About sixteen years ago, my lovely wife and I moved to Calgary. It was a first wedding anniversary gift to each other. The alternative was surely divorce as in the first year of our marriage, I wasn’t exactly the poster boy for excellent husbands…I wasn’t fooling around or anything like that, but I was blowing through cash like a crazy man, and not exactly sharing the state of our financial health with my new missus. We figured we could either give up and go our separate ways, or throw a dart at the map and try for a new start, so that’s what we did, and before we knew it, we were on the road, pointed west.
Laura and I sold almost everything but a selection of our crap we thought would be important, and together with our dog, and a couple of cats took off in the middle of the night. In Wawa, Ontario, one of the cats, Tigger, decided that he could no longer live with us and decided that life on his own was better than being cooped up in our freaking truck for one more minute. I choose to think that he finished out his days as a gas station cat in the woods of northern Ontario.
We had the most horrendous trip to the west, in the crappiest Ford Bronco that you’ve ever seen. We completely overpaid for it, and let’s just say we saw the inside of every transmission shop between Ottawa and the Rocky Mountains. We even spent a day and a half in beautiful Portage La Prairie, Manitoba waiting for a new axle to arrive. Our U Haul trailer, filled with an eclectic mix of our remaining belongings, was left sitting on the side of the highway (covered in transmission fluid, of course). Even now, every time I pass a lonely trailer parked on the side of a highway, my heart totally goes out to the owner.
We arrived in Calgary a week later than we expected, and to our surprise (not), the house we had arranged to rent had been rented, and we found ourselves homeless. Luckily, the landlord had another place available, which, shockingly, was bigger and more expensive. Being stuck, we took it. As we were moving in to our three-bedroom house, it became sickeningly clear that we chose the wrong eclectic mix of crap to truck across the country. We brought a dryer, but not a washer. We brought a mattress, but not a box-spring. We brought a stereo (of course), and some pots but no dishes, and because we had planned to buy new furniture when we arrived, we brought absolutely no furniture. Incidentally, we blew through all of our cash in the Pan-Canadian Transmission Shop Odyssey. We were so screwed.
You can now understand how important it was for me to get a job. Fast. Luckily, I got hired by a hotel in downtown Calgary and started right away. But we were so stuck for cash that by this point, we were selling gold. Not in the dignified way that you sell gold today, by visiting Russell Oliver, or sending it away in the mail, but in the most undignified way possible, pouring it out on a counter at the flea market for pennies on the dollar. You do what you need to, to get the grocery money.
It became obvious that the hotel gig was not going make us rich. It halted the immediate bleeding, but we weren’t improving. By this time, we had gone to a third-hand store (that’s where the crap that doesn’t get sold at second-hand stores goes to die). We picked out two chairs that most likely had something living in them, but they were better than the milk crates we were using as a living room suite. Things were so bad that when the guys who loaded the chairs into the bronco went back into the store, as Laura just sat there in horror, I hit the gas peeled outta there. That’s right, I ripped off two crappy chairs from a junk store. Not my proudest day. The next day, I started looking for a second job.
I managed to quickly find a job at a Swedish build-it-yourself furniture store working in the Customer Service-Returns and Exchanges Department. It was an excellent job. I loved it, but because we had a very, very liberal returns policy in those days, we got lots of stuff returned, and some of it wasn’t even purchased at our company. Lots of crazy people with lots of crazy stories.
So between the hotel and the store, I was effectively working seven days a week. We were making progress in terms of financial stability, and due to an excellent employee discount, and the ability to charge purchases against future pay cheques (just what we needed), our house was becoming fairly well-furnished in Scandinavian style. Where I was improving financially, working seven days a week was having a pretty negative impact on my mental health, and my usual happy and friendly demeanor was pretty much shot to hell. I was seriously bitchy and a little bit tired.
You need to know that there was really only one rule in the department…when you returned an item, you got your money back in the same way you paid for it. For example, if you paid by Visa, you got a refund on Visa. If you paid by cash, you got cash back. If you paid on debit, you got a debit refund. Of course, as with most things, the clerk had the authority to circumvent the rule to satisfy a customer.
At the end of a very busy shift, a customer approached my counter to return a seven dollar can opener. I don’t know if it was the weather, or my bitchy mood, or the customer herself, but something in me snapped. She was completely insisting on getting a cash refund for the seven bucks even though she paid by debit. I dug in. The more she demanded, the more adamant I became, at one point even shouting at her while pointing at the sign that listed the return rules. I was not in the mood to circumvent or to satisfy.
The arguing went on for a few minutes, and I recall very clearly stopping everything, looking across the counter and saying quite loudly, ‘What exactly do you want from me?’ ‘Seven dollars,’ she said. To that, I responded, ‘FINE!’ and turned around to the cash register where I pounded on the keyboard with such force that I’m sure it had to be replaced after my shift. The cash drawer shot open, and instead of pulling out a five dollar bill and a couple of loonies, I opened rolls of nickels, dimes, and quarters and collected the full amount in a handful of change. The poor customer had no idea that she was about to be the owner of enough change to fill a mason jar.
With a big breath, I turned around and slapped the change down on the counter with such force that the coins scattered all over the counter and across the full floor of the returns area. She looked at me with such disgust, and to her I simply said, ‘Have a nice day,’ and I walked away. I’m sure she was crying as she got down on her hands and knees to gather up the shrapnel. I went directly to the store manager’s office and I remember very clearly saying, ‘Peter, you may be getting a complaint from a customer. I’m not sure what set her off, but you know how bitchy customers can be in the returns area.’ I don’t know if she ever complained or not, but somehow I didn’t get fired, I didn’t get reassigned, and I never heard anything more about it. I’m pretty certain however that the customer is probably now shopping at Sears.
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