Staggeringly rude customers, a zero hours contract and a lesson in real life

Jonathan Brocklebank

ARECORD 75.2 per cent of Scots were in employment during the three months to the end of June and I am delighted to report my daughter was one of them.

I am also happy to confirm the work was demanding, the pay not much above the minimum wage and that, because she was on a zero hours contract, her employers held all the aces. All characterforming stuff.

I am less thrilled about the fact some members of the public were unpleasant to her as she went about her duties, but I think I am getting over it. Now that she has left the job to return to her studies, so is she.

But we remember the hard times. ‘Dad, why are people so bad-tempered?’ she asked, a few weeks into the job.

It was a surprising question from one who worked in the café of the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, the most visited tourist attraction in our land and, to my mind, deservedly so.

They could not be sulking because of all the savings they had to part with for family tickets to view the treasures of Scotland’s past. There are no tickets. Everyone gets in free. Donations gratefully accepted, sure, but no one stands at the exit with a begging bowl and a pleading gawp like they do after ‘free’ shows at the Festival Fringe.

Nor could it be the mediocrity of the collection which got up visitors’ noses. The collection is outstanding. I particularly enjoy the natural history section which has a T. rex and a sabre toothed cat. For excellent reasons, it also has far fewer animal escapees every year than Edinburgh Zoo where tickets for a family of four cost £58.50.

‘I really don’t know but I’m sure it’s nothing you’ve done,’ I replied to my daughter at length. ‘Maybe they’re just angry people.’

Rude too. One man with a tray was kept waiting a few seconds on his journey to the till as a young waitress on a zero hours contract earning £8.50 an hour replenished the cakes stand.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, getting out of his way.

‘Don’t be sorry,’ he said. ‘Just move.’

Anxious

Then there was the lady grump who approached this same member of staff while she was manning the till. It was lunchtime and the queue of diners anxious to pay and be seated was threatening to turn into a Cecil B DeMille movie.

But now the lady customer was holding a tray of empties she had removed from her table and demanding the till operator relieve her of it. But the till operator was frantically till operating.

Unimpressed with the promise that another staff member would attend to it directly, the customer plonked the tray on the floor in front of the till and stalked back to her table, leaving the young employee with a health and safety issue to add to her worries.

The customer is always right? Really? You haven’t met some customers.

There is no suggestion, of course, that any more than a small minority of National Museum of Scotland patrons are beastly to café staff – or that they are any better behaved in Starbucks.

But it is the needlessly impolite and antagonistic customers who linger longest in the after-hours reflections of eager to please young employees – the ones who make them worry that they are failing when it is more accurately they who are failing impressionable new members of the workforce.

But are they, in their own crotchety way, doing those greenhorns a service too?

‘Oi, barman!’ a customer shouted at me one Saturday night when I was around my daughter’s age. Obediently I went to inquire how I might be of service but my words were drowned out by my boss whose forefinger was suddenly very close to this customer’s nose. He was telling the customer how uncomfortably his bottom would descend on to the pavement outside if he ever again tried to summon a member of his staff with the word ‘Oi’.

I served this customer without incident for months thereafter, always with an agreeable image in my mind’s eye. His rudeness had taught me as important a lesson as it had taught him: bar people get respect. Always.

On another occasion, as a novice caddie in St Andrews, I advised a fractious company director from the States that a decent four iron would probably get him to the green.

Disaster

‘Gimme the four,’ he barked and held out his Texan paw for it as I fumbled through the bag. The club wasn’t there. ‘Um … I can’t find it.’ ‘You’ve lost my four iron, bud? Is that what you’re telling me?’

It certainly appeared that way, I admitted sombrely.

For two long holes I wondered whether any greater disaster could possibly befall the rookie caddie at the Home of Golf than losing a high roller’s four iron on the Old Course. I’d never work again.

Then I found it nestling under the hood of his driver.

I forget whether he tipped me. I forgive whatever rubbish money I was on for lugging an irritable holidaymaker’s clubs round 18 holes. I just remember that I was in work, making my own way and learning something about people and me.

That’s the headline, I think, for the news that a record number of Scots are in jobs – not the fact some new recruits aren’t coining it in.

Wrong choice: Daniel Craig DANIEL Craig was never right for James Bond, which means the more they pay him the more wrong he becomes. Fleming’s character was as much about the silk as the slaughter. It was the polish of the man that made his deadliness...