Results!

I know how to deal with people. I dare say I'm good at it. It's remarkably easy to me to get a feel for someone very quickly and then adjust my approach in order to achieve a desired outcome.


One thing--of a good many things--that I've learned about people is that they often prepare themselves for multiple different possible scenarios. You sort of have a battle plan when it comes to confronting people. You think, 'Okay, if X happens, I'm going to do Y; if A happens, I'm going to do B', and so on for every permutation of results you can think of. So it's not always easy to cut them off at the pass, so to speak, because they'll have already thought of contingency plans for most of the reactions you would think of.



Which is why I quoted Shakespeare at a problem customer.


There are three main ways in which it's considered 'acceptable' for clerks to react to belligerent customers: they can be super nice, or ignore them. Sometimes you get clerks who are rude back, which occasionally startles them into silence. Most of the time it doesn't, because even being mean right back isn't weird or strange. They may not have thought you'd do it, but that doesn't mean they'd be unprepared for it. People's reactions to shit they hadn't though of is usually hostility, but there does come a point--and everyone has this point, it's just located in different areas--where you are experiencing something so unbelievably insane, so totally out of the ordinary, so unexpected, that you cannot meaningfully react. Because you just have no fucking idea what you're supposed to do in that situation.


I've been there myself. There are situations I look back on where I wonder why I didn't do something or say something, but it's like coming up with a biting retort--you only do it after you've had time to think about it because you were too shocked to on the spot. I've had time and the benefit of not actually being in that place anymore to aid me in coming up with possible coping strategies. At the time I was pretty much just sitting there thinking, 'What the ever-loving shit am I supposed to do here? Is this even real? What the fuck?'


So after a very long day with very long queues and very big purchases and very picky customers, I got a woman who was annoyed with me for taking too long and was being a complete entitlement whore. By then I'd had enough and, while I didn't want to get fired, I figured there would be no established protocol at the store in the event that an employee regurgitated Shakespeare.


Which they don't.


Which is great, because that's exactly what I did.


Specifically, it was Shylock's famous quote from 'The Merchant of Venice'. The woman was ranting about how clerks are horrible and no one is helping any customers and we're all being jerks and we should be ashamed and...


And then I piped up with, 'Hath not a clerk eyes? Hath not a clerk hands? Organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?'

Then went back to the transaction as if nothing had happened.


I'm not sure if I eventually will be in any trouble for this, but it did make the woman shut up out of pure shock.


Which was all I wanted in the first place.