Today is mothers day and we had the usual dribble of people through the doors, one of my favourites would be Flo, who, every Sunday waddles through the door and stops precisely in the same spot, in front of the till and waits.
Sometimes I play with the situation and stand there pretending to be oblivious to what she does, waiting for her to tell me what she wants.
But every week is the same; "two Sunday papers Kate," then she waits for me to go and get them, it is only a 2 metre walk from the till to the papers, however she expects me to go and get them for her, like I am her slave, not to mention the fact that my name is actually Katie. I find her extremely rude, but I always smile with indignation, she doesn't seems to notice.
Another Sunday regular is old Sid, who is pushing 90, a tiny old man. Short and thin as a rake, who would blow over in a breeze, he has but one tooth which sticks proudly out the front and a thick tuft of yellowish white hair which he combs back, he shuffles in ever so slowly, after getting off his little red motorised buggy.
Now even though he calls me Kay, I don't mind getting his paper for him, bringing it closer to the door, he is a gentleman and George has a lot of time for him and beside that we would be here until sunset if I had the patience to wait for him to get it, I fold it in half for him because I know that he isn't strong enough to do it himself, I pass it to him, he pays me and he tucks it under his arm, wishes us a good day and off he shuffles again.
The all time classic for today would have to be a middle aged man who wanders into the shop, not to buy anything, but to ask a question:
"Is next door open?"
Ah, OK... I have no idea I am in MY shop! How about you go and have a look! I was dumbfounded and George just looked at me in shock.
I politely suggested that he go and have a look. Why would you walk into a shop to find out if another shop was open, wouldn't you just try to go into the shop that you wanted to in the first place?
When I went outside to pull down the roller doors to lock up for the day and looked across to the take-away it was clearly open, their windows were open, the lights were on and it was full of people. It amazes me.
Another beauty was when someone walked in and informed us that the petrol station had run out of fuel. Now this is quite funny just on its own, a petrol station with no petrol, except that this is a regular occurrence.
'Dirty Dot' as the kids in town have affectionately named her, has the monopoly on fuel around here, it is the only place to get petrol for either 70 or 140kms depending on which way your going.
And Dellaren isn't the most exciting place to be stranded, the only place to stay is in the pub... or your Winnebago, if you should be so lucky, however you won't find anywhere to park it bar a truck bay, unless you want to try your luck down by the river, on the trail to the mission/reserve/camp, in the pitch black darkness of the night...
The locals are usually able to work manage to keep enough fuel in their cars to get to somewhere else to fuel up, not only does she frequently run out of fuel, she is expensive and extremely abrupt. I know people who will do almost anything to avoid going in there.
Being a business owner it is quite amusing that the basic principal of customer service is not being utilised, I know how difficult it is to be polite when people are rude, but I do it anyway. Rumour has it that she is not paying her bills which is why she is running out of fuel, everyone thinks she is going broke, she has also been accused of being greedy as she never changes the price except to put it up. She doesn't seem to comprehend if she lowered her margin but increased her turnover she would make more money.
I have to admit that I am a nameist, I find that as a broad generalisation it rings true, by this I mean I use people's names to judge them going on experiences of people I have met with the same name.
One example is Ken, my Aunt married a Ken who was a horrible man, short, fat with rosy cheeks and a glint in the eye that you just don't trust, she was blind to the way he looked at young girls, the tantrums he threw when things didn't go his way, or if somebody ate one of his Paddle pops or read 'his' daily paper before him, even if it was 3 o'clock in the afternoon. I can't explain it but I was never really a fan of Barbies Ken either.
Today a Ken came into the shop, another short fat man who rolls around. He only comes in to buy a Sunday paper and to order some medicine, for some reason we feel used by this sort of customer, hard to explain.
Flo is another one of these, we know exactly which people come in purely for this purpose and nothing else.
Today he was doing both, he bought his paper, then started saying he wanted some Progout, it took me 30 seconds to realise what he was on about, I was thinking to myself, what is progout? I don't sell that... then the light came on, I went to the box and pulled out the scripts ticked off the one he wanted and told him that there wasn't a script for the other one he wanted.
To which he started verbally abusing me, he only gets his them here so I will have to ring up the pharmacy and find out what was going on, the box told him that he had 5 repeats left yada yada yada.
I simply said to him, No, you will have to call the pharmacy and ask them, it has nothing to do with me, he was very off-put and said he would go home and get the box to show me. I told him to do that.
He came back 20 minutes later, a little sheepish, and apologised, holding the script in his hand. He had in fact ordered it though another pharmacy.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Monday, May 3, 2010
Customer of the day
Today has been a pretty average day in shop in terms of customers, one outstanding gentleman won the customer of the day trophy. He made an entrance not once or twice but three times throughout the duration of the day.
It was an overcast morning which meant it didn't have the bite in the air that usually has me rugged up in as many layers as is appropriate for me to still be able to move relatively normally.
We had only just opened and a short older man with scruffy grey hair shoved under a hat with his dirty jacket hanging off one shoulder, one hand gripping on to an old calico bag, the other swinging by his side when he walked, was lingering in the doorway looking at the phones on display in one of the side windows.
He came in and I said "Hi how you going?" which when I write it down, sounds extremely bogan, I guess I have dissolved my speech to help the local folk feel comfortable in the shop. No response. So I try again "Good Morning, how are you?" Nothing, "uhm (slight cough) can I help you?"
"Hi, you wouldn't have Saturday nights lotto numbers?" He pulled out a little notebook ready to write them down as if I was going to read them out for him. I printed out the results from the terminal and handed them to him for him to take. He seemed surprised and happy with the fact that it was printed out for him.
He took it outside and stood leaning on the rubbish bin for 5 minutes, presumably checking his numbers?
Take two, later that afternoon he comes flying into the shop with no time for me to say hi, he says in quickly, "How much is your cheapest phone?"
I could see he was in a flap so I decided to keep it short and sweet "$79."
I waited.
Then a fast tirade of gibberish, slosh, abuse and angst came out so quickly that it is difficult to understand what exactly he was going on about.
From what I could understand he had been down at the post office trying to sort out an issue he had with the telephone service in "this dump of a town."
You see he had a Nokia phone that worked perfectly at the other dump of a town, which isn't too far from here (from my understanding this was where he usually resided, which is an hour away from here), however he wasn't able to get his phone to work here.
Apparently he had managed to arrange for the telephone company to call him tomorrow, (which I found amusing since his phone didn't work here) and that it was an absolute disgrace that you couldn't use your phone to call anyone while you were in Dellaren but when he was in the other town, Dead Mans Gully, he was able to ring people in Dellaren. It was all too much for him, so he was going to speak to his contacts in the Government and "mark my word" he would have it sorted out so that his phone would work here in the future.
I asked him if he would like to know why his didn't work here, he said that he would so I explained it to him, which I think he listened to but didn't understand.
He must have thought it was a massive conspiracy, this gentleman was of the highest notoriety because he received a letter of commendation for his work with the Aboriginal people, helping them with their abuse of drugs and alcohol, he didn't tell anyone about his work, but someone must have said something because he got this letter, so he was going to contact his people in the government and get it all sorted out.
Now I did not find this very amusing at the time because I was tired and a bit over it all, but it really is quite incredible, you really can't help some people, and I hadn't quite realised that this bloke was on another planet.
I am not a massive fan of Dellaren but when someone openly slanders the place you live it is difficult not to be a little off put by it, I said to him if you don't like it, you don't have to stay here. I was defending the town for the locals I can't stand because I know how much they love it here.
To which I received another slur of words about how he was here to help the Aboriginals with their problems, I think they would more than likely tell him where to go. He left the shop muttering under his breath.
Take three. Later that evening he returns, wanting to know if I sell a portable radio that didn't cost a million dollars, I showed him a Walkman which he seemed quite interested in...until he discovered that it didn't plug into the wall. Go figure.
I then showed him a clock radio that plugged into the wall, which he liked but it couldn't play a cassette so he didn't want it.
"I can't help you, go and try at Edmunds"
He was very friendly then and said he had been told by the ladies at the supermarket to try there, but then he couldn't remember if he had already asked at Edmunds.
I just said to him again that I couldn't help him, so off he went into the night and that was the last I heard of him...for today anyway.
Yesterday the winner was an obese foreigner who was looking around the shop in a dirty white bonds singlet, with chest hair spilling out the sides, and his gut hanging out the bottom. He was poking around for a while with his colleagues before coming up to me asking, "how much is dis?" holding out a stubby holder printed with the Australian flag. I said, "$3.95."
He turned away from me and retorted with a loud exhaling through his nostrils, I was already annoyed at them from the manner in which they poked about the shop so I replied "do you think that is expensive?"
He said "yes." So I plainly said to him, in a polite voice, to try buying one from somewhere else! He put it back and left the shop.
I know from experience stubby holders elsewhere can cost anywhere from $6.95 upwards, so to say I was put out by the fact he thought it was expensive is an understatement, I didn't care if he bought it or not, I just couldn't believe what had just happened, how much did he think it was worth?
I should be able to laugh at the stupidity of it all but for today and yesterday I am a little beyond tired.
It was an overcast morning which meant it didn't have the bite in the air that usually has me rugged up in as many layers as is appropriate for me to still be able to move relatively normally.
We had only just opened and a short older man with scruffy grey hair shoved under a hat with his dirty jacket hanging off one shoulder, one hand gripping on to an old calico bag, the other swinging by his side when he walked, was lingering in the doorway looking at the phones on display in one of the side windows.
He came in and I said "Hi how you going?" which when I write it down, sounds extremely bogan, I guess I have dissolved my speech to help the local folk feel comfortable in the shop. No response. So I try again "Good Morning, how are you?" Nothing, "uhm (slight cough) can I help you?"
"Hi, you wouldn't have Saturday nights lotto numbers?" He pulled out a little notebook ready to write them down as if I was going to read them out for him. I printed out the results from the terminal and handed them to him for him to take. He seemed surprised and happy with the fact that it was printed out for him.
He took it outside and stood leaning on the rubbish bin for 5 minutes, presumably checking his numbers?
Take two, later that afternoon he comes flying into the shop with no time for me to say hi, he says in quickly, "How much is your cheapest phone?"
I could see he was in a flap so I decided to keep it short and sweet "$79."
I waited.
Then a fast tirade of gibberish, slosh, abuse and angst came out so quickly that it is difficult to understand what exactly he was going on about.
From what I could understand he had been down at the post office trying to sort out an issue he had with the telephone service in "this dump of a town."
You see he had a Nokia phone that worked perfectly at the other dump of a town, which isn't too far from here (from my understanding this was where he usually resided, which is an hour away from here), however he wasn't able to get his phone to work here.
Apparently he had managed to arrange for the telephone company to call him tomorrow, (which I found amusing since his phone didn't work here) and that it was an absolute disgrace that you couldn't use your phone to call anyone while you were in Dellaren but when he was in the other town, Dead Mans Gully, he was able to ring people in Dellaren. It was all too much for him, so he was going to speak to his contacts in the Government and "mark my word" he would have it sorted out so that his phone would work here in the future.
I asked him if he would like to know why his didn't work here, he said that he would so I explained it to him, which I think he listened to but didn't understand.
He must have thought it was a massive conspiracy, this gentleman was of the highest notoriety because he received a letter of commendation for his work with the Aboriginal people, helping them with their abuse of drugs and alcohol, he didn't tell anyone about his work, but someone must have said something because he got this letter, so he was going to contact his people in the government and get it all sorted out.
Now I did not find this very amusing at the time because I was tired and a bit over it all, but it really is quite incredible, you really can't help some people, and I hadn't quite realised that this bloke was on another planet.
I am not a massive fan of Dellaren but when someone openly slanders the place you live it is difficult not to be a little off put by it, I said to him if you don't like it, you don't have to stay here. I was defending the town for the locals I can't stand because I know how much they love it here.
To which I received another slur of words about how he was here to help the Aboriginals with their problems, I think they would more than likely tell him where to go. He left the shop muttering under his breath.
Take three. Later that evening he returns, wanting to know if I sell a portable radio that didn't cost a million dollars, I showed him a Walkman which he seemed quite interested in...until he discovered that it didn't plug into the wall. Go figure.
I then showed him a clock radio that plugged into the wall, which he liked but it couldn't play a cassette so he didn't want it.
"I can't help you, go and try at Edmunds"
He was very friendly then and said he had been told by the ladies at the supermarket to try there, but then he couldn't remember if he had already asked at Edmunds.
I just said to him again that I couldn't help him, so off he went into the night and that was the last I heard of him...for today anyway.
Yesterday the winner was an obese foreigner who was looking around the shop in a dirty white bonds singlet, with chest hair spilling out the sides, and his gut hanging out the bottom. He was poking around for a while with his colleagues before coming up to me asking, "how much is dis?" holding out a stubby holder printed with the Australian flag. I said, "$3.95."
He turned away from me and retorted with a loud exhaling through his nostrils, I was already annoyed at them from the manner in which they poked about the shop so I replied "do you think that is expensive?"
He said "yes." So I plainly said to him, in a polite voice, to try buying one from somewhere else! He put it back and left the shop.
I know from experience stubby holders elsewhere can cost anywhere from $6.95 upwards, so to say I was put out by the fact he thought it was expensive is an understatement, I didn't care if he bought it or not, I just couldn't believe what had just happened, how much did he think it was worth?
I should be able to laugh at the stupidity of it all but for today and yesterday I am a little beyond tired.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
The new nurse
On Thursday I went to work up at the doctors surgery as I normally do on a Thursday, only today I discovered a new nurse.
I was going about my own business preparing one of the rooms so we could cut something grotesque off somebody and was wandering back to my office when I was bailed up,
N:"what I do with this mess Suzanne left behind?" referring to an armful of patients folders from the emergency department.
I politely explained that I don't really know as I don't work for the hospital, which she clearly didn't understand, which I came to see by the blank look staring back at me, I told her to put them in the nurses station,
N:"yer ba {but} the docs gotta write sumfing in dere"
I said that's fine, just put them in there and he will fill them out later.
N:"oh yeh ok, wheres dat?" something I found intriguing as I assumed she would know where the nurses station was even if she was new, she was a nurse?
I shook it off, told her where it was and said, "I don't think we have met yet I'm Katie", the light comes on, N:"oh I'm **** "who are you?" (I forgot the name instantly)
I said "I beg your pardon?" slightly confused as I had just introduced myself "I'm Katie"
N:"yeh ba where'd you fit?"
I thought I knew where she was going but thought I'd have a bit of fun with it "I'm sorry I don't understand what you mean"
N:"what'd you do here?"
K: "I work for the doctor"
This went on for a while, because she didn't know what that meant, she asked if I was a nurse, I tried to explain that I work as the receptionist however assist the doctor with excisions, until I knew beyond doubt that it wasn't getting through to her, so I excused myself as I had things to do. I was dumbfounded to say the least.
It amazes me how rude some people can be 80% of new nurses we get, fail to introduce themselves, which I find peculiar, being in a new environment you would think they would at least like to meet who they are going to be working with or could possibly make a new friend out of.
The reason for this long winded introduction to this new nurse comes the very next day, when she comes into our shop with one of the other new nurses in town who I had previously met. She was poking around for about 5 to 10 minutes before coming up to be served by me. I completed the transaction, during which time I had a short conversation with her and I moved on to serve the next nurse when all of a sudden she loudly exclaims...
N: "I seen you aye!"
Now keeping in mind that the written word doesn't translate the accent and tone in which this was said, needless to say George was sitting out of sight in the office and he nearly fell off his chair, I managed to refrain myself to a smirk and a polite "yes" and the other nurse chirped in, and said that I work up at the doctors surgery. They left chatting to each other, George and I just looked at each other before he says "I seen you aye!" We both laughed dumbfounded that she is actually a nurse. How people like this gain employment is beyond me.
I was going about my own business preparing one of the rooms so we could cut something grotesque off somebody and was wandering back to my office when I was bailed up,
N:"what I do with this mess Suzanne left behind?" referring to an armful of patients folders from the emergency department.
I politely explained that I don't really know as I don't work for the hospital, which she clearly didn't understand, which I came to see by the blank look staring back at me, I told her to put them in the nurses station,
N:"yer ba {but} the docs gotta write sumfing in dere"
I said that's fine, just put them in there and he will fill them out later.
N:"oh yeh ok, wheres dat?" something I found intriguing as I assumed she would know where the nurses station was even if she was new, she was a nurse?
I shook it off, told her where it was and said, "I don't think we have met yet I'm Katie", the light comes on, N:"oh I'm **** "who are you?" (I forgot the name instantly)
I said "I beg your pardon?" slightly confused as I had just introduced myself "I'm Katie"
N:"yeh ba where'd you fit?"
I thought I knew where she was going but thought I'd have a bit of fun with it "I'm sorry I don't understand what you mean"
N:"what'd you do here?"
K: "I work for the doctor"
This went on for a while, because she didn't know what that meant, she asked if I was a nurse, I tried to explain that I work as the receptionist however assist the doctor with excisions, until I knew beyond doubt that it wasn't getting through to her, so I excused myself as I had things to do. I was dumbfounded to say the least.
It amazes me how rude some people can be 80% of new nurses we get, fail to introduce themselves, which I find peculiar, being in a new environment you would think they would at least like to meet who they are going to be working with or could possibly make a new friend out of.
The reason for this long winded introduction to this new nurse comes the very next day, when she comes into our shop with one of the other new nurses in town who I had previously met. She was poking around for about 5 to 10 minutes before coming up to be served by me. I completed the transaction, during which time I had a short conversation with her and I moved on to serve the next nurse when all of a sudden she loudly exclaims...
N: "I seen you aye!"
Now keeping in mind that the written word doesn't translate the accent and tone in which this was said, needless to say George was sitting out of sight in the office and he nearly fell off his chair, I managed to refrain myself to a smirk and a polite "yes" and the other nurse chirped in, and said that I work up at the doctors surgery. They left chatting to each other, George and I just looked at each other before he says "I seen you aye!" We both laughed dumbfounded that she is actually a nurse. How people like this gain employment is beyond me.
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