Be Excellent To Each Other

Am I alone in being annoyed when giving a stranger my name (when they are serving me) and they immediately decide I'm their mate and start using my first name, when they know my surname? Winds me up, it does. Some cow at Domino's just did it. Gave her my phone number and she started calling me Mike. Who the hell are you, love?

/edit I wqas a lready sore at having to phone them because their website won't let me past the final purchase screen. Fuckers.

I hate it when the ask me if I am having a nice day.

I know the idea is that they are being polite, but it is so false, they obviously don't care how my day has been.

On the flipside, I cannot stand the automated tills super markets have these days. I only ever use them when the other tills are all shut (like 2am or something). It's like our society is trying to eradicate any communication we have with other human beings.

I always just have an audible conversation with them, just to make a point.

Screen: "Place goods on scales"
Me: "Sure thing, no worries mate."
Screen: "Remove goods"
Me: "Will do, cheers buddy"
Screen: "Insert cash"
Me: "There you go, I think that's exact change"
Screen: "Please take reciept"
Me: "Thanks a lot, take it easy!"

I like friendly chats with shop people. And I prefer to be Owen rather than Mr. Allaway.

There is a woman in Greggs in Walkden who ends every sentence with "love".

"What can I get for you love?"
"Do you want a carrier bag, love?"
"That will be £1.50, love"
"Here's your receipt love. Bye love.".


I don't go there any more as it quite frankly did my fucking nut.

No you're an uptight old git who should be yelling at kids to get off your lawn.

Sorry.

I agree with Dudley. You're making us Mikes look like grumpy bastards!

To be honest, I've very little time for people who aren't openly friendly. It's a shame that people in chain stores can be so false about it, but y'know, it's better than a sulk.

PS - LewieP's post made my day.

Some people in shops have no respect for you because the bulk majority of their customers are arseholes who wouldn't know manners if their life depended on uttering a hello or thank you, rather than a grunt.

Not so much shops but call centres: my bank, Virgin Media, Leccy company and more than a few others insist on calling me Steven, which is technically my given name but one I never use so I'm damned if I'm letting these fuckers call me it.

Grr

Well this is rather my point - particularly when one is providing a service to another in return for money. Buying a pizza or taking out a loan is a financial transaction, one which is more valuable to one party than anpother - hence I'd be Mr. in a shop, because I'm providing them with money, whilst in the bank asking for a loan the manager isn;t Nigel, he's Mr. Smith because I'mm there cap in hand to borrow his money. It is an exchange and recognition of power. And we all have power over one another at times.

This irrational insistance on first-name terms being presumed serves only to undermine the power of communication. Do banks really wonder why people are ignorant of the debt they get themselves into now that 'Howard' the gurning fuckwit is the way they present themselves? Debase oneself and who will respect you?

To my mind it is tantamount to communism - a facade of equality, a linguistic delusion which makes idiots of otherwise intelligent folk. In my work we often have to deal with Irate members of the public - as they have a complaint for me to handle they are Mr or Mrs. Whatever, where my colleagues will try to get on first name terms. They don't want to be our friends, they just need us to stop the dealers coming round to their street. When I speak to them in a respectuful manner, they know that my attention is on them, their problem, and I tend to get reasonably quick results compared to most.

The use of someone's title is too versatile and useful a linguistic device for us to dismiss entirely. Even Kevin Smith's Jay addresses peers as Sir from time to time. And everyone loves Jay.

Heh, I can remember when I used to work for Electronics Boutique and I'd have to wear a name tag. It used to really piss me off whenever some random member of the public who I'd never met before would start calling me 'Dave'. It was my job to be polite, so I was always was, but deep down I'd be wanting to tell them to just fuck right off.

When I worked at GS it was a bit different - we didn't have name badges so the only way anyone would know my name was if I told it to them, so in those instances I never minded. I'd only ever refer to customers by their first names if they were regulars and they'd told me what their names were - for the most part everyone was always just 'Sir' or 'Madam'.

I do vaguely remember a massively chavvy bloke who would horrendously abuse our returns policy at EB who insisted on being referred to as Mr. Smith. He was a proper twat. It used to really piss me off that my managers at the time would always bend over backwards for him instead of just telling him to fuck off, like he deserved. He never shopped in GS whilst I was in charge, so I never got the pleasure of doing this myself.

I'd rather someone call me by my name in a friendly way than have them straight out ignore my presence in a shop (which happens, especially in women's clothes shops, and Boots, all the time.)

Calling irate customers Mr./Mrs. signifies that you're taking them seriously, and anything else would likely rile them up further. In most situations, though, the full form of a person's first name is surely fine and dandy.

I call people Sir all the time, but it has nothing to do with that old class-system power-ackowledging stuff...

All this from a man who casually patronises women with "love".

Yeah, if my parents misspelt my birth name I wouldn't use it either



So you genuinely think you're better than them?

It's at this point I stop I think.

I like to think that I was always pretty good at judging how people would like to be addressed, as everyone is different. I always remember my second day on the job at EB (which itself was my first ever retail job), where we had to approach every customer and ask if we could help. This old guy had been walking around the shop for a couple of minutes, so I very politely asked if I could help. He just glared at me and went utterly ballistic about he how he can't even go into a shop anymore without spotty youths constantly badgering him, before loudly shouting how he'd never come into our shop again and storming off. Not a great start to my career, that.

No, I just happen at that point in time to be the person who is handing over the money. Politeness helps things go smoothly between people, and moving money around is a serious business, wherein the established polite form is for the recipient of the money to be totally respectful from the outset, while of course it is also only polite for the giver to return the sentiment.

Works for me, is all I'm saying. I like being respectful to a customer and I like receiving that respect as one.

n.b. The above it doubly important when money is being exchanged for drugs or sex.

I feel for the pair of you there. Every time I walk into PC World, any branch, there is a pointless person standing next to the inner end of the metal sheep-pen thing they channel you through, who waits until I'm a foot or two past him or her, then says 'Hallo' at just the point where I'm figuring out where to head to first. Bloody mithers me that does, as I must then stop, turn and return the greeting, so now I'm feeling awkward and spend the rest of the time moving around the shop and trying to avid eye contact with the rest of them.

Then there's the classic Game 'Are you alright there, mate?' from someone young enough to be my son and the hilarious 'Is everything alright with your meal?' from the socially retarded chav lass at the local harvester. If I've got a question or complaint, I'll come and get you. No need to interrupt me while I'm trying to remember how much the title I'm holding was going for in Cex orGamestation, nor when I'm charming an impromptu dinner date with a witty anecdote about the time I ralphed on her Ladyship's geraniums. I mean I'm paying a premium for what amounts to a probably microwaved frozen meal with the blandest undressed lettuce-and-tomato salad you can imagine, dumped onto my table with the allure of a camel turd. I'm fairly sure that if it isn;t a least functionally pleasant, I'm going to be able to muster up the courage to mention whatever vileness they've conjured onto my dish.

But then of course, complain and they wank off in your starter. So you never do. The incredibly annoying manager bollocks about 80% of customers walking away never to return rather than complain is given substance and them challenging you to utter a mid-gobful verdict on their disinterested service and culinary skills is tantamount to reducing the dining experience into a mannered russian roulette. It has to stop, it really does.

Also, Hotel owners - when we've spent the afternoon cooing over your gorgeous dog, please don't feel that once we've given our permission for you to have it in the near-empty dining room as we eat, you've any need to constantly call it away when it is happy to wait patiently for whatever affection and morsels we might offer. They kept making it leave us alone, and we miss our own dog because she's dead, so it would have been nice just to have one chill with us.

I have a little grumble about 'alienation' almost every time I have to use one of those buggers, but the real bummer is that every time I try to pay with my bank card, I seem to require assistance anyway, so it's not even any quicker!

I think the problem is over familiarity without due cause. If someone is nice and friendly on a call I'll ask them to stop calling me 'Sir' all the time, but in other situations, say, where I'm pissed off, I want to be called Mr. Gnomes because we're not having a friendly conversation.

It does fuck me off with emails. Someone emails me, asking XYZ, I respond in a formal way, i.e. 'Dear Blah, Thank you for your email, here is the information you requested, Sincerely Gnomes', and they reply to say 'LOLZ CHEERS MATE K OMFG LOL', and I'm like, what the fuck? I gave no hint that we were suddenly friends so why are you suddenly acting like an overly familiar dick? Fuck off and thank me with the same formal sincerety I showed you.

To me it's unprofessional unless I've been very casual in my reply to start with. Damn people.

Augmented bty the SMS curse, email has become a communication race to the bottom. Our thoughts grow through interaction wiht the thoughs of others. What hapens when we start to use cruder language to express these thoughts? Proper language and the observation of its rules is fun to challenge and pervert, but doing so at the expense of general convention limits us more than many realise.

That isn't a new or contentious idea, and I'm sure most people here would go along with it to varying degrees. Can we get back to your wanting to be addressed as Grand Poobah of the Universe?



Your point in that post is actually fair enough, but things like this are only going to make you sound like a hateful snob.

We shouldn't have to bother, but "Fine, thanks!" is an utterance that rarely causes the trachea to collapse, and it seems to get rid of 'em in a second. They're as fed up as you are, so it's no use being huffy with them.

That's Mr. MrD, thank you very much.

No, wait.

My Surname is Love, so that freaks me the hell out. Get Grammar-school flashbacks...

My Surname is Love sounds like something from bad album covers.

In my working life, if there's something stupid I and my custOmer obviously don't want me to do, I just don't do it. We are all responsible for our own behaviour and 'It's my job' isn't a justification any thinking person should ever have to fall back on. If nobody was prepared to interrupt diners with inane questions, the mangers would soon have to capitulate. But no, invarably I get someone who can barely be arsed to move their tongue in their mouth as they ask, nor slow down sufficuently as they do so. That's being a chav. I calls it as I sees it. I used to do waitering yewars ago - taking a moment or two to survey the room, you can tell from body language and so on how happy someone is with a meal, you don't need to interrupt them to do so. Here are the other sins:

1: Asking me the question when I'm three quarters done. Bit fucking late now, isn't it love?

2: What happens when you tell them 'no'? Total lack of eye contact all of a sudden, a mumbled 'dju wanna free dessert?' or somesuch. Why ask if you are going to make it look like the biggest hardship in the world to deal with the answer?

3: These are the people who will end up in shops behind a till, the ones who talk to their mate the whole way through serving you, ignore your hallo when you reach the counter. Good riddance to them.

I think I just fundementally dislike being served by anyone who is actively trying to undermine their employer's business. Though not a restaurant critic, I've a tendancy to write for the local news or arts paper wherever I live, and these things get mentioned. I'm far less likely to return somewhere for gig if I've historically been served by a disinterested goblin.

More recently I've had them attempt to serve me with emo haircuts, which puts me right off my fucking food.


SEVRYFINGAWLRIYTWIVYORMEEL?

"Goodness me Jeeves, did you see that? That peasant back there had the temerity to ask me if my carriage was all right after he got himself caught under the wheels. The sheer impudence of the man!"

"I'll have him whipped, sir."

"Very good. Give him a couple of extra lashes for attempting eye contact, while you're at it. He clearly doesn't know his place. And do have someone clean the blood off the wheels when we reach Gloucester, the smell is quite vile. Give that peasant the bill when you're done whipping him. Drive on."

Crap formality gets my goat much more than any of the above, I think, though it is annoying when people are only saying things because they are being ordered to. E.g., I used to work at a Happy Eater, and the officially sanctioned greeting was

"Hello, welcome to Happy Eater Ware - can I take you to a smoking or a non smoking table"

Which of course I ignored.

However, now when I'm covering the helpdesk someone who writes "hello, I've forgotten my password, can you help?" will get answered much more quickly than someone who asks for my help "at my earliest convenience". And I insert an extra half hour into the reply for anyone who says "yourselves" or "myself".

Surely that's preferable (in as much as it's less of a pain in the arse in the long run) to when someone says they do need help, and then asks for games in genres they have blatantly coined the terms for themselves and which mean nothing to you but they look at you as thought you are an idiot because you don't understand the incomprehensible bollocks they are talking. (And I mean the people who play games, not a granny buying one for her little Timmy, because that's understandable)

I used to frequent a little market stall that sold and traded games as well as other things (sadly no longer there) back in the mid to late 1990's when I had way too much free time and my knowledge of pretty much all games was second to none (or very few, at least). I was pretty much a regular, and so when people were asking him advice on games when I was present, he'd generally involve me in the conversation.

Some of the things the poor bloke was asked for that stuck in my mind included "Level games" ("What do you mean exactly?" "Games with levels in"), "Mission games", "A game where you go round and do things" and there's many more I can't remember now. Other classics include "I want a fighting game" (blokey shows his various beat em ups) "No, I don't like games where you beat people up, I want something with guns in".

And that's from before casual gaming really kicked in.

I work in 3rd line support and rarely talk to our customers directly. sometimes I do tho, normally when it's gone very wrong. Often you get the warning that they are arseholes and you should be careful with them. However, I rarely find that to be the case. And I'm sure it's because I don't go around calling them Sir, or Madam. If I've been given their name before hand, then I use that, if not, then I ask them what their name is, and then use that.

I think there's been only one case where someone has ended being rude to me, and he would have been rude no matter what the circumstances.

Malc

I really couldn't care less about people in shops or most other places as you can just choose whether to go there or use that service. What winds me up is coppers who use "mate" with everyone, grrr.

I regret that I'm a stickler for professional courtesy, and get annoyed by the casual use of the first-name. Part of my role involves dealing with hospitals: how do I know who am I speaking to if you just give me a first name? And don't get me started when they start referring to patients like that.

Digression:
Ladies! Do you like being called 'Ms' when we are unsure of your marital status?

I use 'mate' quite a lot, but only in social type situations ("'scuse me, mate" in the pub for example). I also get called 'mate' a fair bit when buying things. but I put this down to my approachable face and easy going demeanour.

It doesn't worry me if people refer to me as Miss/Mrs/Ms. I don't expect people to be mind readers and at the end of the day, who cares? My mother, on the other hand, used to go ballistic if people called her 'Mrs', but she's not a very reasonable person.

I'm like MaliA, although the 'mate' has gone from being something I would say to be friendly to something I habitually tack onto the end of too many sentences.

Sorry, but I have very little sympathy for most of the pathetic self-important whinging going on in here. However poor you think a service is - particularly if all you can complain about is that their nose doesn't scrape enough of the floor when they greet you - it pales in comparison to a tenth of the shit that people in customer service and catering have to put up with. I've experienced crappy service and attitudes, and I've worked with people who acted crappily to customers, but I and the people I've worked with put up with far worse on a daily dasis, particularly in catering. They get a lot worse than they give, and frankly whether or not you're happy about being called by the name you gave them is the least of their concerns.

Protip: If I call you "sir" or "madam" at work, what I actually mean is "you vile, witless cunt".

Fucking hell, I hope never to give my custom to your employer.

If I call someone Sir or Madam, I mean Sir or Madam. Which is honesty.

Oh, with Police, I insist on formal terms. I'm not their fucking mate.

Vicious circle, then? Start respecting the customer's wishes regarding names and maybe you'll get a little more respect?

No, honesty is talking to people truthfully, which in customer service is very often the opposite of respectful. If I were being honest, I would call those people vile, witless cunts. It's reserved almost entirely for people who have been persistently unpleasant, and who would, if told to fuck off, despite the fact that they fully deserved it, have cost me my job.

I very rarely call anyone sir or madam at work, because I don't talk like a sanctimonious twat, and the word "madam" in particular is a hideous one. It's rare that you'd have to address someone if you didn't know their name, and if you don't, a neutral "hello" or "good evening" is close enough to how I'd talk to any human being, whether at work or not. I will talk to people with respect, but I won't demean myself and suck up for a shitty shop job, not least because there are millions of utter tossers who will just take any such treatment as an opportunity to lord it over you.

What?

You're discounting the possibility that some of us may have worked in that environment whilst going through Uni.

When I was doing it and an adviser was calling up to check the value of a bond worth more than a million quid I should have gone for 'Alright Jim, the current value is.....'?

Or would 'I'll just get that for you Mister x' not seem to you to be far more professional?

Much as when I phone my bank, I really don't want to hear 'I'll just check that for you Steven' when I have never met that person in my puff. It's massively patronising and I don't appreciate it.

Sinister Agent is my hero, and I pay him five pounds.

This, this, so very much this.

The most "formal" I'd get is a cheery "Hello, chap!".

I once had a customer as Sainsbury's get arsey when I called him "mate". He said "You call me Sir, OK?" Upon which I congratulated him and asked him when he got his Knighthood. I got a "show" bollocking for it but the customers behind thought it was hilarious and so, it turned out, did my manager.

*checks thread title*

Where's the shop involved, here?

Its not. Much like my first post in this thread that you haven't done me the courtesy of reading.

SA's post was generic regarding customer service.

Oh, come off it. Do you honestly think that the only reason people treat people like shit is because they don't call them "sir" or "mister"? I worked in libraries for two years and almost everyone was Mr/Mrs/Ms, but they're still often rude and sometimes total cunts. I presently work for an architectural salvage company, and plenty of people prefer being called by their first name even if they're calling to spend £20,000 on a pile of reclaimed stone. I worked in Canterbury Cathedral for over a year, dealing with schoolchildren, tourists, historians, bishops, businessmen and retired generals. I know how to talk to people and cunts are cunts, whether you call them "bob", "my friend", "Mister" or "your grace", each of which can be perfectly appropriate depending on the situation, your relationship and their personal preference - some people will in fact be visibly annoyed if you call them 'sir', and some people prefer a first-name basis - the patrons of family-run restaurants in particular often feel more welcomed this way, as do some of the people you'd otherwise expect to call 'brigadier-general' when making them a cup of tea.

I have always treated every customer with the utmost respect, and never been rude or short or disrespectful to any of them, and the only complaint there's ever been about me was when I worked in catering in canterbury and some old witch of a tour guide complained because my bin had a teastain on it.

At least a fifth of the people I've ever treated so were impolite at best, and a good one in fifty will be an outrageously rude, personally insulting piece of shit who comes in specifically to slag someone off. And the way they treat the younger staff in particular is revolting. The only time I've ever asked anyone to leave was when they were deliberately bullying one of the weekend girls in Canterbury purely because she was young and shy and they wanted to feel big.

If it bothers you that much, tell them so. They, particularly if they work in banks, are probably acting only on orders.

Edit: Removed the opening bit. Too personal, I do apologise.

Now Sainbury's I simply cant figure out. If you are in the midlle of a conversation when your turn comes at a till, they'll interrupt you with a forceful 'hallo' then ask you if you want your bag packing, whereas if you get the hallo in first, they look at you like you've wiped your cock on their tits. Also "This is a colleague announcement" can fuck the fucking fuck off. I used to work for NTL, when they announced we were all going to be 'partners' in the organisation instead of staff. I never came back from my next fag break. Again, abuse of language to providethe illusion of parity where there is none. Colleagues don't sack colleagues, but you can bet the person authorising the 'colleague announcement' has fired someone at some point.

If people want to stay in the same shitty job forever, they are more than welcome to carry on sneering at customers behind their backs and calling them mate. I'm not against being called mate when being served somehow, but there needs to be a degree of rapport established first, or you might as well call me grandma.

And then of course there's the Lincoln/Nottinghamshire 'Duck'. To which I respond 'quack'. Oh, how I adore the blank stares.

Don't waste my time. I'm done here.