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Art Colony: my entry for sunday (a day early)
Saturday, July 16, 2005
› by victoria
Today my dad is supposed to take me to see "Charlie & The Chocolate Factory" after work. A 2 sentence movie review will be forthcoming on monday, or as soon as I get my bum in front of a computer screen. :)
I was just musing upon the question of "why do people have to be rude?" I sincerely feel that if more people treated other people with respect and consideration--even (gasp) empathy--things would move so much more smoothly. In a transactional sense. I mean, let's consider your average patron who comes down to where I work, asking for a video/DVD to rent:
A nice person would say (and yes, I do have nice patrons, and i love chatting with them):
"Hi, how are you?"
Me, smiling: "Oh, I'm doing alright, how about you?"
Them: "Hangin' in there. I was wondering if you had these movies?" proffers a list of films at me
Me: "Okay, hold on"
And then I do everything in my power to get those movies. If we don't have the movie or whatever they need, I will do whatever it takes to help them find a library or video rental place that does.
But a rude person goes:
"I need this."
or "Get me this."
or just hands me a sheet of paper with unintelligible scribbles on it that are supposed to represent call numbers or the location of an item.
I've had people who don't know the names of the classes that they are enrolled in, or the names of the professors who teach those classes. I've had people need a book about "science" or "business administration" but be unable to help me narrow the search down from the bazillion books on those subjects that we have.
The best part is how angry and militant they become.
Anyways, if more patrons were the nice kinds, that would make everything a lot nicer.
I have a lot of empathy for video rental store workers, since I used to work at a Hollywood Video back in my junior year of highschool.
We used to have people come in there who would...
>>start cursing at me when I'd tell them they'd have to wait to use the (keyed) restroom, because we had a line of 50 people
>>demand refunds when the movie they rented was shitty, even when we *warned* them the movie was shitty
>>let their kids shit on the ceiling of the bathroom (yes, this is like the scene in that Eddie Murphy movie "Daddy Daycare" where he's looking inside the bathroom with a facial expression that seem to say "what the ...? how did that get up there?!")
>>get all up in my face, threatening me about our store's membership card requirements, and saying that "Ah don't need no credit card. Ah don't need no state I.D." (*this was one of the incidents that led me to quit after a year of working there)
>>Ask if we rented "Adult Videos": they were usually creepy college-age guys. I'd try to deny them membership (and usually was successful in doing so) because they wouldn't have brought what they needed--driver's license, credit card--to get the card. Plus they would look at me in a creepy way.
And just that general kind of thing. I remember in particular one father who brought in his two young sons on the day the Jim Carrey movie "The Grinch" was released on video. We were entirely out of rental copies of the film, but the man was throwing such a fit--and when I mean fit, he was about to punch the store manager, practically--that finally the store manager just gave in under the pressure and opened a For Sale VHS copy of "The Grinch" and added it into the system as a rental copy, just to get the guy out of the store.
So please, treat the person you rent your movies/books from with kindness and consideration.
(**Unless they're a sexist pig-bastard, like this one co-worker I had back in highschool...but that's a different story)
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