Comic Strips

The right attitude.

Between people boycotting certain brick and mortars for political reasons and the monopoly that is Amazon, there are not a lot of options.

I honestly do wonder where the average person thinks the customer service workers have some kind of stake in the company or something. Getting fired from a job like that is only a minor inconvenience, and the odds of their complaint being anywhere near a firable offense is usually laughable (and half the time the opposite as usually it's wanting the employee to break store policy).

See, what you gotta do is threaten them with absurdity.

Don't say "I'm never coming back". Instead, walk across the street to the bus stop. Wait for them to come out to their car. Memorize it.

Now come back to the parking lot every day for a week. Wait for them to leave their car, and go inside. Once they're inside, you walk over to their car, and write down their liscense plate number.

Now go home, and use public records to do a search to find their name and address.

Now go back to the store, and take a picture of them with your cell phone.

Now, sit across the street from a police department, and watch for a cop arriving to work. Take note of his liscense plate, and search his name/address.

Now write a letter to the clerk, threatening to wait outside his work with a giraffe. Tell him "Giraffes have 15 inch tongues, thick as a beer can. I've trained this one to stick their tongues into your butthole, and grab your waist with their teeth. You'll be 19 feet in the air, getting tongue fucked by a giraffe. If you try to escape, you fall. See ya at Costco, Gary!"

And you use the cops name/address as the return address. Now if he tries to go to the cops, they'll protect their own, and find something to arrest him with.

Checkmate, Gary!

Companies I boycott:

Bank of America
5/3 Bank
Wells Fargo
McDonald's
Walmart
That corner gas station that never paid their invoice Planet Fitness
John Deere
Verizon
AT&T

Number of store employees I've told that I'm never coming back:

0

An interaction I had when I was in my final days of my fast food "career":

Karen: "The service here is terrible I'm NEVER eating here again if you don't fix this RIGHT NOW"

Me (actually said to them): "Oh no, please don't, the giant multinational corporation with billions in revenue that is [Big burger fast food joint] will notice and cry"

Karen: "I..yea...well!" Storms off

When I was a teenager in the 90s I worked a local, Chicago-area chain fast food job, as ya do. One customer was mad that his ribs were taking a while so he came up to tell at the cashier. The General Manager was a older Chicagoan with a Mike Ditka mustache, and came out of the office right behind the cashiers and yelled right back, mad that somebody was yelling at his employees.

The guy shouted that he'd take his business elsewhere and never come back, at which point the GM pointed at the line that stretched to the door and said something to the effect of "you see all these people? I don't need your business! Now get out of my store!" It was in the middle of the dinner rush, and it's still a popular chain.

We all really liked that GM before and especially after that. He was one of those "tough but fair" types, the kind of boss you could respect. Good guy.

The point is that yeah, go ahead and take your business elsewhere Karen. It literally makes no difference and nobody cares.

I’ll admit it; I want to say things like those customers in the comic. Sometimes I do. But I also understand and appreciate that the person I’m talking to both doesn’t care, and can’t do anything about it. So when possible, I try to take some marriage advice I saw somewhere online:

Never say the first thing that comes to mind. Don’t even say the second thing. Say the third thing.

This works really well in emails or online forums, where you can revise many times until you hit send or post.

And for anybody who has read any of my past replies and feel inclined to point out that I still say stupid shit: just know that those stupid shit were the third things that came to mind. 😊

The thing is, either workers are powerless to change things, or just don’t care enough to be bothered by that threat.

Which is why I usually just smile and lodge formal complaints with the company as well as any regulatory body if the situation calls for it. Much more effective when it’s an actual punishment rather than an empty threat. I’ve gotten companies actual fines that way.

My absolute favorite response to these types of people is "can I get that in writing?"

During my penance in food service in my earlier years, I worked for a while for what was literally the only pizza joint in town that had delivery. (This was well before all the food delivery apps and in fact in the pre-smartphone era.) When we would not accede to whatever ridiculous demand a customer was having a tantrum about and they threatened to never order here again, my boss would just say, "Okay, fine, see you next week."

He was usually right, too.

I agree with this with one exception - if you're in admin or clerical customer facing roles where the stuff you do is actually life changing for people.

I almost got deported because some cunt at the uni couldn't be arsed to send one email of a document she got by clicking one button for a whole year despite the fact I rang every day for like two months and visited the offices for a goddamn week.

Another example is healthcare. If you're some piece of shit receptionist who can do fuck all and instead of sympathising - and just trying at all - you act all smug about how you can't even do me the decency of telling me which fucking department I need to talk to when I can't get the result of a fucking piss test I need for life-changing surgery.

Surgery that I have been on a waiting list for for 7 years, surgery hat I have bad scheduled months ago that I have done everything for months ago, that's now in a week and all of that is now under threat of being postponed many more months because you can't fucking ring a phone number? Because you can't be arsed and you'll "let me know if there's anything further" in 15-30 working days? And you, despite working this job, can't possibly know how long it usually even takes? Literally refuse to even give an estimate?

I will make your day hell because I hate you - not just the company - but you as a human being, fuck you and find another fucking job, your failure in life is no excuse to fuck mine up too.

Especially when I know I'll come back tomorrow and someone with a fucking brain is going to sort it out for me, so it was never some "policy", it was you and your lack of effort when human lives are on the fucking line. Wouldn't piss on you if you was on fire, you living piece of evidence that some people are just plain inferior and why some people don't deserve welfare and security because they can't do anything unless you threaten them with not being able to eat the next fucking day.

God, sorry, all this shit was years ago but it boils my blood to this day that some fucknuggets could've destroyed my entire amazing life for literally no other reason than the fact they have no life worth living and choose to make everyone else's a living nightmare.

I think the pain will heal once all this shit is replaced by a nice LLM integration. And communism too, fuck capitalism and decay in public services.

Actually in a better world I'd gladly pay taxes so these actual fucking untermenschen stay home and rot or whatever it is they do, so the rest of us can get on with life. They already mooch off my taxes, the least they can do is get out of the fucking way.

This is the natural consequence of a business that is not worker owned.