Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Fuckscrews

[undergroundpanther]

Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Fuckscrews, or "Get your entitlement gene off my planet!"

I need to get a new job.

Well, technically, I'm still a "professional student", but that doesn't keep the creditors from coming after my thumbs, so a few months ago I got myself a position as Guest Service Drone #238 at a major video rental chain.

I won't mention its name, but I will say that its name starts with "Hol" and ends with "lywood". I hope that's not giving too much away.

This chain has a whole load of rules regarding the upkeep of the store. Most of them are what you'd expect from a monolithic corporation: draconian, ancient policies, most of which are for purely cosmetic purposes and, thus, are only implemented when inconsiderate customers come in and rummage around our selection without putting shit back where it belongs.

This doesn't happen too often with adults when they come in alone, mind you, but when accompanied by their slobbering larvae, you'd think a very localized Armageddon hit the inside of the place after they leave.

This is what really gets my blood pressure up.

I work in a very nouveau riche (for the lack of a better term) area, so most of our business comes from young thirty-somethings who roll up in BMWs and, if they're really adventurous, Chargers.



These people come in with a whole brood underfoot and, while they bog off to peruse the New Release wall, just turn their heads and ignore their kids while they pillage the fucking joint like a horde of midget vikings. They pick up every movie they can and put them back in different areas, dump shit from our concessions wall all over the floor, scream and holler, rape our female employees, and generally just make a mess of things. The ones that are old enough to be autonomous in their rental decisions are rude enough to make a nun cuss like a sailor; they expect to be waited on at the drop of a hat even when we're busy with the customers that were good enough to wait in line.

This happens on a daily basis, and virtually every half hour on Fridays and Saturdays, and I know why. When you combine the sense of entitlement that these little fucks have after a decade of getting whatever they want in lieu of actual discipline and parenting with the fact that these parents treat every place they go like a goddamn daycare, this is exactly what you get. I'm not saying that the kids need to get their asses whooped on a weekly basis like I did (though some could use a swat upside the head once in a while), but for God's sake, use some sense.

I realize that some of these kids are just mimicking what they see from their progenitors, but the younger ones really don't know any better, and they never will until the parents just get a fucking clue and keep an eye on them. I once had a customer yell at me for ten minutes because she wasn't watching her little spawn when he was running around, which resulted in him falling near a concessions rack and cracking his head open on the edge of a plastic shelf. She walked out of the store with my name, my manager's name and phone number, the number to Customer Service and ten free rentals (because, you know, she was so fucking inconvenienced), and she STILL threatened to sue us.

That leads me to my next point: large store chains of all kinds should cease offering free shit altogether when their employees fuck up. This, in part, is what perpetuates this idea of entitlement; if a customer is in ANY way unhappy with the service they receive, they can just get a kink in their undies and demand the world on a silver platter until they're finally satisfied. Now, I hate to compartmentalize groups of people, but the wealthy customers that come in our store do this early and often.

What the fuck, Thurston? Your Jaguar and your three million dollar home and cushy job at your dad's office isn't enough to make you content that you need to verbally abuse my fat ass until you get a handful of free 99 cent movie rentals? Congradu-fucking-lations. I hope that makes your dick feel positively elephantine.

Anyone here on Ubersite, if you work in the service industry, I entreat you: shake up the system a little. Stop giving people free shit, because most of the time, the fuck up really isn't anyone's fault. Maybe if we pour salt on enough of these leeches, they'll all dry up and blow away.

http://www.ubersite.com/m/108639

[Blashyrkh]

1. Kinda the way I feel about these 'service drones'.

I find people who frequent retail outlets...frequently tend to be as daft as the people who work there.

[pinto]

2. Geez, hope that blogger finds another job. Sounds like a bad fit, all around.

[Demeter]

3. I Feel Your Pain, Author

Watching these parents, if one must call them that, is frightening. It is a way of perpetuating the devolution of the human race. These children will never be good parents, having never seen one in action.

Personally, I point the finger at the parenting books of the past 15 years. Parenting isn't for wimps, and timeouts are more often copouts.

[seriousstan]

4. It looks like this person is lucky to have this job, but I doubt they will keep it.

Poor work attitude. No wonder they are stuck in an entry level job.

[Missy Vixen]

5. Hey seriousstan, when's the last time you worked in retail?

Just out of idle curiosity, y'know.

I used to own a business. I finally closed that business because of not just the economic downturn in the particular hobbyists my store catered to (yarn shop,) but I could not TAKE the estimated 10% of customers that seemed to LIVE solely to take out their aggressions on people that couldn't fight back. At least I owned the business; if people got too out of control or abusive, they were promptly asked to leave. When one's an employee, they don't have that luxury. I won't do it again unless I'm starving to death, and frankly, I would work in just about any other industry before I took on retail again.

I'd also like to mention at this point that even using the words "May I have --" "Please" and "Thank you", will bring amazing service, due to the fact that I've been told more than once I was the only customer all day to even be polite and courteous to whomever it was working behind the counter in that business.

It is astonishing to me on a daily basis how many times I've witnessed something similar to what undergroundpanther describes. It's not a case of "poor work attitude". It's a case of dealing with far too many people who think that they don't have to treat anyone in a uniform with a nametag on like a human being.

Julie

[seriousstan]

6. I worked retail, grocery bagger, for one year...when I was 16. Then I got better jobs.

That is why these are called entry level jobs. I now get my aggravation by being a landlord.

This person starts the article by noting his own sense of entitlement. God forbid anything like the people he owes money to would interfere with his "professional" studying. He immediately states that he doesn't like the work (drone) or the rules. I am sure he thinks that he should have been hired as the manager if not owner. I am sure he will continue to make even more insightful comments about this and the many future low level jobs he is destined to work.
That is, until the world realizes that he should be able to pursue his "studies" unencumbered by the need to pay his bills and support himself.

[Rabrrrrrr]

7. While he's right about the huge amount of shitty entitlement people out there,

he also has a bad work attitude that isn't helping him enjoy it at least a little bit.

But yeah, people suck - especially customers.