Oh No Response

There are some customers -who are semi regular- that come into the store and I have this automatic "Oh, No. You again." 

They're also the sort of customers where while you recognize them...you don't see them often enough to remember exactly why they give you the 'oh no' response. 

That situation happened today.

Where I had two people come into the store. 
And I recognized them. 
But I also had the "Oh No" response. 
But it had been long enough since I last interacted with them, that I wasn't quite sure how they'd been difficult in the past.

Mostly because I got the sense that I've had to run the gambit with them in helping them with problems with various animals. 

In today's case.

The customers were wanting to get a bigger fish tank.

Or...at least a fish tank with a different sort of lid on top. Because apparently the cats they have keep drinking from their 40 gallon tank and apparently throwing up in it?? O_o Who knows. 

They were wanting a new 40 gallon tank, but we didn't have any that size in the style they wanted. So they ended up upgrading to a larger 55 gallon size. 

Thankfully I didn't have to interact with them for as long this time.

But yah...I was grateful when they left the store. 

-Sarnic Dirchi

Long Lost Twin

So towards the end of the work day, a while after the sun had set, I ended up going out to gather up all the carts in the parking lot as we'd gotten rather low in the store. 

And apparently a customer saw me gathering carts outside.

Again. It'd dark out. So the only light is the light from the parking lot lights or cars driving past.

And when they entered the store....they saw my coworker who was walking by.

And like stopped dead. And pointed straight at them.

My coworker was like O_o?? "Can I help you?" 

lol and the customer was like "Weren't you just outside gathering carts?" 

And then proceed to ask if this coworker was my twin. XD lol.

Which I could see how people might think we're related.

As we're similar build, have similar hair color, and wear our hair in the same hair style....

So in the darkness of outside I could see how people would think the two of us were twins.

Though standing side by side? Not so much.

Still. It's amusing to think we confused a customer. lol amusing to think I have a twin in the store too. XD 

-Sarnic Dirchi

Finally Heading Home

 So for the past two...maybe three weeks? now we've had a customer calling our store practically every day.

Why? Because they'd returned a guinea pig to us to be treated as they'd noticed he'd been injured in his side. 

Which if a customer returns an animal to us and they want to buy it back after getting treatment...they can't buy it back from us until the animal has recovered from whatever reason it was returned for.

So with the guinea pig, we couldn't return it until the wound on the side healed and the fur in the area grew back.

Already I could estimate it would be like 2ish weeks for the wound to heal and for the fur to probably grow back.

And we told the customer that we would call them when the guinea pig was ready to be taken home.

But the customer....i don't know if they just didn't believe we would call...or was just super worried about the state of their pet...but yah we ended up having to talk to them basically every single day.

Which like....the customer has to realize that wounds don't just heal over night....

And that by calling daily there won't be much to report right away beyond 'we're treating it'

But ah.

It was so nice to be able to call the customer today and tell them that their guinea pig was ready to go home.

As the fur had finally shown signs of growing back, and while I usually would want to wait another day or two to have the fur be a bit longer. The moment that the new growth covered the bare skin...I decided it was time for the guinea pig to go back.

If only to save our sanity as this customer was driving all my managers to annoyance with their constant calls to us to check in despite our repeated assurances we would call them when the guinea pig was ready to go home.

Yah. There was palatable relief when the customer came in and finally took their guinea pig back.

Hopefully they don't continue calling with other concerns...but only time will tell.

-Sarnic Dirchi

1 Part Per Million

 Dealing with customers who like to do 'technical' speak is always 'fun' because half the time you have no idea what they're talking about.

The most popular sort of techno speak is when customers ask for Elodia or Koridorous. Which the former is known as Anacharis in the store and the latter are just our Cory Catfish.

But customers often insist on speaking more sciency when they're wanting those particular things.

It's more amusing though when the customer tries to sound smart but obviously doesn't know what they're talking about.

I had a customer come into the store today who said that their ammonia levels in their tank were 1 part per million.

Which I actually had never heard of the ppm for ammonia until that moment. 

And the customer was freaking out over it because they tested their water and their levels were the 1/1,000,00 which was 'high' to them because they'd had their tank cycling for a couple of weeks? And had apparently put a betta fish into their tank and had it die in like two days.

Which...if there had been no fish in the tank before the betta...and the betta lived only two days...that's not enough time to have toxic amounts of ammonia show up in your tank...not unless the water you used to fill the tank with was already high in ammoina.

No. What was more likely was that bettas aren't always as hardy in the winter time. So more than likely they picked a betta that wasn't as healthy and it ended up not doing well with the stress of travel. 

But the customer wasn't hearing it.

They were convinced it was the ammonia levels.

And like...I have no idea how to read ppm compared to our regular water tests.

but if for every MILLION particles in the water only ONE of them is Ammonia....it sounds like the levels are rather low. Aka there should be no concern there, especially when the customer said that their nitrites and nitrates were fine.

Yet, when I tried to show them the tests we use...the customer was insistant that despite me showing them that they were more likely on the 'fine' side of the spectrum, they were under the impression that the 'low' side was the 'bad' side.

*exhales*

So I ended up recommending a couple of different fish for them to try -they decided to go for platys-and then suggested they do a 25% water change before putting the new fish into the tank.

As most problems within a tank are solved when you do a water change. So if the ammonia levels were actually the cause, the water change would help that.

Hopefully those fish do well. :S Guess we'll see if the customer shows up in the next handful of days with more dead fish....

-Sarnic Dirchi

NOT Self Serve

I don't understand some customers.

Like...we're in the middle of a pandemic....and yet there are some individuals out there who think it's okay to touch things that they shouldn't be touching.

Like today I discovered a customer at our cricket podium...bagging his own crickets.

Which is not something we ever let customers do. It's not a self serve station. We bag up the crickets for the customers.

Mostly because many customers lie. And they would probably bag up 100 crickets and then claim they were only buying like 10. *shakes head*

But yah, this guy just went a head and gave himself 6 large crickets while I was like "Dude, you can't do that."

Did he care? Nope. 

He didn't even properly put things away. Just left them willy nilly. XP 

It had me seeing red.

Like...dude...I don't know if you're new here, but the cricket podium is NOT self serve. DO NOT TOUCH. And like we have a button on said podium that lets you call help to you.

And it was even more infuriating because like...I'd been gone from that podium for maybe two minutes? You couldn't wait 2 minutes to have someone help you? 

Plus it meant that I had to go through and wipe down and sanitize everything he'd potentially touched to be safe.

Yah. Did not like this guy. At all.

-Sarnic Dirchi

A Teaching Moment

 One thing I do enjoy is helping customers who want to learn and are anxious to learn.

Like when the day is slow and there's not a long line of customers waiting to need help. I do love taking the time to guide and teach new pet parents in how to take care of their pets.

I had a customer come into the store for fish. Though they were waiting for the rest of their family to show up.

As they'd bought fish from our competitor in the southern part of the valley (their first mistake as fish from there nearly always die) and the customer wanted to know what they'd done wrong as they'd thought they'd done everything correctly.

So I did my teaching thing and we ended up guessing that it was mostly the fish...but that the customer also has too soft of water and that they needed the water to be harder before adding in more fish.

This was confirmed when the customer had their family bring in a sample of water and I was able to see that yes their water was soft.

But yah.

It was kinda fun -until a rush hit- to help this customer and their family out in picking new fish that would go well in their tank and guiding them in how many to add and other measures to take to protect their fish and such.

Hopefully the new batch does better than the first batch...we'll have to see. 

-Sarnic Dirchi

Busy Busy

 Tuesday has been one of those days that just...gets super busy lately and I don't like it.

At least it wasn't as crazy busy as last Tuesday where we had like a rush for three straight hours.

But today we had a good hour rush from 5pm-6pm where suddenly everyone was in the store needing help and we had to have 2 registers going while also having 2 people at the fish wall catching fish because if people weren't standing in line to check out it seemed like they were waiting for us to get them fish.

So annoying.

Like....I don't know how this hive mind forms. But I don't like my calm mellow tuesdays turning super busy. It's stressful.

Especially when I end up catching the same creatures over and over and over like I had to have caught 3 sets of frogs in a row for 3 different customers today....

It was nice when the rush finally faded away.

-Sarnic Dirchi