I had any number of customers try to return books because they were upside-down.

How do these people NOT get thinned out of the herd?

!!!

What Cindy said.

There is crap all on TV tonight. Good opportunity to make progress on the Eyes DVDs.

Occasionally, they had trouble believing that flipping the dust jacket which had been put on wrong had actually fixed the problem.

You're supposed to say, "A La Peanut Butter Sandwiches!"

The bookstore complaint that I loved was when a customer returned a book, complaining that I didn't tell him that a book was missing 16 pages. Like I was supposed to make sure that every book we had in the store was bound correctly?

You're supposed to say, "A La Peanut Butter Sandwiches!"

That was not covered in the training. How was I supposed to know?

Blarg. Ninnyhead attending MD just stopped by about half an hour ago to drop off a day's worth of notes, which I'd been noodging him about since yesterday, and now I'm feeling all sullen and gripey and like just not fucking doing them at all (this is the guy who has to have his drafts printed out sheet by sheet for editing because he can't get on the server to edit them electronically and I can't just email them to him because he doesn't know how to open an email attachment; I'm fully convinced, despite his bucketload of Ivy League degrees, that if I were to say "Just double-click" he'd tap the monitor screen twice and then look at me all bewildered and puppy-like).

Also, my boss's newest grandbaby has just been transferred here from another local hospital because there's something wrong with her lungs.

Man, fuck this work year. Just fuck it.

Nicole, if you ever work in customer support, you shall find out. amych speaks sooth. I'm astounded by things I encounter daily. I wish I were a better humor writer because I'd love to write a sort of "Bastard Operator from Hell" about my job. Stuff that would make your jaw drop. And stuff that's incredibly depressing when you think that these people are running around unsupervised. Maybe voting and donating money to political campaigns...

I'm fully convinced, despite his bucketload of Ivy League degrees, that if I were to say "Just double-click" he'd tap the monitor screen twice and then look at me all bewildered and puppy-like).

Dummy. Doesn't he know you click your HEELS twice?

ICompletelyON, I've been fucking around not doing Doctor The-Big-Shiny-Box-Scares-Me!'s notes and catching up on news and politics blogs. Digby interrupted his usual in-depth news analysis and despair in mid-December to note that he was being killed dead by the cuteness of the baby pandas on the Animal Planet PandaCam and commanded all his readers to click on the link and be dead of the cute, too, if they dared.

Two days later, in the middle of the comments section to an actual rant about a substantive topic, another poster commented:

BTW, I haven't seen those cute pandas move yet.

It's a comforting sign of continuity in this crazy mixed-up world to know that the baby pandas are not only still deadly cute, they're still dead.