“The customer is always right.” Well, except for when they’re wrong. I don’t just mean they miscalculate the price in their heads and try to tell you that you did the math wrong. I mean sometimes they are so wrong that a team of scientists armed with the latest technology could not decipher the processes that had to occur in this customer’s brain in order for them to verbalize their wrongness. Anyone who works with the public can tell you this. Hell, probably anyone who has ever been in public can tell you this. However, as a teenager who basically one-man-shows a bowling alley on weekends, I get some pretty interesting characters who deserve their own showcase.
The fact that I’m a teenage girl automatically makes some customers uncomfortable. I don’t know why, but the idea of an eighteen-year-old female fixing things makes them shake in their boots. There are very few parts of the bowling alley scene that I am not capable of handling on my own, and usually the pinsetters are something I can handle. Occasionally, I’ll get someone who will start to inform me that their ball is stuck or their lane has a jam, and then they freak out when they realize that I’m about to walk back and handle it myself. “Oh no, sweetie, maybe call for one of the men to run back and fix that. You go make someone a hamburger or something.” Then, when I say that there are no men and it’s just me, they offer to go back and do it themselves. For all of you non-bowling alley mechanics out there, let me educate you momentarily on pinsetters. Our pinsetters have 1,470 moving parts per machine. I have not only studied manuals, but have been informed firsthand by people who have gone to school for this exact thing, how to fix and properly maintain whichever part is acting up. So, dear customer, you walking back there and just poking around until you think you’ve done something isn’t going to happen. I have actually had customers walk up to my male friends and inform them of any problems before they even think to tell the girl behind the counter. Then they just roll their eyes when my friends spread the message to me. After I successfully get in back, fix the problem, and return to the counter, said customer usually refuses to make eye contact with me and relies on the other members of their party to handle communication with me for the remainder of their visit.
Not all of the customer mistakes are in thinking that I am incapable of doing a “man’s work,” however. Sometimes, they’re just wrong in the common sense department. I may be wrong, but I believe that there’s an assumed list of things you just don’t walk up to a stranger and tell them about the business they are working in. On that list: “Ma’am, the plunger in the women’s restroom looks like a sex toy, and it concerns me,” should be in the top ten. My boss and I were standing behind the counter discussing which size rental shoes we were running low on when a southern gentleman walked up to the counter and tapped on it to get our attention. We both looked at him, and that was the sentence he chose to say. My boss looked at me, gave me a head nod as if to wish me luck, and walked out of the front door. I’m not trained for that kind of statement. I didn’t feel like apologizing was the right move, smiling and nodding was not even an option, and I wasn’t about to ask why this guy was checking out the furniture selection in the ladies’ room. What was this concern he felt the need to tell me that he had? In the few seconds we just awkwardly stood there looking at each other, I hit the speed dial button on my cell phone and called the bowling alley. I said “I’ll be back with you in one second, Sir,” and picked up the phone and acted like it was another customer, and he walked away. Later, I walked downstairs to check the restroom toilet paper levels and such and glanced at the plunger. It looked like any other plunger out there, just a suction cup with a pole. To this day, I’m not sure what he was on about.
Sometimes the restaurant aspect of the bowling alley is my favorite part. You get people complimenting your cooking, telling you that you did a great job, and asking you to re-bone your boneless wings. If that last part made you do a double take, join the club. I was taking this lady’s order, and she said “One order of hot wings, but this says that they’re boneless. I don’t want them boneless, I want the bone to be put back inside of them.” This was one of the many instances where I was unsure if the customer was joking or actually asking me to do something. After she didn’t smile for a few seconds, I realized that she meant business. “I’m sorry, but we don’t have the bones on hand in order to do that,” I said. “Well then, just don’t remove the bone,” she replied. I can only assume that she assumed that we had a hidden chicken coop somewhere and that I was going to personally go get her nine wings with the bones still in them. After I explained to her that the only wing option we provided was boneless, she changed her order to french fries. “But I want them to be cheesy fries,” she yelled at me as I turned to start the order. “Alright, I can put a cup of our nacho cheese on the side,” I told her. “No no no no no,” I heard. I turned back around, half-expecting her to ask me to just melt some Kraft singles over some garden-fresh potatoes, but what she actually said was worse. “You have those cheese balls. Take those and un-bread them, and then melt that cheese on top of the fries.” I stopped, thought about it, and, against my better judgement, decided that it was doable if I cooked the cheeseballs and then just peeled the bread off of them. I started ringing up and order of cheeseballs and tell her the cost, and she lost it. “Excuse me? I am not paying extra money because this establishment doesn’t provide bone-in wings or proper cheese for french fries.” I tried explaining to her that she was basically ordering french fries and cheese balls, but combining them into one dish. I understand that arguing with a customer isn’t wise, but just freely giving them the menu item that costs the business the most money isn’t very good for job security. After a long back and forth, I eventually got her to change her order to just french fries “with extra salt” (much like her attitude), and she was relatively okay for the rest of her visit.
A final common problem with our customers is the fact that they do not want to watch their own kids. If the family is in a public place, it is apparently the worker’s job to not only cook, clean, fix things, bartend, and man the counter, but to babysit as well. For the sole reason that I don’t want to see kids absolutely destroy my bowling alley, I sometimes cave in and find myself keeping an eye on the small demons. Once, a kid sat next to the counter for an hour before I heard anyone at her table ask “Where’s the little one?” I usually find myself telling kids to stop running and to not play with the heavy bowling balls. In fact, that’s exactly what I told this one child, who then proceeded to run straight into the 16-pound ball rack and knock three of them onto himself. He screamed and cried, and then his mother screamed at me because I didn’t stop it. In other instances kids will start running down the actual lane and fall on their butts. This, too, is somehow my fault. I mean, I guess there’s a chance that I was the one who put oil on the lanes, but that’s bowling alley maintenance. There is a definite line as to where you stop walking. That line even has a sign next to it saying not to cross it. Before customers even type their names in they have to press a button that says that they agree to the rules that they have read on the screen, and not crossing the foul line is one of those rules. I’m also usually the one who has to go save this kid and escort him to the counter for a new pair of bowling shoes. At what point do you, as a parent, see your child doing something that will probably end in them getting hurt and say to yourself “Wonder when that employee who is handling other customers right now is going to stop this?” I have seen children, and I mean young children, just walk out the front door before. I once had to sprint into the road in front of cars, which thankfully had slammed on their brakes, grab this stranger’s kid, and carry him back inside the bowling alley, and didn’t even get a tip or a genuine “thank you” for it. I am all about being really into bowling, but please, don’t sacrifice your child for it.
I don’t expect customers to always know what’s going on, or to be experts at bowling alley etiquette. That being said, sometimes it would be nice if they would be experts on human etiquette.
