You Lost My Film!

At my ever-joyous workplace people never cease to piss me off. We have a send away film developing service like countless other stores and like most of the other stores, the company that handles this service is called Qualex. The people that work at Qualex are not the brightest bulbs on the Christmas Tree of Knowledge and often times will lose some of the film that is sent to them. These mistakes usually go unnoticed by the staff because from what I gather, these people develop somewhere in the neighborhood of 250,000 packets of film a day. If a few get lost so what, the other 249,800 packets went through just fine. What Qualex has a hard time grasping is that when they mess up, people like me are the ones that get to cope with their mistakes. Punks.

Just that happened today. A lady comes up to me and says that it has been several weeks and her film had yet to be returned. Average turnaround is usually 2-3 days. I say no problem and ask her for her packet stubs that the top of each packet comes equipped with. It is on these stubs that I find valuable tracking information that will help me trace this person's prints. Of course, like every other head of cattle that come through the store and lose film, this wench does not have her stubs. Her reply to me was, "No, I don't have them. Of course not, you expect me to keep them."

Every person that does not have their stub has the exact same response for the most part. Just because the top of the envelope says to keep your stub does not mean you have to, of course not, that would be too easy and actually require a person to keep track of something...heaven forbid. Odds are most people don't read the extraneous stuff on the envelope anyways. What people don't realize is that in order to trace film, I MUST have that little pointless scrap of paper with the envelope number on it. When I tell people this, 99% of the time they say this, "Well..HMPHF...can't you just look it up by my name?" I then reply that I cannot and I MUST have the envelope number. The next response is, "Well, I can tell you the exact day that I left the film here. Can you locate it by the date?" Again, I reply no and that I MUST have the envelope number. Then comes the best part.

The people realize the futility of talking to me without possessing their envelope number and try to make me pity them by saying, "Oh, well these pictures were of my daughter's wedding," or "These are the pictures from our once in a lifetime trip to Bumfuck, Africa." This is the part of the interaction I love the most. Today, the lady's pity plea was that her pictures were of a big family reunion. After she tells me this there is a pause and I can see a pleading look in her eyes. I then tell her AGAIN that without that envelope number there is no way I can locate her film. The pity story pisses me off because obviously if these people had cared that much about their precious lifetime event, they would have taken the film to a one hour processing shop and paid a measly twenty cents more to have their film done that day by people they can actually see and talk to. Imagine the convenience of it! But no, they send their film off to total strangers that don't give a damned about their film so they can save less money that what it takes to by a stamp. Retards!

The lady then gets angry at me when I ask her if I can help her with anything else and tells me that I already lost her film and that was enough for one day. She is pissed at me because she was careless enough to send her film to total strangers. Usually the customers get angry when they realize I care less about their film than Qualex does. I am a heartless and cold bastard.

I came about a rat's butt hair from telling this lady to "Fuck Off" to her face. The sad part is that I can feel myself caring less and less about the consequences of me doing this and I know that one day I will probably say something I shouldn't. When that time comes, it will be sooo much fun. Once you cross the "nice" threshold there is no reason to come back. If you say one thing that will probably get you fired why not say three or four, you’re still getting fired. One day I will lay into a customer and I pity that person. In the mean time, I will remain employed. Unfortunately. :)