h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I often find that my place of work is rather like a war zone with the assistant managers and managers acting like top soldiers taking refuge in the office, while we Customer Service Assistants (CSA's) face the onslaught of the customers. Many customers are well behaved friendly beings that are great to serve, but then you get those who are a right royal pain in the behind and if asked whether they have fuel or not decline even though they know that they have.

As you may expect this has consequences and these are mainly thrown at the CSA who served them with a letter of warning that if they did that again their head would be shot off as an example to others. But is this right? It wasn't the CSA who lost the company money if they asked the customer and what if the manager says they don't believe a word the CSA tells them.

There are also many customers to be served and keeping an eye out on all of them is easy if you have a number of eyes dotted round your head and as many arms as an octopus, but CSA's are only human.

On top of this the soldiers on the front line are given little change to serve the customers with, sometimes the products aren't on the shelves when they could well be, the unsociable hours are there and at the end of the day they get paid minimum wage, no wonder the CSA is prone to getting frustrated which fuels anger and then they try to do this counting technique but it doesn't help and the manager screws up their timetable so they are working too few or too many days. It's enough to screw anyone up isn't it? I'm sure some of us have even lost loved ones because of this war.

So please be nice to your CSA this Christmas and for that matter all year round we are only trying to scrape by.