Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Annoying customer habit: approaching a staff member with a request phrased…
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2002 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Annoying customer habit: approaching a staff member with a request phrased as a single word. "Chess." "Gardening." (At least one staffer regularly replies to such unmannerly requests in kind, with arbitrary words, e.g., "bingo.") Leonard theorizes that these people have been overly conditioned by search engines.
Today a man approached the register and asked, "Where's Hawaii?" Inevitably, I replied, "It's west of here." And then I showed him to the Hawaii section of Travel, which indicates to me that I'm not a complete smartass.
