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

I am very thankful for the man's sake, that he didn't succeed in topping himself... and for the library too, as returning the deceased's books is one of the last things that would ever occur to the family, believe me..

In the circumstances, Liz the BRO called it quits after retrieving the books, and ensured the totalled outstanding fines were cancelled from his ticket. (Well, she'd got the books back, she felt she could afford to be generous and use discretion)

But just in case, she's petitioned her bosses to put Samaritans contact details into the flysheets of the books on suicide - as she pointed out, what if he had topped himself and the family then sued the local council, because he'd found the means and the motivation via the local library? This way, she hopes, they'll be able to demonstrate that they've shown due care and diligence by ensuring a suicidally-minded borrower has access to an alternative.

I mentioned in an earlier post that once, when I was working in one of my many booksellingjobs, a woman came in looking terribly upset. She asked if we had any books on suicide.

I led her to the Psychology section and pointed aout a couple of titles and left her there. However, I went to one of my collegues and commented that I worried because she looked rather distraught. Finally, I said "I can't just let her leave before I check and see if she is okay. I wouldn't want to think that she might have needed help and I ignored it."

So I went over and said "I know this might not be any of my business but I wanted to check and see if everything is okay."

She looked at me funny and so I added "It's just that you look a bit upset. Like you have been crying. I just wanted to make sure you were okay..."

She still hadn't clued in but suddenly she realized that I was talking about her choice in books and what I saw as her state of mind.

"Ohhhh!" She laughed "No, no.... I'm okay. I have a really, really bad cold and I have a paper due tomorrow. I was just looking for some reference material!"

"Whew! I was just worried and didn't want to let you go without checking!"

When she came to the counter she said that she thought I was very nice to have checked and she was sorry that she had worried me.

I was just relieved to know that she WAS okay.

So has nobody had any bad customers in the last year?

Seems not.

Personally, I've been spending my time re-reading http://www.actsofgord.com/

It's strange how much you forget.


Geggs

And "Acts of Gord" has expanded a little since I fist came across the site in 2004, which is delightful!

I worked at a supermarket for the Christmas period, and did indeed have some odd customers.

For example there was the man who bought 40 loaves of bread and nothing else.

Then there was the guy who paid with a credit card. It had a chip, but unfortunately the chip reader was broken, so I had to manually punch in the number and get him to sign for it. But when that happened, he got insanely upset and refused to sign it, because he was apparently phobic about anyone having his signature. Eventually he agreed to pay in cash, but refused to use any change in some petty act of revenge against me for the failing of a machine I don't maintain.

That guy was worse than he sounds.

The worst one was this woman with three or four young kids, I forget how many. The trouble started when she came to my till. One of her kids had dirt smeared around his eyes, nose, and mouth, and was constantly bawling "Mommy I don't want it mommy I don't want it mommy I don't want it..." etc.

So this woman buys some milk, bread, tea, baby food, and stuff. Just a normal basket of shopping. Then she decides she doesn't want half the stuff, so I unscan it. Then she decides she actually does want the milk after all.

She had brought two cartons (tins as she called them) of milk to be scanned, of which one was subsequently unscanned. She demanded I give her one tin of milk, even though I totally had. then she insisted it was under my counter, despite the fact that that one had been unscanned and the unscan authorised by act of manager. After a five minute shouting match, it eventually turned out that her daughter had taken the milk she did intend to buy back to the dairy section while we had our eyes on other matters.

By the time she left, I was about ready to kill something soft and fluffy, but unfortunately I had another pair of customers to see to (who were, thankfully, patient and easy going).

Too many stupid customers to mention.

But here are a few..

There's the guy who calls up about his computer and asks stupid questions that just barely falls into the "supported" category, so we have to give him info about it, and then he waffles on about other stuff that has nothing to do with his computer, such as the construction site across the street that he's reported to the police because they "start work too early in the morning" and his mother coming to visit, and that he uses two or three different user accounts for Windows on the machine that no one uses except for him, because someone had told him that he should have one user account just for surfing the net, and one for daily usage and then the admin account as well. Of course, I made the mistake of sending him some information where to find drivers for his machine online, which prompted an email 1400 words long (I just checked the word count on it) with no useful or relevant questions whatsoever.

Then, I had another customer the other week telling me I was a liar since he'd been reminded that he needed to send a faulty hard drive back after having got a new hard drive sent to him about a month ago. I know for a fact that I always tell people to return their faulty parts when we send new parts out, and he had agreed to that. I even made notes on that in the case logs. However, he had decided that I was lying and that I'd told him he didn't need to send the old part back and now he was pissed off because he'd been told that if he didn't send the old part back, he'd be billed for the new part.
He also claimed that he could remember word by word our conversation from over a month ago, but he couldn't remember the name of the person he had spoken to earlier that day that had told him that the part would be billed, and then referred the customer to me.

Those are just two of the customers I've had in the past few weeks but there are so many more...

Many are the times I have thought that the person who invents a way of sending electrical shocks through a phone line would be loved by everyone working in a technical support/call centre environment.
Any person asking a really stupid question, just press a button and *BZZZZZTTTT!!!* they get shocked. Hell, police officers have their tazers, we should get something like that as well.

Could be the guy with the 40 loaves of bread was like a cafe owner I knew: rather than have a standing order with the bakery, he found out which local supermarket of the Netto/Aldi/KwikSave variety had the cheapest loaf of bog-standard bread (sometimes 3p or 4p or 5p a loaf) and he'd buy the max he was allowed - apparently it worked out cheaper than buying direct from Sunblest, but because the dirt-cheap Aldi bread also comes from Sunblest, the bakery doesn't like this sort of thing, so Aldi, Netto, et c, tend to put an upper limit on how many loaves any individual can buy. Otherwise there's no incentive for the catering industry to have accounts with Sunblest, if they can get bread over thecounter in Aldi for half the price per loaf.

This was like a battle of wits:- one day cheap bread from Aldi, the next he might do KwikSave for three days on the run, then (when the manager at Kwikkie had said "look, mate, it's getting too obvious, the bakery are going to notice") it might be Netto for the next two days. All to get his bread at 5p a loaf rather than 10 or 11p...

Makes a lot of economic sense, as you might be turning out three or four hundred slices of toast every morning in the average caff/sandwich takeaway. If you put a smear of marge on it and sell it for 15p, you might be making a clear 12 or 13p profit on one piece of bread that came out of a loaf that cost you tenpence. Now you get up to 30 slices of toastable bread in every loaf, so that's £3.80 clear profit on every 10p spent on materials..... over forty loaves that's £150 in the till every day... pay your wage slaves who are on minimum wage (two food prep/sales people on £5.20 an hour) and you are still sailing towards that new car. And small business and the catering trade in Britain resisted the minimum wage because they thought it would damage business....

That would be very plausible, except that these were relatively high-end loaves, costing about €1.20 each.

10p for a loaf? I want British prices in Ireland!

Hmmm... I think of my cousin in Liverpool who "does" catering for the local church, St Anthony of Padua, every time there's a bulk christening or they've sent the latest batch of seven year olds down to Paddy's Wigwam to be first communioned..

She'll collect the monies first, a few quid from each family, then hit the dirt-cheap supermarket for the humungous pots of sandwich fillings and, crucially, forty or fifty loaves to make sandwiches for up to 200. As the loaves are a bulky item, I have known her do a seperate run for those. I wonder if you saw something similar?

(My suggestion: "look, just do fishpaste butties on five small barm cakes, and pray for a miracle, after all it got a result once when Jesus had to cater for five thousand" is not thought of as helpful!)

Shame we can't settle the drinks supply Jesus' way either..

Oh, and what you might call the "standard" price for a loaf in GB is around 50-60 pence. (90c? €0.9?)

It's the "pile 'em high - sell 'em cheap" supermarkets that might delibeerately sell bread at cost or at a loss - knowing you are gonig to want things to spread on that cheap bread or to eat with it, as man can not live on bread alone!

So if you're shopping at Lidl or Netto or Aldi - dirt-cheap supermarkets imported from Germany - you can often clean up on cheap food. I'm surprised these haven't reached Ireland yet?

Also surprised that many British people wouldn't be seen dead in a Lidl or a KwikSave - the reasoning is apparently that if the neighbours see you in a "paupers' shop", you're advertising your poverty and losing face socially, advertising to the world that you aren't affluent enough to shop at Sainsbury's or Waitrose or wherever.

I've never been that proud, to be honest: if Netto of Lidl or Aldi can provide our monthly big shop for half or a third of what it costs in Sainsbury's, then whoopee, that's money saved for other things!

(Where we live, Waitrose has not even CONSIDERED setting up. And it's thought of as a fairly affluent area of a not badly off town in the north of England! You get the feeling Waitrose only wants to step outside its natural catchment area in London and the rich south-east, if there's a natural "pocket of affluence" in the regions that it can exploit - otherwise we're just impoverished Northern paupers to them!)Evidently our relative afluence is nowhere near London levels yet...

My mother will quite happily shop at Lidl. It's about the only supermarket within walking distance and she doesn't drive. OK, Sainsbury's have a large-ish branch that's a short bus ride away, but Mum only goes there if she wants something special.

She has no qualms about shopping at a 'cheap' shop. She only has her pension to live on, and the stuff you get at Lidl is reasonable quality. My one objection to the Lidl in Redditch is the state of the shop itself. Mum's Lidl (Rugby) is light, airy and clean. The one in Redditch is dark, dingy and dirty. I know that has to be down to the people who run the shop, but it doesn't make me want to shop there.

I hadn't thought of that aspect: that stacking the stuff directly on the shelves in its transport outers with no frills or fripperies might save money and time, but also acts as a dust trap.

Here in Stockport, the Aldi and the Lidl are fine for presentation and cleanliness, but the Netto is on the edge of an industrial estate just north of the town centre which is frankly rundown and the store is as gloomy and dusty as the one you describe - it's the only working store in what ws meant to be a mini-shopping mall to serve a large council estate, almost everything else in Whitehill Shopping Centre(space for ten or a dozen other retail outlets) is closed or boarded up and the ambience is one of poverty and desolation. I do agree that in these circumstances you don't want to linger!

When I say 'dirty', I don't just mean dust on the packaging. The floors are filthy, there's bits of old packaging and other litter all over the place. The Lidl in Rugby looks like it's in a purpose-built store. The store in Redditch wasn't built for Lidl, but it was always intended as a shop of some sort. It's not on an industrial estate, it's just outside the town centre. There's no good reason for the shop to be as dingy and dirty as it is. The shop next-door is a branch of Staples. The workforce there manage to keep a bigger store clean and welcoming, so why can't the workforce at Lidl. Unless, of course, the wages there are in line with the prices charged. But then, I'd have thought Lidl's in Rugby would have the same problem, but they don't.

You're right. It's down to the manager. One of my sons used to manage for them in Ireland, and all of his stores were clean. The main problem in the really run-down areas was that scallies kept setting fire to the trash cans

There are indeed Lidl and Aldi in Ireland; in fact, the Galway branches of them are literally across the road from each other.

Both give off a slight warehouse vibe, but are very clean. Some people refuse to shop there out of some vague notion about supporting Irish companies, but most people I know, being poor college students, are very much willing to get their stuff cheap.

The fact that the German stores' alcohol and chocolate is both cheaper than dirt and bloody delicious is also a bonus.

In Germany, Lidl and Aldi *used to* have the reputation of being where the down-and-outs went shopping. But these days, everyone admits to shopping there - they're a part of everyday life - and the merchandise is reputed to be of good quality, especially the weekly offers (non-food). They now accept credit/debit cards - up until recently they only accepted cash.

I've never been to an Aldi or a Lidl which looked untidy or dirty, in fact, when you're in there, you can forget which town you're in as they all look the same, with variations perhaps in size only.

Lidl certainly has a very bad reputation as to how they treat their staff, but still I have always found them very friendly and helpful, occasionally chatting about what I've bought (for example, one cashier once asked me what you do with avocadoes, as she'd never had one. This shows that (a) Lidl now sells things like avocadoes (b) they're of suitable quality to actually warrant being bought and (c) shopping there is not an unpleasant experience.)

Aldi, on the other hand, has a very good reputation for training retail staff and the way they are treated.

Netto is a supermarket like any other, but, I think, somewhat dearer than most others. We have one in the village and I very rarely go there.

Netto is also Danish, not German.
They did a survey in Denmark, and I believe they found that Aldi stores were quite dirty compared to others. But they are cheap and good quality for the money. And Lidl has some good chocolate called J B Gross.