Can you read? Or listen?

Hnnnnnrgghhh!

That's the sound of utter frustration and contempt that I feel all too often when people present forms to me that haven't been filled in properly or aren't supported by the required documentation.

Allow me to elaborate.

Mail redirections are a particular source of wrongness and therefore irritation. Whenever we hand out a redirection form, we make a point of telling the customer to fill it in and bring it back with some ID/documentation and then we point to the list of acceptable ID and tell them what we need.

Invariably this is totally ignored.

Several days later, said customer will return with the form but no supporting ID. I don't want to be a jobsworth here but (pompous/serious hat on here) it is really rather important that mail isn't redirected fraudulently. If any old idiot could arrange for someone else's mail to be sent wherever they wanted no doubt we'd never hear the end of it. But no, we're being awkward that we can't process a redirection just on their say-so that they are who they claim to be. Fraudsters have been known to tell the odd fib here and there you know.

Only today a woman came in to do a redirection. Predictably enough, she didn't have any ID at all. I pointed out the list of stuff and told her we needed something from list A and something from list B on the form. Thirty minutes later she returned. Again, predictably enough, she hadn't read the list correctly and had bought the wrong stuff.

*sigh*

It's at this point that the customer gets annoyed at me personally because it's my fault that

A. We need proper ID to process this redirection
B. She's too stupid to listen to instructions
c. She's too stupid to read things properly.
D. She's fat and ugly and stupid.
E. She's going to have to walk home and then walk back here again and then walk all the way home!!! (she needed the excercise though, see point D.)

I soooooo love it when customers resort to getting stroppy when they're not getting their way. The number of times I've been tempted to turn round and say something along the lines of:

"Now that you put that argument to me so eloquently and reasonably, I'm going to change my mind and say a big "fuck you" to the rules and common sense and process this application. Clearly it is far too difficult to read and/or listen to instructions that are there for a bloody good reason. A big strop is certainly the best way of getting you own way. Congratulations on being terribly grown up and everything.

Oh wait, I've changed my mind again. Kindly shove your attitude up your arse and fuck off."

I never have but whenever I have a difficult customer, you can bet I'm thinking it.

Needless to say, the customer who I was serving stormed off and said that she'd send it off instead. I neglected to point out that she'd need to send off the same stuff with her application. Oh well.