Chapter Eight

Unfortunately, it was proven that customer service was not a competent position as a whole within the confines of the Fresh Face Co-Op. When Sara wasn’t around to run the front desk, it was occupied (or abandoned) by a dullard typical of the rest of the front end, only with the benefit of having been employed there for longer than four months.

It was early on in my first week that I witnessed a customer relations catastrophe taking place right in front of my eyes at the customer service desk.

This was while it was being manned by a glassy eyed girl who I would say was college-aged had I determined she was intellectually capable of attending college. Her name was Moira.

She was speaking to a tall woman with dark brown hair, almost black, and a very angular body form. She really could have been taken right out of an abstract painting; the pointy jut of her hip was practically cubist.

It didn’t take me long to realize that the customer in question was holding her body like that because there was some sort of disagreement going on.

“But I received the phone call today,” said the pointy lady. “They explicitly told me that my order was in and that I could pick it up here.”

Without even bothering to give the space around her a second glance, Moira shut the customer down.

“I think you’re confused,” she said. “They probably meant something else. You should listen to the voicemail again, because it is definitely not anywhere around here.”

The customer lifted up her phone and offered it to Moira.

“Do you want to listen to it for yourself?” she asked. “Because someone from here called me and said it was here right now!”

“I don’t need to do that,” said Moira.

I could see that Moira was dangerously close to calling security. I had been informed that she had a penchant for overreacting to moments of conflict.

In one instance, she called “stationary” over the P.A. system in response to a shoplifter. This was incredibly inappropriate; “stationary” was only meant for when somebody with a weapon such as a gun or some kind of blade made explicitly for assault entered the store. It was an indication that all managers and supervisors in all departments should come to customer service as quickly as possible. Worst of all, she had done it while she was working a regular cashier position on the floor and Sara had been working customer service. Somehow, in all the confusion, the blame got shifted onto Sara who was completely baffled by the entire situation. (It had been Sara, coincidentally, who had regaled me with this story when I asked her about the mark on her employee record).

If she pulled a similar stunt at this moment in time, the retribution would fall on the right person, but we would lose a potential customer who had already made a special order in all likelihood.

I sighed.

I guess it’s my responsibility to step in, I thought.

Little did I know, I would be thinking that exact line over and over throughout the course of my stay in the Midwest until it became an internal war cry.

I tried to put my mind in a light place. If I were internally stressed, the customer would be able to pick up on that no matter how hard I plastered on a fake smile and the entire interaction would feed off of that energy; that is not good customer service.

“Hey, you guys,” I said as I casually wandered over to the desk. “What’s going on?”

I smiled like I was walking into a conversation between friends rather than two people staring daggers at one another and one of them on the precipice of calling security.

“This lady thinks we have her order here,” said Moira. “But we don’t.”

I cringed internally at Moira’s use of the word “lady” to describe the customer. That was poor manners at best. To combat this, I turned my back to Moira and began to engage the customer so that my body language might convince her that nothing of consequence had been said at all.

“What kind of order did you place?” I asked. “Maybe it’s been placed somewhere in the back.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying!” the lady exclaimed, more exasperated than anyone had the right to be. “It’s produce and it’s a relatively rare fruit, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Dora wasn’t comfortable with keeping it up here!”

The fact that she had been interfacing directly with Dora immediately led me to believe that she was, in fact, correct in her assumptions. Dora was the manager of the produce department and she took care of all the special orders personally. Dora wasn’t an exceptionally rare name, so I was pretty certain that this lady knew what she was talking about.

“Moira,” I said. “Dora’s in today, right?”

“I don’t know,” said Moira.

I gritted my teeth. Moira just continued to stand there like a bump on a log.

“Then why don’t you check the schedule?” I asked.

Moira proceeded to look through binder where everyone’s shifts were listed, but did so at an excruciatingly slow pace. I was certain I was about to have an aneurysm. I cringed thinking that I would have to tell her to either page Dora if she was there or call Dora if she wasn’t there and then we would have to go through an, in all likelihood, equally excruciating process of looking up Dora’s phone number and then calling her and then asking for the customer’s order… this did not reflect well on the Fresh Face Co-Op at all.

Luckily, I happened to see Dora milling about in produce at that moment. I waved her down.

“Dora!” I exclaimed. “Did we have a special order for today?”

“Um… yeah!” Dora said back brightly, but dumbly. “I think so!”

The customer stepped forward.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m Caroline. We spoke on the phone.”

“Oh!” Dora exclaimed. “The miracle berries! How fun! I’ll go get them for you!”

Without a second word, Dora waddled off, her breezy, floor length, hippy chic, skirt trailing behind her.

I approached Caroline after the chipper produce manager was out of sight.

“I am so sorry for all the misunderstanding,” I said.

“It’s not your fault,” she said. “But you have some real issues with customer service.”

The customer seemed a little annoyed, but altogether reasonable with a fairly agreeable temper.

This should actually be pretty easy to smooth over, I thought to myself.

“That’s actually something I’m keeping an eye out for,” I said. “I’m considering incorporating extra training for our employees.”

Caroline eyed me with a very critical look. She gave me the quick “up and down” in a manner that I had not been subjected to since college. It made me feel quite self-conscious.

“If there’s any other feedback you have,” I continued to hide my discomfort. “I would be more than welcome to hear it. I’m currently trying to incorporate changes into the way we do things.”

Caroline continued to set her face in an assessing frame. Her dark eyes were steely with judgment.

“I don’t actually come here all that often,” she said. “I really only make special orders here because Dora has access to rare fruit.”

“Yeah, I’m curious about that, actually.” I said partially to make conversations and partially because it was the truth. “What are those things that she mentioned? I’ve never heard of them before.”

Caroline cracked a smile as if she had just decided something. It put me at ease, somewhat, but it made me curious as to what was going on in her head.

“Oh,” she said. “Miracle berries?”

“Yeah!” I exclaimed. “Those! What are they?”

“So, you’re new here?” she asked instead of answering my question. “I was pretty sure I hadn’t seen you around here before, but now I’m certain because I come in here about once a month for some sort of produce for work or for personal use.”

“It’s my first week here,” I admitted. “I’m actually based out of Green and Associates out in California. We were hired to come in and see what we can do to make business more efficient here.”

“And it’s already working!” Caroline exclaimed. “I swear to god, every time I come in, I pray to God Moira’s not working the front desk. She hasn’t quite grasped the fact that Dora doesn’t normally keep my special orders at customer service like she does with other special orders because they’re often quite rare and theft happens.”

I cringed at this. So, this wasn’t the first time Moira had handled this exact same situation poorly. I glanced over to where she remained at customer service, obliviously picking at her nails. She was going to be a hard nut to crack and I would more than likely have to let her go when the time came to it. This was not an appealing prospect to me as places like this reacted more vitriolically to employees being fired due to the “we’re a family” narrative they liked to push on their employees no matter how poorly they treated them or little they paid them. Also, the threat of firing hanging over anyone put people ill at ease, even if the person getting fired deserved it. So, everyone else tended to react negatively unless they were arch enemies of the employee in question.

At least, that was the case over in California. I had a strong hunch it would be the same at the Fresh Face Co-Op.

“I’m certainly sorry to hear that,” I said, truthfully. “It looks like I have my work cut out for me.”

Caroline let out a peal of sardonic laughter.

“You have no idea,” she said.

“I’m starting to get one,” I said.

“Yeah, well, best of luck to you on that one,” Caroline said. “Like I said, I only come here for very specialized reasons, but some aspects of this place can be really rough around the edges.”

Tell me about it, I thought to myself.

Something shifted in Caroline, as if she had suddenly changed her mind about something.

“Ah, what do I know?” she said. “You probably know this place better than I do. It’s probably under control. Anyway, I’m just salty because of work and then I’ve got this party coming up and my friend has cancer. That’s why I’m here for the miracle berries. They should help.”

I tensed up. Was this woman buying a product to help “cure” a friend’s cancer? I hoped not. Normally, I subscribed to “the customer is always right” mentality of sales, but I had an ethical objection to promising miracles from snake oil. The fact alone that she was purchasing an item called “miracle” berries put me on edge.

“How so?” I asked.

Caroline smiled.

“She’s gone through chemo and radiation and all that jazz,” she began to explain. “So, she’s in the process of recovering from all that, which sucks on its own. But now the medication has royally messed up her ability to taste food.”

With some relief, I nodded. I didn’t know where this was going. The conversation was taking a weird turn. However, I was glad that at least Caroline’s friend had gotten Western medicine from a licensed professional. That put me somewhat more at ease.

“So, these berries are supposed to be good for that,” Caroline went on to explain. “They block the receptors in your tongue that taste more unpleasant flavors. For example, they make lemons taste like lemonade and they make broccoli taste kind of like candy.”

“You’re joking!” I exclaimed.

“No joke,” said Caroline. “My friend told me that even water tastes like old, rusty, pennies to her right now. I was hoping to alleviate that a little bit with these bad boys.”

It had been hard day. Who was I kidding? It had been a hard week! But the fact that I had met someone who thought about other people in this way made my heart sing a little song and restored my hope in humanity (as the kids on the social medias like to say).

“I certainly hope it works out for her,” I said.

“Me too,” said Caroline. “She’s really such a doll. I wish she could make it to my party on Friday, but she can’t for obvious reasons. I hope they can make up for it.”

Dora came back pushing a dolly full of boxes. The boxes in question rattled as she moved as if they were full of little pebbles.

“I didn’t have access to any fresh ones,” she said. “I’m sorry!”

“Dora, don’t apologize!” Caroline exclaimed emphatically. “I knew it was impossible to get them fresh. They grow all the way over in Ghana, for Christ’s sake! How would you ever get them fresh?”

Dora looked down sheepishly at the box.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I was confident I could.”

“It’s all right,” Caroline assured her for a second time. “I was expecting it and I am grateful that you were able to get the dried kind. You really are a Godsend!”

Caroline was showing the qualities of a high-level schmoozer: sociable, outgoing and constantly validating everyone around her. She said she had been stressed out at work; I wondered what she did for a living. Something told me it was rare in these parts.

“Let me help you get this out to your car,” I offered.

“That would be lovely,” said Caroline. “Thank you.”

Caroline then turned to Dora.

“And thanks for everything again, Dora,” she said. “My friend is going to love this. I just know it!”

Dora blushed and looked at her stereotypically hippy type of sandals.

I followed Caroline out the door pushing the dolly full of boxes behind her.

Wow, she really went all out and got a lot of these, I thought to myself. Does her friend really need this much?

From what I was picking up, this Caroline person was the sort who was gluttonous when it came to her own generosity, whether it was with material items, praise or enthusiasm. I appreciated that kind of person, but, my goodness, did they ever exhaust me. My friend Shirley from college had been like that, though not as much as Caroline seemed to be.

“For a minute there, I was worried you were going to think I was crazy,” Caroline said as we walked through parking lot.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Caroline turned my way and gave me a sort of supercilious look.

“Come on,” she beseeched me. “You guys are selling a lot of miracle cures over there at the Fresh Face Co-Op and even though you work there, you’re new and you don’t strike me as the guy who buys into that sort of thing.”

“I like empirical data,” I settled for saying. “But you seem to really know your stuff about these things. So who am I to judge?”

Caroline laughed at this. I could tell that she laughed at things a lot.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m prone to judgment myself. But you’re right about me doing my research. I even did a test run on some I bought a while back just to make sure. They’re weird little things. They’re these red berries that grow in West Africa, right? All the trees are in these tropical forests over there. Anyway, they’ve got, like, this sweetening effect. Doctors use them all the time to bring back the appetite of cancer patients when everything starts to taste weird like it does for my friend! I actually would have been pretty suspicious of them, except this doctor I went on a couple of dates with told me about them a few years back…”

My head was spinning from all the words this woman was saying to me. I could tell she enjoyed talking, which was fair enough. It was a relief to me, because I knew from years of working with customers that the more you got them to talk about themselves, the less you had to say for yourself and the less likely you were to say anything they’d find unpalatable on top of feeling good about what they were saying because almost everyone likes talking about themselves.

“…and for a while I thought about using them when I went on diets just because I was on one where I couldn’t eat anything but bananas and kale all day which I don’t even like,” she continued her stream-of-consciousness monologuing. “But it also increases acidity apparently which would have thrown off my PH levels which would have been bad and, anyway, I was thinking about switching my diet at the time, which I ended up doing.”

We stopped in front of a purple sports car which, I assumed, belonged to the customer who had just been releasing verbal diarrhea in my direction for almost the entirety for our walk across the long, Wisconsin parking lot. It was so shiny and polished, the sunlight that reflected off of it blazed in my eyes and made me squint.

Caroline popped the trunk and I began to load the boxes into the car. To be honest, they were only moderately heavy and I was fairly certain Caroline could have handled them herself; she struck me as a fairly capable sort of person, but the first half of her visit to the Fresh Face Co-Op had gone so poorly, I wanted to go that extra mile for her and this seemed like the easiest way to do it.

“Hey, thanks for everything,” Caroline said when I had put all the boxes in the car. “I mean it, I’m glad you stepped in when you did. Honestly, I don’t know why I simply didn’t track down Dora in the first place. This all would have been settled so much faster that way.”

I shrugged.

“You didn’t know if she’d be there today,” I said. “A lot of times it is faster if you just go to customer service in the first place. At least, I hope it will be by the time I’m done here.”

“When will that be?” Caroline asked.

Hopefully soon, I thought.

“Hard to tell,” I said instead. “I just got here and I’m kind of feeling the place out, figuring out strengths, figuring out weaknesses. You know, that sort of thing.”

Caroline shut the trunk and turned to me.

“You should come to my party,” she said. “The one I was telling you about? It’s going to be such a good time!”

“I don’t want to add any extra stress,” I said. “I know you said it was part of what was stressing you out before…”

“Don’t be silly!” Caroline exclaimed. “The party is the least stressful thing I have going on this week and it’s a fun sort of stressful, anyway. In fact, I love it so much, it’s what I do for a living.”

So, Caroline was a professional party planner. That made sense; it accounted for her extroverted demeanor and bubbly attitude.

She opened the driver’s side door of her car and pulled something out. It was a small invitation on cardstock giving me the date, time and address. It was impeccably typefaced and decorated. I could tell that the person who had designed this was, in fact, a professional.

This intrigued me. It was rare that I met someone with such enthusiasm for their job that they did it in their free time, but here was Caroline who planned parties for a living and not only was she throwing a party on this upcoming Friday night, she was doing so with visible stars in her eyes! I had to know more about this person.

“You really should come,” she said. “You’re new around here and you don’t know anyone. If you come to the party, you’ll be able to meet people and all that. I think you would get along really well with my brother.”

“Is he coming to the party?” I asked.

“Of course!” Caroline exclaimed. “I make sure he comes to all my parties! Otherwise, he’d never go out anywhere!”

That struck me as a little strange. To be honest, most of my friends were the only child in their immediate families, but of the people I knew that had siblings, very few of them hung out on a regular basis. This was especially true of parties and social events that were based around friends and not family.

I wondered why that was and assumed that most people preferred to keep the two worlds separate. I assumed that I would. At least, whenever I thought of my parents partying with my friends, I felt a little awkward. Then again, brothers and sisters were a different story from moms and dads.

Either way, Caroline struck me as really enthusiastic about the idea when she mentioned her brother. Maybe this guy was so cool, he transcended the vague sort of embarrassment one felt about their family when hanging out with their friends.

“Oh!” Caroline added on as an afterthought. “And it’s Sixties themed! So, dress for that. Really, you’re a guy, so any suit that’s period appropriate should be fine.”

“Sounds cool,” I said. “I suppose I could make an appearance.”

Why not? Caroline was right. I was new and had yet to make any friends in this Godforsaken city. The way things were going, I certainly wasn’t going to make any at work. Maybe I should put myself out there a little bit or at least accept this opportunity since I didn’t know when the next one would come along.

“Excellent!” Caroline said with such enthusiasm, her cry of joy echoed across the parking lot. “I’ll see you then!”

Caroline drove off and I returned to the building wondering, for what seemed like the millionth time, what I had gotten myself into.