I WAS BARELY 17 AND I’D ONCE KILLED A CUSTOMER WITH A MILK DUD

Posted On 2023-01-02

He had it coming, too.

I used to do hiring- interviews, orientations, everything related. As much as people make my skin crawl, those interactions I was totally cool with. Other managers tended to hire poorly. Other managers were crummy educators. This isn’t vanity, that was self-preservation. When I was HR my building brought in better people and they were set on a path that steered them clear of driving me crazy. And because pissed-off customers were #1 at driving me crazy, my people were by definition better for the guests too.

I used to ask the new hires, “Is the customer always right?” but only because I knew there was always gonna be some impressionable sucker who’d say “yes”, just so I could say “NO!” And I did this once with one of my senior managers sitting in, I could see him getting nervous out of the corner of my eye. “40% of customers are fine, 40% will gladly take advantage of you to their benefit if they get the chance, and the other 20% are flat-out looking for chances to steal from you. Is the customer always right? Under no circumstances. But – and this is the important part – telling the customer they’re wrong is not your job.”

Because I get the concept of the axiom. Words drive actions, so approaching service with that view will help to ensure a service-compliant solution to problems. But at the same time because words drive actions, customers approaching commerce with that same view will approach those same problems as insufferable assholes. Because as we’ve already established, 60% of customers lean in the “insufferable asshole” direction by default. I wanted my staff to be helpful and constructive, but I never wanted them to have to feel like they had to be less than some asshole customer just so we as a business could maintain the purity of the transaction.

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Just like I remember the compliments, I remember the insults. I remember them every day. The highlights are from work so those get the backstory. There were the guys at the North 6 one afternoon who were leaving early and wanted a refund. Cool, no problem, I told them the box office would refund them without any difficulty. Then they went upstairs and, instead of proceeding to the staffed box office window, they stopped at the unstaffed service counter. In some ways this was an understandable mistake, but still at this point no harm, no foul. But clearly these were not contest winners. Anyway, they waited at this unstaffed counter for a few minutes then came back downstairs looking for a fight. After some confusion I let them know where the actual window was (literally 10 feet away from where they’d been waiting). One of them gets in my face and pokes his finger at me, “You’re too little to be such an asshole.”

Then they left, collecting their refund along the way. They got passes on top of that after the primo douchebag wrote a letter and my dipshit boss bent over. Yeah, I remember that guy too.

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Then there was the Karen at ArcLight Sherman Oaks. Which on its face was not notable, the ArcLights explicitly cultivated entitled trash as their audience of choice. One afternoon I was in the lobby working on a ticket machine, and had a partially-connected printer balanced in my hand when this woman comes up and demands I validate her parking ticket. Which I simply could not do without first performing the work necessary to not kill the printer, but she wasn’t having it. She’s holding her ticket in my face and insisting I service her. Again not 10 feet behind her (customers are such children), there was a staffed service counter, probably a third of their work was just validating parking. I was trying to direct this woman to where she could be helped IMMEDIATELY but she simply wasn’t having it, demanding that I stop what I was doing and validate her damn parking myself. Finally I let her know that was always going to be five minutes away, because in the whole time we were talking I couldn’t do the disconnects needed. And finally she gave up. “You piece of shit,” she says to me before taking the FIVE FCKING STEPS between her and her parking salvation.

Her other problems are between her, her therapist, traffic, and a short pier. If this is reading as unprofessional, then hopefully it’s reading just as well that theater management is not a “professional” realm.

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I remember when my boss lied to my face about pay terms because he assumed I was dumb. I remember [REDACTED] behind my back, forever nailing the lid on my ever having any career prospects with AMC. My concession stand at the 6 ran better then yours at the 14 for a reason- faster, larger sales with fewer complaints and less mess. When you told those dopes that you just didn’t see me having any new ideas, it was only because [REDACTEDREDACTEDREDACTEDREDACTED].

But there’s more, so much more. I remember when ex #2 started calling me stupid. I remember the Phantom girl (“don’t write back, don’t ever call”), I remember the family that overstepped, I remember every word.

There’s a very sound argument to be made that that’s not healthy. Maybe it’s not. This library of insults I recall, I don’t take them to heart, they don’t weigh me down. But I do rage against their memory, and that could be problematic. I’ve never needed help being critical of myself, even before I started dating or working. But carrying around outside voices that agree with that already unreliable narrator could be problematic.

But I can’t make people smarter, I can’t shine a light through the cloud people LIKE to live in.

I can stay far, far away from them though.