How Do You Spell That?

Besides catching evil parakeets and putting back fish ornaments into the tanks,
I have to say that my least favorite thing to do at work is answer the phone.

Because you never quite know what sort of situation you're going to find yourself in when you pick up the phone.
It could be as simple as "Do you guys carry guinea pigs? How much are they?" And you're good.
Or it could be a question that involves more than a two second answer.
Or it could be that the customer just needs to be transferred back to the grooming department because they ended up ringing out to the main part of the store.

It used to not be so bad, because my store has specific phones for specific calls. One for customer service, one for dog training, one for my department, two for grooming, etc.

But the past couple of weeks....
Something has gone wonky with our phone system where the division of calls to specific depts between the phones....doesn't always happen. (that or else the managers have gotten really bad at answering the other phones.)

So I've been answering a lot more phone calls recently where customers aren't always asking questions relating to my department.

*shakes head*
In any case.

This particular phone call was kinda in my dept.
As it's not uncommon for me to field questions in relation to the adoption groups that come into the store, as customers are always calling and asking when they're going to be in our store or what kind of dogs they bring in, how much fees are, etc.

So I picked up the ringing phone for probably the twelfth time in the last hour.
And on the other end of the line was an older woman.
She sounded like a grandmother.
Who was insistent that she wanted a teacup yorkie female dog.
And that she'd been told that our adoption groups came in this Saturday, and that she wanted to know if they had any teacup yorkies.

To which I started to explain to her that the adoption group wasn't coming in today and that they commonly have mixed breeds. It's rare for them to have full breeds in their adoption events.

But she interrupted me, asking me to speak slower. Because she's a 'slow thinker' (her words not mine) and she needed to comprehend what I was saying.
So again, I repeated it. I didn't have adoptions today. I would have them next Saturday. They'd be coming in about 1. Call back then. I don't know what dogs they carry. Usually they're mutts.

I basically had to repeat that information three times. With her repeating back to me what I was saying to her.

It was a very long conversation....which I wouldn't have minded...only I was by myself in the department (due to a scheduling error) and I had at least three other customers waiting for me to help them. (I shouldn't have answered the phone but I thought it would be a quick question and the managers had yet to really pick up the calls, I felt like, and this one was actually my dept specific)
So while I was explaining the adoptions to her, I was also catching fish and counting crickets and such.
-Which by the way it's not the easiest to count while listening to another person talking, but I managed.

In any case. Because we didn't have any dogs today, the woman on the phone wanted to know what other places could be carrying dogs. So I gave her the names of a few. But couldn't give her the phone numbers to the places because I don't have that at work.

Beyond wanting the phone numbers, she also wanted to know how to spell the names.
And one of the names of the local pet stores has "Ark" in it's name.

But for whatever reason. She couldn't comprehend that word.
Ark.
Like in Noah's Ark?

Yah no.
She had me spell it out and it basically went like so.

Me on phone with customer: Ark.
Customer: And how do you spell that?
Me: A-r-k
Customer: A-R-C??
Me: No, K...
Customer: C?
Me: No, K as in Kitten
Customer: C?
Me: K
Customer: So A-R-C
Me: *gives up* Yes.

Really....I must have tried to probably spell ark out to her at least a dozen times before I gave up on it and let her spell it out as ARC.

Because for what ever reason she couldn't hear the difference in what I was saying.

Which is weird.

You'd think that 'KAY" would be noticeably different from "SEA"

But to her, no it wasn't.

Whenever I said "K" she would hear "C"

*shakes head*

Hopefully she managed to find that store...because I did what I could to get her on the right track....

-Sarnic Dirchi