Daily Dose of Sultnpapper 03/07/18> My Lord, is good help really that hard to find ?

I deal with a lot of people each day and one thing I know is that the quality of people in the workforce has diminished in the last 20 years. My experience at Office Depot in Victoria, TX on Tuesday is a prime example of what I mean by that.

I had some checks that I needed to print for some customer rebates that I need to distribute and my printer at home needed the color ink replaced so I decided rather than go get the cartridge and fool around wasting time with changing and printing them at home I would get them printed when I got to Victoria and pick up an ink cartridge at the same time.

So at the Office Depot the customer service person at the printing and shipping counter acted like she didn’t see me as I am standing at the counter, but I know she did. She was cutting some laminate off of some menus that they evidently had printed and were laminating. So after standing there for five minutes I finally said, “Excuse me miss, is there someone who can help me?” She told me, “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t see you there, I’ll be right there.”

She comes over after about another minute and I explain to her that I have this USB drive that has one folder on it, with 9 single page documents that I need one copy of each. She says okay and takes the USB, “color or black and white?” she asks, “color please” I replied. She plugs the USB in her computer and then tells me that her computer has to run a security scan on the USB before she can open any files. That’s fine; I understand the problems with viruses and such.

So she walks away and goes back to trimming laminate from the menus. So another four minutes goes by and I say, “excuse me miss, did you forget about me?” She proceeds to give me a go to hell look and says she will be right there.

She takes her sweet time walking her big butt back to the counter and opens the file, “so how many copies do you want?” I tell her I need one copy of each document in the folder. She then asks me again about color of black and white, to which I answer, color. It has only been five minutes or so and she has forgotten everything from our initial conversation. Then she needs to know if I want landscape or portrait, I don’t give a rats ass, just put it on 8.5” x 11” is what I wanted to say but I just told her I didn’t care at this point.

So she punches a few buttons, clicks a couple boxes and says, “I’ll be right back.” Yep, she heads off to cut more laminate from the menus. It took all of about one minute until my copies were done printing, if that. But I had to stand there another four minutes or so, “I think the printer has stopped.”, I called out to her. So looks up and says she will be with me in a second, which ended up being another minute or so.

She plucks my copies off the printer as she walks by it and counts them on her way to the counter, “Here are your nine copies.” In a snarky tone as she hands them to me. So, as I am counting them I noticed that instead of nine individual checks, I have nine copies of the first check that was in the number one position in the folder. “We have a problem miss, you printed nine copies of one, I need one copy of each of the nine documents.”, I told her. I hand them back to her and she thumbs through them and agrees that she did in fact print the same one nine times.

“I’m not going to be able to print these for you now.”, she tells me. She then goes into about a three minute explanation that she is leaving in twenty minutes and she has to finish that menu job before her shift is over. This lady would not let me get a word in edge wise either as she is explaining her situation. She tells me that I would have to wait for Robert to come over and help me; Robert is running the cash register up by the front. All that this lady had to do while taking the time to explain was just click on each file and hit the print button, and she could have been done in the damn time it took her to explain why she couldn’t do it.

It took about another five minutes before Robert came over, when he approached me the first thing he did was apologize for the time I had to wait. Next he asked what I needed and I explained it to him, he proceeded to print the work the work and in less than two minutes we were walking up to the cash register for me to check out.

Robert told me that good help is hard to find, “no kidding?” I asked, “That lady took more time explaining why she couldn’t do it than it took to do the damn work.” I finished up with it. His reaction to my comment was priceless, he proceeded to put his hands and arms up like I had told him it was a stick up, and then started bowing like I was some kind of god.

He bowed three times and then said, “You see this ear phone and radio?” pointing to his ear piece, “that woman wears me out with excuses all day long on this thing. I wish I could just tell her to shut her mouth and get to work.” He told me no one can stand to work with her; she just runs her mouth instead of the machines. His bowing was praising me for realizing and verbalizing what he was up against in working with her. “Seriously mister, good help is hard to find.”, he said.

For some reason I think Robert is an honest man.
Until next time,
@sultnpapper

https://sola.ai/sultnpapper