So yeah, I jumped into the Portal 2 comics about a week late. Oh well. With that out of the way, I’m kind of surprised that the internet took to the potato ARG so well and without question. In case you didn’t know, Valve promised an earlier release of Portal 2 if players purchased and earned potatoes (achievements) in a bunch of Steam games.

The internet suddenly made it it’s mission to collect as many potatoes as possible; sites like Reddit saw its members telling everyone what games to play. While it looks like everyone had some fun with the ARG, I feel like Valve just laughed itself to the bank. They got people to purchase and play games that they would not have otherwise, all so they can purchase and play one particular game a little sooner.

Valve must be the envy of every Enron out there; they found a legal way to make extra dough.

Little update on life in the store. There has been an uptick in hilarious customers recently, people asking for “Tobishies” and “Sony Bravos” and such, but yesterday I had a customer that really, really went out of her way to be the most terrible, horrible lady I’ve every dealt with.

A phone call was transferred to my department, and from the moment the receiver went to my ear, the screaming started. I attempted to calm the lady (about 40-55ish) down and ask what the problem was.

“ILL TELL YOU WHAT THE $*%#(*% PROBLEM IS, MY TV WAS SUPPOSED TO BE MOUNTED YESTERDAY AND NOTHING IS DONE!”

She then when on to curse me out for a little bit. I asked if she had an order number for the installation, and she screamed that I should already know it. I reminded her that I never met her before, and asked again for the number.

“HOLD ON. HOLD OOOOOONNN. LET ME FIND IT YOU ASSHOLE.”

She read it off to me, nothing came up in the computer. Are you sure the number is right?

“IM $*%&#*@ POSITIVE.”

Well ma’m, it can’t be right, as theres nothing here in the computer for that number. Then she screamed a bit, and once she shut up I asked if she had a phone number attached to the order. She gave me one and lo and behold, there was no order for that number.

More screaming. I managed to get a second number from her, and finally was able to pull up an order. According to what I saw, her installation never took place because she didn’t have the Television and mount in her home.

“OF COURSE WE DONT NO ONE DELIVERED IT!”

I told her that it said right in the order that those items were supposed to picked up by her at another location. Then she exploded and called me a number of things that I wont type here.

I decided that since my store had all the items she needed, I’d cancel her previous order and send her everything from here and personally check that everything get sent out. More screaming. I told her I was putting her on hold while I get the items.

I came back to my desk, items in tow, to find that she hung up.
A call then transferred to me, hello this is Alex from (store) how can I help you?

“I WAS JUST ON THE PHONE WITH SOME ASSHOLE WHO PUT ME ON HOL-”
Yes ma’m, that was me, I told you I was putting you on hold while I got your products.

“WELL YOU DIDN’T DO IT FAST ENOUGH. I’M GOING TO SUE YOU AND YOUR ENTIRE COMPANY”

How will I sleep at night? I thought. From that point, I was able to cancel all her previous orders, reschedule installation appointments, etc. We were all ready to go when she hung up on me a second time, called the store again,and got transferred back to me.

This time, I was in our downstairs warehouse getting ready to have another employee process the transaction over the phone. We handled everything, and the evil lady was done. The moment she got exactly what she wanted, she was suddenly apologetic, saying that she was taking out her anger and frustration on us, yada yada yada.

Honestly, if you’re a customer and you treat an employee badly, that makes you a bad person, no matter what your motivation is. That said, no matter how much of a jerk a customer is, I’ll always help them out. But really, for someone to scream at me every step of the way, all while I’m trying to help her, it really goes to show how little this woman cared about anyone else, and how large her sense of entitlement is.

This isn’t even a record of the whole story, which would be way too long to post here.

Egads.