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Sunday afternoons for some reason tend to be very hectic. I guess it's partly due to the fact that
we have a hard time finding people that are willing to work on the weekends, and if we end up doing more business than expected, then we run into all kinds of problems, and the day doesn't run as smoothly as it should. This one particular Sunday afternoon, I had a manager trainee working with me who was having trouble understanding the paperwork we were required to do at the end of our shifts. I had to keep running back to the office to help her out, and in addition, I had a cashier who was having trouble under- standing our cash registers. I felt that I really needed to be working closely with him because he wasn't exactly ready to go "solo" yet. With all of my responsibilities in running a shift, trying to make sure that everyone was doing what they were supposed to be doing, and correctly, this wasn't exactly the easiest day of my life as a manager. This manager trainee, every five minutes, kept calling me back into the office over something she didn't quite understand. And at one point after going back to explain something to her, I came back up front to the drive-thru and noticed that my cashier had rung in an order incorrectly. When the customer came to the window, I questioned her about her order so that if corrections needed to be made, I could make them before she paid. Sure enough, her order was wrong. I made the necessary corrections, repeated her order back to her to be absolutely sure, and collected her money when she had told me it was fine. When her order was brought over to the window, I doubled checked everything in the bag to make certain that there was no confusion, and saw that everything was there before handing it to her. I thanked her. She smiled and thanked me and was on her way. Approximately twenty minutes later this woman was back. I answered the drive-thru and she informed me that her order was "all screwed up!". Although I couldn't understand what could possibly be wrong with her order after I had taken the extra time to make sure that it was correct, I didn't argue with her. I asked her to pull around to the window and told her I would take care of it. My cashier didn't have a chance to say anything to her when he opened the window. As soon as that window was open, she hurled a sandwich at him. It hit him and splattered all over the place. We had a mess! I was already stressed, and now I had to deal with someone like this. "Hey, that wasn't necessary!", I said. "I ordered a fucking chicken sandwich, bitch! That is not a chicken sandwich!" "Excuse me?! I repeated your order back to you when I thought that there was a mistake, and I honestly thought it was taken care of when you told me it was fine! Now if you had a problem, then you should have told me about it then. Not twenty minutes later, and by throwing food at my employees!" With that, I had the part of the sandwich that had landed on the window sill in my hand, and I was actually rared back to throw it back at her. But noticing the little girl sitting in the front seat next to this woman, I caught myself. The little girl couldn't have been more than eight years old, and she looked scared. "Go ahead, bitch! I dare you!" "No, I'm not stooping to your level. You can take your money, and your business somewhere else. I don't want to see you in this restaurant again!" Before driving off, she mouthed off a few profanities along with a few racial slurs directed at my cashier, and informed me that I needed to get better help. Maybe I could have handled myself a little better than I had, but when it comes to my employees, nothing gets to me more than a customer who seems to think that it is quite alright to throw things at them, shove them or hit them. Yes, we do have to put up with a lot from people, but a line has to be drawn somewhere. As soon as a confrontation becomes physical, I don't care what the reason is, that customer has crossed that line, and I absolutely will not tolerate that. |