The facility I work at now opened two weeks ago, and on the FIRST DAY we got an entire list of stupid complaints. Since then we have received so many that we are keeping a list of “suggestions” that customers give us that no one will ever see or do anything about.

Today, though, a woman came up to me 10 minutes before closing and told me the sinks in the woman’s restroom were not working (she was the 809th person to tell me that in the last five seconds), so I politely told her that we were aware of the problem and were going to get it fixed the next day. She proceeded to list all the reasons for why it was disgusting that people could not wash their hands…like she was the only one that had ever heard of germs. She went on and on for almost five minutes acting like I was the maintenance man in charge and could fix the problem right away. I informed her that we did have hand sanitizer dispensers on the wall, but that did not please her because she would have had to walk 10 extra feet to use it, so she walked across the entire building to complain to me instead.

Here are more things on the list of “suggestions” (aka complaints):

1. Put blow dries in the family restrooms (because the facility has showers)-this is stupid because there are at least 20 blow driers in the locker rooms that are located a whole 3 feet away from the family changing rooms. Move your butt and use one of those.

2. The sauna isn’t hot enough

3. The sauna is too small

4. Our name tags flip over so no one can see our names-Good, I don’t want you to know my name. I find it creepy than when customers know your name they say it every five seconds and thing your best friends and always come to you when they have a complaint

People need to realize that there is nothing we can do at this point about the size of our sauna. We can’t knock anything down to make it bigger, and none of these suggestions will probably ever be considered so stop wasting your time. Your idea isn’t smart, it’s stupid, someone else has probably thought of it, and I don’t care…at all.

LESSON LEARNED

People will ALWAYS find something to complain about

Another thing that happened today:

In order to look around our facility, prospective members must sign in, then fill out a paper asking their name, address, phone number, e.t.c. They MUST do this in order to speak to a representative and find out the different prices of our facility. Most people are okay with this, but you’ll always have the one jerk that has something against giving us anything besides their name, even though I could look them up in the phone book or online and find out everything I could ever want to know about them. Anyway, this woman I was helping today REFUSED to fill this sheet out until I told her it was the only way she could look at our facility. Then she complained that other guests were being taken in before her (because it till her 30 minutes to fill out a stupid paper), then scribbled her name so I couldn’t read it to add her name to our database…then she wanted to buy a lock for her locker, complained that the lock had a key, complained that we didn’t sell bracelets to put the keys on, then complained that we had to ring her up on a separate computer because the one she was standing in front of didn’t take credit cards.

I always wonder if it ever gets tiring for these people to constantly complain. Complaining does nothing but stress everyone out, and if everyone just calmed down things would be a lot happier and I wouldn’t want to throw customers through the front door.

For example, I had to call my cellphone provider last week to set my moms new phone up for her, and I was on the phone for over an hour speaking to a very helpful woman. Throughout the conversation she thanked me many times for being so patient and I really had a pleasant experience, though it took a long time…but I assumed it would. My point is that sometimes things take more than five seconds. In the case of setting up my moms cell phone, it wasn’t the woman’s fault that the process took so long. She was doing what she needed to do to help me. She was doing her job, and yelling about it isn’t going to get anything done any faster.