okay, you don't have to kiss up to me with personal compliments, so could you just shut up about my hair for a while? Please?

caller: did you hear about the flooding?

me: no, they just beat me and put me in the closet when my shift is over, I've never seen the outside world.

...I did not actually say this. But at least I know why I'm grumpy.