Blog CPR

So I've realized that my blog is dying. Gasping it last breaths. No heartbeat. And that's completely my fault. And I am not okay with it. So I am doing some blog CPR to try to resuscitate it. I always feel like I have nothing to write about, but then I realized, there are incidents of monumentous stupidity all around me every day, which could make excellent blog fodder.

Take the other day, for example. I had just started working at my Walmart job, after having worked all day at my other job (a temp job at Rust Consulting, Inc.). So I'm tired, but still trying to do my job the best I can. Pretty soon a family comes through my checkout line. They had an entire cartful of food and candy and dog food and stuff. So I get it all rung up, and then at the end, the guy hands me a Coinstar receipt. Now for anyone not familiar with Coinstar, you take your buckets of loose change to a Coinstar machine and put it in, and the machine will print out this weird little receipt with your info on it and a bar code. You take the receipt to a register in the store, and after the cashier has gone through a whole process to make sure the receipt is legitimate, they scan it, and you either get cash for that amount or have it applied to your total.

So the guy hands it to me, just as I'm telling him his total, and he says, "Oh, here, I have this, too." He does not say anything else. I take the receipt and go through the whole process with it, while the guy stands there silently watching. I have to take a minute to rip this weird wavy perforation from the side of the receipt, and then I have to rub this little rectangular area on the back with a penny to see that the Coinstar logo appears, and then I have to rub my fingers along the side of the front of the receipt to see that the Coinstar logo on that part disappears. After I've done all this (and the guy has stood there silently watching me) the guy swipes his EBT (food stamps) card, at the same moment that I scan the barcode on the Coinstar receipt. His total was seventy-something dollars, and his Coinstar thing was twenty-something dollars, which made his total fifty-something dollars. The debit thing pops up on my screen (EBT/food stamps run as debit cards) and I hit my debit button. I also tell the guy his new total of fifty-something dollars, and he starts getting all mad. He couldn't understand why his total was twenty-something dollars less. I tell him it was because of his Coinstar receipt, and he says in an annoyed way that he wanted it ALL charged to his EBT. At this point the receipt has already printed and the transaction cannot be taken back, at least by me. But the guy is mad, and wants some cash. Apparently I'm supposed to be a psychic or something and should have just magically known that he wanted the Coinstar done in a completely separate transaction, even though he gave it to me with his other stuff and said nothing about doing it separately and then watched me getting it ready without saying anything.

I knew that there was nothing I could do to help this guy. The transaction was already done. So I called a CSM, because I figured maybe the CSM could override it, put the money back on his EBT, and give him cash for his Coinstar amount. So CSM Tony comes over, and I hand him the receipts and explain the situation to him (leaving out the part about how this idiot guy didn't bother to tell me he wanted his stuff done in two separate transactions and then got mad at me for not automatically knowing). There is a huge line forming behind this guy, and he starts going off about how he just needed some cash because he was from out of town.

At this point, two separate thoughts are going through my mind. One was that there was no reason for his to be a jerk to me because I had no way to know what he had intended to do and if he wanted cash that badly he should have just said "I'm sorry, no problem, I'll just go to the ATM." The other was that this guy shouldn't even be on government welfare. Half of it was spent on candy and chocolate milk for his kids, and he bought a truckload of dog food. I'm sorry, but if you can afford to have a dog, you can afford to feed your family without the government's help. If not, you should get rid of the unnecessary expense of the dog and use that money to feed your family. I know this was totally judgmental of me, and I didn't need to be speculating on whether or not this guy deserved to be on welfare, but he was really irritating me, and I'd already been working for around nine hours that day.

So Tony tries to override the transaction. Pretty much anything can be removed from a transaction by a CSM, even after the transaction is finished. Except for, come to find out, Coinstar. When he scanned the Coinstar receipt to remove it from the transaction, it said that that barcode had already been redeemed. We try to explain this to the guy, who keeps on insisting that we give him his twenty-something in cash. Finally Tony asks the guy to come up to the service desk and he'll take care of him up there so I can help all the other customers in my line. So they all leave to the service desk, but the transaction is still on my register from when Tony tried to void out the Coinstar receipt. I abort the transaction, which requires CSM approval (they just have to push a button on their palm pilots). Then I realize that Tony has left his palm pilot at my register. I apologize to the customer waiting at the front of the line for all the waiting, and take the palm pilot up to customer service so Tony can approve my request. I get up there, and he's still there with the jerk guy, who is complaining about me and how he hadn't wanted me to put his Coinstar on with all his other stuff and he just really wanted some cash. (For one thing buddy, I'm not a mind-reader, and for another thing, you are literally standing three feet away from an ATM, so quit your complaining, shut up, and let's all move on with our lives.) I don't say this, of course, I just think it. I hand the palm pilot to Tony and ask him to abort the transaction on my register. I go back to my register, and it's been approved. I apologize to the customers there again and start ringing up their stuff. (Luckily these are nice people.)

So it's going fine, and about ten minutes have passed, and I've noticed that I never saw the guy leave the customer service desk. I wonder to myself if he's still over there being an idiot or if I just didn't see him leave. A minute later I see one of the assistant managers go in to the customer service desk, and I'm thinking that Tony probably called him on the walkie to come talk to this guy. Another five minutes pass, and I finally see the guy leave, looking really annoyed. A minute later I see the manager and Tony leave the service desk. I put it all together, that the guy was mad at me for not being able to read his mind, and since I couldn't help him and the CSM couldn't help him he went to the store management, who also couldn't help him, which is why he left looking so annoyed. Tony comes over later and tells me that the problem was with the Coinstar being on the same transaction with everything else, and I said, "I know. He never told me he wanted it done separately. Apparently I was just supposed to magically know or something." He said yeah, just not to do Coinstars with other stuff, with a look that said that he completely understood about stupid people like that.

And you know what? I really think I don't deserve to have to help all these stupid people all day after I've already been working at my other job all day. I'm worth more than that. And it makes me think that maybe the time has come for me to quit my job at Walmart.