Barrybran - A Year On

[Barrybran]

Yesterday's bag of crazy was followed up with another bag today. Everyone settled down, other family stepped in and everything went back to normal. Long story short, my SIL and her friend, both in their mid-30s had another of their usual high school drama fights and this time, decided to drag everyone they knew into it. My wife overreacted to the situation threatening our babysitter's job and in turn, my ability to work. My wife hasn't spoken to me today but all I know is that I have a babysitter and all is back to normal.

Todays bag of crazy... a customer came into work and was quite difficult to serve, chopping and changing between things. I stayed as patient as I could, finished her order and off she went. A short time later, she comes back and complains about her order blaming ME. This caught me off guard. I'm very good at my job, very attentive and have a high attention to detail. I ask relevant questions every step of the way and the order was made as requested. To have my work questioned was offensive and it took every ounce of strength not to tell her to call her out on her behaviour.

I really didn't know how to handle it. I was the only person in the store, I had followed the customer's instructions and I had to somehow finely balance between satisfying an upset customer, not giving away free food and standing up for myself. I wound up calling my boss because, as I said to her, I wanted to tell the customer to F-off.

Thankfully, I stopped short of being rude to her. I did have to take a lot of deep breaths. I paused for a very long time and I wound up shaking. I just had no idea how to handle the situation. I'm very proud of my work and I'm frequently complimented on it. This was the first time in 13 months that I had a customer complain and it wasn't even my error.

I reflected quite a lot later on. Both last night and today's incidents reinforced that patience was something that I had come a long way in developing but still needed to work on. I wasn't impatient but it reminded me that I need to keep plugging away at it. It also highlighted that I travel along in life with a fairly narrow view of things. Two wild incidents occurred and I had no idea how to handle them. Both people were upset, both were aggressively telling me how to handle things and both were in the wrong and I had no idea how to handle them.

In hindsight, I still don't know what I could have done differently in each situation. Both my wife and the customer were out of line and for some reason, I felt torn between doing the right thing and doing what will diffuse the situation quickest. The customer isn't so much an issue; I can palm her off on to the boss. My wife, however, I have to work with. She's riding the hate train lately and nothing I say is getting through; which is completely expected but makes life very difficult as there are things in each of our lives that affect the other and we do have to work as a team to solve those problems. Unfortunately, her attitude at the moment makes me not want to work with her. I am thankful for family stepping in and calming my wife down. At some point, my wife needs to come to the party and work with me though.

Have I said roll on Wednesday already?