Good grief I hate stupid people.
There was this customer who came in earlier today to cash in some lotto tickets and get new ones. Simple enough, I do it literally hundreds of times a week (and am jealous of those who win hundreds of dollars). I don't know how many of you are familiar with how lotto tickets are sold, but scratch-offs (or scratchers) are usually sold in a case clear case, with numbers assigned to them and the dollar amounts highlighted RIGHT ON the picture of the ticket.
She wants to get two number 6 tickets (a $3 ticket), two number 12 tickets ($2 ticket) and two number 3 tickets ($10 ticket). I add them up, tell her total after counting the tickets out to her and showing them to her, and she leaves, and I think all is fine.
All is
not fine.
She comes in almost five minutes later, cuts in front of people in line, and began yelling at me, telling me I gave her the wrong tickets and that I overcharged her. I apologized to her for any confusion and asked he what she meant. She began to tell me that I had given her the wrong numbers and no wonder she spent so much (I'll let you math geniuses add it up).
I just looked at her and told her I thought she told me two number 3 tickets. She said "No, I TOLD you, two number SEVEN tickets!", and started yelling again about how I had upsold her and blahblahblah. At this point it's really hard for me not to laugh but I manage!
Finally, even though we're not supposed to do this, I could see she clearly hadn't scratched off any of the tickets and I offered to let her exchange them for two number 7s and I would gladly give her the difference back. She then went off on a tangent about how I should KNOW what tickets she always buys and that she would NEVER pay $10 for a single ticket, and at this point I just don't know what to do. So I said the following, not really caring if I sounded amused or not.
"Ma'am, I sell literally hundreds of scratch-off tickets per week, I have no way of knowing what tickets you buy on a regular basis or what tickets you want to buy. After all I'm not psychic!" and I laughed a little because I thought that would help alleviate the situation. All she did was turn on her feet, mutter under her breath about how she can't afford groceries now, and started to walk out. A co-worker comes over to the desk and she sees him and runs over, demanding to know if he's a manager. He's not. She asks him if he recognizes her, he says yes, and she starts asking him if he remembers what tickets she buys. He looks at me and says pretty much exactly what I did, and she just rolled her eyes and laughed.
A couple minutes later my manager comes out and asks what happened. I told her and she started laughing and when I told her I even offered to trade the tickets around she said she couldn't fathom why the lady didn't want to since I clearly was trying to help her.
My theory? The lady realized she probably wasn't going to win and didn't want to waste the $20. I figure this, because as the customers are telling me what tickets they want, I ALWAYS repeat the numbers back to them, and then count out the tickets in front of them before accepting the payment, just to be sure. After that, it's their fault if they don't realize they told me the wrong numbers.
This was a story I could have told in five sentences but I decided five paragraphs would be better
The formatting keeps messing itself up thanks to the Apollo Forums poltergeist!
