Customer service....and why I sometimes fail

Just back from a loooong day at work. I think there should be some sort of order of merit for any one who manages to work directly with "the public" and not be arrested, or get sectioned under a mental health act.

So far this week we have had

1. The man with the gun. He brought his hand gun into the shop to show us.He produced it in the shop without warning and started waving it about, he then proceeded to load the magazine, in the shop. We know him, and reported him to the police. He returned a few days later to complain to the manageress that we had caused HIM some STRESS. Apparently it was " joke". He then asked one of the girls to be a character witness for him in court, after threatening to run his car through the shop windows...

2. The woman I spent half an hour with regarding her cough. I suggested various options, then she said, " But I don't want medicine, it doesn't agree with me." I asked her why she was in a pharmacy then, um she didn't really know.

3. I spent half an hour finding the ideal iron preparation for a customer who didn't want constipation or stomach upsets, and a natural product, and , and ,and. Anyway I found something for her needs, at which she requested in addition a product available over the counter that is well known to cause stomach ulcers, stomach upsets, nausea and constipation. When I pointed this out to her, in view of her previous requests she replied that ," She didn't care she wanted them" Grrrr.

4. Having dispensed a lady's contraceptive pill to her she asked me, two children in tow, if changing her brand of contraceptive would mean the she would get pregnant with a girl ............

5. I asked a lady buying nit lotion if she needed a nit comb, to which she replied.." I wouldn't buy anything here, you only sell crap" ( and I do quote) . But you just bought......oh never mind.

Well my halo is slightly bent and I could live without seeing another human being again for a while, but back to work tomorrow.

The road home

This is the way home? There's a road and a bridge under there... promise

Check out the clouds more water coming

Smoking is bad?

Day two on the giving up smoking trial...yes trial not trail. Still hanging in there, but I can honestly say people know it. They know ALL ABOUT IT.

I love support from my supporters, but from the people I don't like when they say "Well done" and " Good Job", I just feel like lighting one up and blowing smoke in their faces. "Think of your health" one said today, "Think of your own and back away" I thought.

Stop preaching to me, I wouldn't be trying to give up if I thought it was good for me. If you carry on telling me how well I'm doing you may find out how good for YOU me smoking was, removing me as it did from your immediate environment.

OOh good , now you can have lunch with us, said one today, Not if I slit my wrists first I thought.

I will succeed and to those with helpful encouragement, mainly ex smokers who feel my pain Thank-you. Thank-you and thank-you again. To the rest of you, Get a life, platitudes do not remove homicidal tendencies and I know you don't know what I feel like from the look on your face. Just steer clear of me while I do the psychotic bitch part of giving up. I may become socialised again in a week or two but at the moment my short temper is going to harm both of us.

DCS has guilty mother woes

My DCS ( see link on left) has had her first visit to A& E with her baby. Frankly I am a little amazed that this is the first one, as a fully trained medical professional I know that meningitis, mumps, ebola and the Plague are surprisingly often suspected in the children of health professionals.

Give a health care worker a good book and some one they care about and they can probably diagnose a complaint or two for each letter of the alphabet. I suspect that her common sense is all that has actually disuaded her from leaving the house with her child tucked under her arm a few times, following her diagnosis of this and similar illnesses.

I just keep thinking what will happen when her baby walks and talks...and opens cupboards. I remember finding child #1 and #2 making a cake for me in the kitchen, well strictly speaking on the kitchen floor, one day as I tried to unblock the toilet ( One small jeep, three lego blocks and something that may have once been green).

I found out #1 could climb when he fell out of his cot at 3am going for a drink, and that #2 could walk when I found her on the stairs, ( #1 had helpfully opened the gate). Luckily experience led me to have #3 and #4 swimming early as the only people pool gates stop are adults. Children stand on each others shoulders to open them.

#4 is also very handy with a screw driver, having dismantled three air conditioning units, a fridge, the car seats and a television before we found out where he was hiding his tools.

#3 helpfully informs me that chickens can't swim like ducks....luckily a test carried out in a washing up bowl.

DCS is in for a shock I think. She always thought my children were badly behaved, and they can be, but they are also inquisitive and intelligent, a deadly mix.

Teenage Piercing / I give up Smoking

Apparently to be popular when you are a teenager you now need a piercing, the more piercings you have the more popular you are.

The way teenage boys slope about is directly due to the weight of metal dangling of various parts of their body. I discovered this when Grumpy got a new piercing and suddenly the house was full of teenage girls come to look at it. MMMM.

Bedroom doors were to be open at all times. One particularly snotty girl told me that at HER house they were allowed to do whatever they wanted, I told her to go back to HER house then. ( She didn't.. but I think "stories" about me may be circulating the teens in the neighbourhood as several of her friends whispered in her ear and dragged her off.)

Today I have given up smoking, which has led to even more psychotic behaviour on my part than usual. I warned every-one in advance, so no blood shed so far, but I have a wide exclusion zone around me. If the UN want a nest of terrorists routing they can send me in. As long as none of the terrorists offer me a cigarette they should all choose to leave fairly quickly.

Bread maker issues

For Christmas I got a bread machine, something I've been after for a long time. I love it. It is a bit slow, but the time factor is not an issue as I haven't got to stand watching it,( except when I want to).

Any one who knows of a machine in Austarlia that makes normal sized and shaped loaves would be a friend for life though. This one makes loaves the right diameter but only "half length" compared to a normal loaf. With a family of six the bread doesn't last long.

Any hoo the issue is this. I've lost the darned measure for the bread machine. Experimentation with measuring by eye has proved to have mixed results. I've done a loaf that had to be scraped out of the machine and was last seen threatening a cat blob like in the corner of the garden and I've done one that I threw to the chickens. It didn't bounce and the chickens are using for a door stop.

Terry Pratchett's dwarf battle bread was made by me in my kitchen!

I am now going to have to go out and buy metric weights ( I know , only two decades late) to make bread with.

Very Wet Indeed

Oh my, in Forest Gump whilst he in Vietnam he experiences a monsoon. I have just experienced a monsoon.

It isn't so much rain as someone pouring huge gallons of cold bath water over your head continually. But it's still hot. This is the largest outdoor sauna in the world.

After three days of this the ground was full,it was so full that water is actually coming up through the floor in places at work, this meets the leaks in the roof quite nicely.

The roads, where you can find them, are being washed away. Us locals have found a solution to this. We get in a line behind a backpackers combi van and wait for it disappear into a pothole, and then use the vehicle as temporary bridge. The council later come along and pour hot tar over the combi van to hide the evidence, who says we don't care about our tourist industry.

The local bridge which is suspended about ten metres in the air, usually over a semi stagnant babbling brook had five meters of water over it. The good thing about that is that once the water level dropped there were no trees attached to the bridge, they'd all gone over the top of it.

Of course now that the water has gone down we have a problem with the wildlife. All our freaky snakes etc have been washed down stream , to be replaced with some stunned looking crocodiles and snakes that had been busily minding there own business, feeding on the occasional unwary tourist, and now find them selves in my backyard.

Most of the roads have moved about three feet East, the run off direction. Regarding run off I hope they are ready for the tsunami in LA. Australia pumped some water into the Pacific the last few days.

The good thing is that us locals are used to this rain fall ( 40cm in twenty four hours over a large area) and just complained about the standard stuff, like, why were we not all at work, couldn't we swim, or get boat? Why had the mail not got through? had the bottle shop run out of beer? ( Answers: We were at home drinking beer watching shocked crocodiles be washed downstream, No the mail couldn't get through, we were cut off, and finally ,No the bottle shop didn't run out of beer, at least not until we got there.)