Early on in my job hunting I was fortunate enough to find employment at a fairly well known department store that specializes in clothing for women. Anybody that has spent any real time working with customers can tell you that things can get pretty sketchy, and you can never really anticipate what the customer is going to do next.
Most of the time, a transaction can go pretty smoothly and everyone can come out a winner, but occasionally, things just take a turn for the worse.
Take this one time, we had a young woman come in and try to return a pair of blue jeans that she had previously purchased. Not the biggest hassle in the world, we do stuff like that all the time, but this case turned particularly difficult.
First ,there was no receipt, no clothing tags were left on the items, and worst of all, there was a putrid and oozing stain in the crotch of the jeans! Actually, I should clarify, there were a lot of different colored stains, but only one of them was oozing!
As I looked at the jeans trying to figure out what I was going to do, since they clearly couldn’t go back on the shelves, she could obviously sense my skepticism and randomly blurted out, “They were like that when I got them!” Right. I’m sure they were.
“They were like that when I got them!” Right. I’m sure they were.
I’m not really sure what’s worse, the fact that she thought I would believe that sorry excuse for a story, or the fact that I didn’t wear gloves when handling that contaminated nightmare of a return!