March of the Acronym People

Collectively at the store we had an interesting day yesterday.

The Barbie lady came in.  No, she didn't buy barbies.  She bought three 25 pound bags of cat food (among other sundries.)  Is this an uh oh moment?

I haven't mentioned the OCD (Obessive Compulsive Disorder) lady before (that I remember) because she's very nice and compared to a lot of our other customers, she simply doesn't stand out as much as, say, Mr. Boston with his lovely accent, gambling habit and the wonderful way he learns and uses all our names, or Pretty Lady man who comes to BiMart because of all the "pretty ladies" and goes around the store telling us all how we're the prettiest.  

Yesterday, OCD lady really stood out.  She got one of our best checkers, thank goodness, a young lady with the patience of a saint.  I've never seen OCD expressed through another person before, so I thought I'd mention it.  After the checker rang through the entire order, the debit card didn't work due to insufficient funds.  The OCD lady was convinced there were sufficient funds, there had to be.  So she instructed the checker to void one of the items, put it back on, and then the OCD lady would try the card again.  For half an hour.  The checker's break came and went.  This caused a service snafu (effectively leaving us with only one checker) but we handled that from the sidelines.  The trouble was how to finish the transaction with a minimum of trauma.  Finally I flagged down our RVP superhero guy (Red Vest Power) and sent him over to help.  No dice the first round.  RVP guy retreated, watched for a few minutes longer, then decided to take a chance.  He broke the cycle by convincing her to go home and call the bank.  She didn't want to until he assured her that we would keep all her selections in their current bags, in her chosen shopping cart, until she returned.  So that'll be waiting for me when I go in to work today.  I'll guard it with my, well, not my life, but every customer service bone in my body.

I feel badly for her.  At least she came to our store.  I doubt other places have the patience with her.  I'm worried that she's standing out now because she's either off meds or she never was under medical care and is getting worse.  Sigh.

Finally, at the end of the day, our RVP guy came up to the front with a customer and he seemed enthusiastically agitated.  ??  We'd locked the front doors and had turned out most of the lights trying to get all the customers up front and taken care of (no paint lady, thank goodness, just regular orders so it was going quick) so I seemed puzzled by how RVP guy was apparently trying to keep this customer up front.  RVP guy wasn't taking his time so much as going way above and beyond our normal spectacular customer service.  ??  And then I caught a critical part of the conversation.

"I don't know how this could be happening.  You guys see me come in here all the time," the customer said.  "And I write checks all the time.  I haven't heard anything about bounced checks from my bank."

Bing!  It's thousand dollars of check debt guy!!  TDoCD guy was standing right there within throttling distance of my super, but my super wasn't working that day.  Lucky for him.  I could imagine her launching herself, grabbing him by the throat while her weight powers him down, and shouting "Call the police!!"  RVP guy decided that he couldn't do that, it turned out, because all the bounced checks, (did I mention there was a thousand dollars worth of them?) had already been shipped off to loss prevention only three days ago.  He was certain that if we did call the police, we'd have no proof of wrongdoing.  Denied!  TDoCD guy was trying to make it sound like he was a victim of identity theft or something--I even suggested it and he got all coy with me.  Unfortunately for him, RVP guy and every other manager at the store had seen this guy's signature quite a few times by now on checks.  It was burned into their brains.  They'd also had to initial quite a few because some of them were for over $100, and they check ID on checks over $100, so most of them had looked him in the eye, looked at his ID ...  Yep, this was him.  The checker didn't recognize him, but TDoCD guy was trying to, guess what, write another check for over $100 and RVP guy went over to initial it--and then said he wasn't going to accept the check.  That's when the games began.

But we had no proof on site for fraud, so TDoCD guy walked out a free man.  For now.  Little does he know that the phone number RVP guy gave him was for loss prevention, not customer service.  Hopefully they'll convince him to come in to 'straighten things out' where he can land solidly into waiting handcuffs.

So I was late getting home, and sore, and drained.  It was kinda fun, but sad, and exciting, but annoying, and worrisome, and I guess just one of those days.