MLAARE -Inside the Bag

I was just about to get off shift.
When my phone rang.
Not my personal phone.
But my departmental phone, where people call to ask questions and such.

And on the other side.
Was a gentleman looking for a particular brand of dog food.

>.<
I hate calls like this. People hear the words "Pet Care" and automatically assume that it means the whole store, when in reality it means the specialty pet section. Which is basically every animal BUT cats and dogs. *sighs*

In any case.
This gentleman was looking for a particular type of dog food.
He told me the name of the brand.
But he wanted it to be more specific than that.
Yet he couldn't remember any other detail.

Well....any other helpful detail.

He told me that the food was "Hard brown pieces, with softer yellow pieces of chicken in it."

O.o
You don't know how often I have people who say that to me.
"Oh you know, I'm looking for the cat food that has star shapes."
"Do you have the dog food that's light brown, kinda octagonal in shape?"

It's like they expect us to have a wall of glass tubes in the backroom with every single dog/cat food that we carry, with pictures of the bags, and samples of what the food looks like on the inside for us to learn and know by heart.

Well...we don't.
Unless we use the food ourselves, we have no idea what the food inside the bag looks like.
We know the outside of the bag really well.
The inside?
Not so much.
We're lucky if we get a picture of what the food is supposed to look like on the outside of the bag.

And this gentleman was insistent that we should know what food he was talking about just by hearing the description of the dog food itself.

Uh....

Well, after putting him on hold to talk to a couple of other coworkers/managers.
I narrowed it down to basically the only choice I could of the brand he was talking about.

It took a while to convince him that what I was recommending was what he wanted.
"I'm looking at the bag sir, the picture shows the food is brown with yellow bits of shredded chicken in it."

Finally, he was convinced.
And he hung up a happy customer (Hopefully he remained happy when he came into the store to check out that product.) grateful that I had stuck through with him and hadn't just passed him off to another coworker -though he'd asked to, I decided to just follow through to the end.

-Sarnic Dirchi