Most of the customers were perfectly nice today, and one was vile. She had brought back a greengage that she said had never thrived. She had planted an orchard, and in total spent around £500. She wondered if the owner could tell her why her tree had died, naming the wife of the partnership by name. She handed me the tree, and said it had been out of the ground for a bit.
Customers who choose to flag early in a conversation that they know the owners tend to be difficult. I looked at the roots of the tree, and the customer's phone rang. She answered it, and had a long conversation about (I dedeuced) the performance of some children in some competitive arena or other. A long conversation. Not a 'hi darling, I'm just with someone in the garden centre, call you in five minutes' sort of conversation. I finished looking at her tree, and waited for her to finish her phone call.
I explained that the manager rather than the owner was the person to help with dead plants, and authorise replacements, and he would be in on Monday, if I could keep the tree and get him to look at it then. I asked how the tree had been planted. She said it had been planted the same as all the others, which were all fine. She hadn't planted it herself. I said that the manager was the expert, but to me the roots looked in good condition, while the bark had rotted at the base of the trunk, and looking at the soil marks on the stem, which seemed to go all the way up to the graft point, I wondered whether it had been planted too deeply. She got very aggressive and very rude. She didn't want to know why her tree had died at all. She had spent five hundred pounds and wanted me to give her a new tree, no questions asked, and she was very disappointed by my attitude.
I stuck to my guns. The rule of the business is that I am not authorised to give out replacements. I am supposed to use my discretion if I think the customer has a genuine case, as we don't want to upset good customers, but I am not supposed to dole out free trees willy nilly to people who have managed to kill plants that were perfectly good when they left our nursery. And she was very, very unpleasant. Advice to any of you who haven't worked in the front line of a service industry, or are more accustomed to calling the shots than receiving them. Try charm. Try getting the staff on your side. They will feel so much more inclined to bend the rules on your behalf than if you come at them like the cook bawling out the thirteen year old scullery maid.
Being offensive to shop staff or waiters who haven't been rude to you is one of the most pathetic forms of social interaction there is. I once told a fellow (first class) commuter who was being gratuitously horrible to the guard on the intercity out of Liverpool Street about a broken carriage door to leave the man alone, since it wasn't the guard's fault the door was opening and shutting randomly. The door was very irritating, but the guard was not responsible for maintenance of the train, and there was nothing he could do about it at that moment. This did actually make the grumbler shut up, though I suppose in other circumstances it might have resulted in my being punched on the nose. Picking on people who are not responsible for the problem and are not in a position to retaliate in kind is such a low form of behaviour. Don't do it. If any of your friends do it then rethink the friendship. You don't want people like that in your life. Social generalisations can be dangerous things, but I'm afraid that the rudest and most horrible customers do seem to come predominantly from the upper end of the middle classes.
All the other customers were pleasant to downright delightful, but one nasty person negates the beneficial psychic impact of twenty good, and I went home with a headache and neuralgia. Tomorrow I'll find out if I should have just given the horrible woman a free tree.
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