World's Most Annoying Customer

There's always one regular customer in every Post Office who will be guaranteed to make all of the staff sigh heavily and try to change their serving speed so as to avoid serving them whenever they come in. Actually, there are generally loads of people who fit into that description but there's one who's head and shoulders above the rest.

Her name is Daisy.

Daisy, as the name suggests, is about as intelligent as your average moo cow and also significantly less fragrant to boot.

Her odour can make your eyes water from across the shop on a bad day.

There aren't any good days.

Apparently she is totally unable to wash either herself or her clothes. Or her kids of which she has three all of whom are by different fathers. I say this not necessarily to condemn her but to point out how gobsmacked I am that she managed to find one desperate sucker with no standards or sense of smell to knock her up let alone three.

As is the way with annoying and smelly customers you can be sure that whenever she comes in, you'll be stuck with her for an age as she has a lot of transactions to do.

First of all comes the benefits. She has a card account into which she gets an exorbitant amount of cash. Nearly £300 per week. That's more than my full time staff get paid. On top of that, her rent is paid and she's constantly getting ferried around in a taxi at our expense despite her current fella having a car. What does she think she is? An MP? (A bit of satire for you). I have a feeling that she gets more benefits as she's probably classified as retarded and is therefore "entitled" to extra cash.

Unlike most card account users who either ask for everything in the account or some specified amount, she'll ask for a balance first so she can check how much she's got available. She can't just ask for a balance though. Oh no. That would be too easy. Due to her thick accent and thick head she asks for a balance in her own language. I still haven't, after three years of serving her, managed to work out what she's actually trying to say but I do know what she's asking for.

Once she's got her balance, she'll ask me to read it for her. The following conversation will then go something like this (for ease of reading, I've translated everything she says into English):

Me: "You've got £295.55 in your account."

Her: "If I put £100 in my savings account, how much will that leave me?"

Me: "£195.55."

Her: "I'll do that then. And then I'll withdraw the rest of the balance."

Every bloody week. She's so dim that she can't work out even the easiest of sums.

She'll then pay her various bills and get a top-up for her mobile. Every Monday she'll put a tenner on it. Followed by an additional fiver every day for the rest of the week. I should be grateful that she spends so much as it's a good little earner for me but I'm not sure it's worth it really.

And do you want to know the thing that bugs me the most about her?

The fact that when she checks her balance, she'll often ask "Have I been paid today?" For fucks sake. Being paid implies that you're actually doing something in exchange for the money rather than just being some cash hoover who's of no use to society whatsoever except to make even total bloody fuckwits feel superior to at least someone else. Bloody parasite.

Fuck You Karma

It's now obvious that there is a mysterious Karmic force in this universe and it's also obvious that it reads this blog.

My first customer today (first, Mr Karma is nothing if not punctual) was the very worst card insertion offender it's ever been my misfortune to serve.

After nine (Yes, nine. I counted them) failed attempts to put the card in I managed to finally direct her so that the card was actually in the correct orientation to go in. I told her that it was now correct and she should now insert the card. The card was hovering literally millimeters from the slot and then the stupid old bitch turned it upside-down for no fathomable reason (well, that she's a total fucking twat who wasn't listening to the words that were coming out of my face is a reason I suppose).

Let's try again.

She got the card ready, pointing the right way and then turned it upside-down again at the last second again.

Drastic action required now.

The penultimate resort for this situation was then attempted. This very, very, very rarely fails. I asked her to pass me the card. I turned it round and gave it back to her with strict instructions to hold onto it where I pointed and not to turn it around or over and just put it straight into the slot.

SUCCESS!!!!

She even managed to get the number right first time.

Then she pulled out another card.

Now, you'd hope that having inserted a card correctly (albeit with more help than anyone should ever need) not twenty seconds ago, she shouldn't have any problems putting the second one in correctly. What do you really think the chances of that happening are?

Fuck all as it turns out.

After only six incorrect attempts (my pataience at this point was running out faster than a Frenchman at a battlefield) to get the card in I tired the same trick with getting her to hold on to a specified part of the card seeing as that strategy work last time. Clearly, she didn't think she'd wasted enough of my time and immediately turned the card upside-down and swapped it to her other hand.

Try again.

Same result.

In the end I had to ask my colleague who was shop-side to put the card in for her before I lost my temper at this prolonged display of total fucking idiocy.

Frankly I think it should be a condition of the card account that if you're too stupid to insert the card without too much instruction then you're clearly too stupid to be allowed to have any money. Someone that dim is probably only going to eat the cash or something anyway so why drain the nation's coffers allowing such sub-human intelligence to continue. With pensioners, it's too late to stop 'em breeding and buggering up the next generation but there's a lot of young people who are nearly that dim.

I depsair sometime, I really do.

Old People and Pensions

It's finally time for volume two in this epic.

Once the coffin dodger has got over the massive and time consuming (for idiots anyway) hurdle of opening their card accounts, the next stumbling block is actually using the damn thing.

Surely that shouldn't be too difficult? People have been using ATM cards for years without too many troubles.

That sadly doesn't take into account your average pensioner's lack of skill with anything new no matter how simple.

The hassle I'm going to cover in this post is the seemingly easy task of putting the card into the card reader. "Surely this won't require a whole post to go through unless it's padded with loads of unnecesary fucking swearing?" You may think. Think again.

The nearly dead are pretty shite at being organised for a start. They may queue up for five minutes but is there any forward planning going on in those wrinkly little noggins?

Nope.

You can be sure that despite the ample amount of time they've had to get preapred while queuing, they'll get to the front and then spend ages trying to find the card which will never be where they think it is. Purses, pockets, wallets and bags are all searched until the card finally resurfaces, ineviatably in the place they looked first but didn't quite look hard enough.

Next come another tricky stage of the operation that manages to catch out about 90% of all OAPs. They have to put the card into the card reader. Easy enough except they have to put it in the right way round. It's not tricky. There are only four different ways that the card will actually fit in and there's even a picture on top of the card reader showing you what way round it goes AND a dirty great big arrow on the card showing which way in it needs to go. Are these clues enough to facillitate easy card insertsion?

Not fucking likely.

Bearing in mind that there are only four different ways that the card can fit in, surely even the most brain dead should have a one in four chance and, at the very worst, take four attempts to get the card in.

Not a bloody hope.

Six or seven tries aren't uncommon. I'd love it if this were an exaggeration but sadly it's not. One old guy even tried to put the card in sideways and one just held the card up to the keypad, no doubt anticipating the touchless credit card by about three years. There are plenty who come to get both their and their spouses pensions so that means you've got to sit through this palaver TWICE! They don't learn from the first attempt. Noooo, they've then got to fuck me around for the second card too. And what makes it worse is what nearly all of them say when they finally manage to get the card in correctly:

"We should be used to this by now."

YES, YES YOU FUCKING SHOULD YOU GOLDFISH BRAINED WASTE OF EVERYTHING. A BARELY TRAINED BABOON WOULD HAVE A BETTER SUCCESS RATE THAN YOU AND WOULD SMELL LESS. SMILING AT ME AND ATTEMPTING SOME LEVITY AT YOUR OWN FUCKWITTEDNESS ISN'T HELPING THE SITUATION. "HAHAH, AREN'T I STUPID, HAHAHA, HAVEN'T I JUST STOLEN SOME OF YOUR LIFE AWAY THAT YOU COULD HAVE BEEN DOING SOMETHING LESS FRUSTRATING, MORE WORTHWHILE AND INTERESTING LIKE SORTING OUT MY RUSTY NAIL COLLECTION USING TWEEZERS."

Hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhrrrrnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnghhhhh!!!


It kinda hacks me off.

Next post in this series, putting the numbers in.