The Customer is Always Right (on target)

My wife works at a big warehouse store. I won’t identify it directly but the name rhymes with Tossed-Toe. Her job, which I will not identify directly either, involves having people come up to a counter at which she works and drop off slips of paper which are later redeemed for salves, ointments, drops, capsules, and pills.

She has great customer stories; here is one of many:

A woman customer who is not originally from this country (I will not directly identify the country she is from but we once dropped two big bombs there many years ago) never fails to perform the following ritual every time she comes to the store.

She grazes the vendor sample tables while shopping and consequently always has food in her mouth. She also has two distinct speaking traits: a) she spits globs of food when she talks and b) her voice gets louder (and therefore her range grows longer) the longer she talks.

After a coworker (who shall not be named directly but might or might not hang around with The Sunshine Band) was on the receiving end of a dried meat shower, he dubbed her “the Jerky Shooter.”

This would be bad enough but the woman never knows exactly what she wants. She asks for “my pills.” The worker will ask her “which ones” and that immediately generates the response “they are round white pills.” If anything, she will get vaguer and vaguer with more questions and therefore the talking gets louder and louder and the food flies farther and farther.

Once, the opposite happened: She came up to the counter and indicated she needed more of a particular ointment. She held out an empty tube of said ointment. I will not say where on the body the ointment is applied but it rhymes with Duh-China. At the same conversation the woman managed to land a glob of spit directly on the back of the employee’s hand. The employee was unable to resist flinching back in revulsion and shaking a bit.

Every employee suddenly has to take a bathroom break when they see the woman in line. They are pooling money to bribe the vendors to NOT feed this woman. I am thinking of loaning the welder’s mask I use for making cookies to my wife for use during waiting on this woman.

All fear The Jerky Shooter.