There’s no time like the rush, is there? You don’t have to have worked the parts counter to understand what that’s all about. Picture being the poor sap making burgers at lunchtime, the bank teller as everybody is trying to handle their business before closing time, or being a package service driver between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. The rush doesn’t mean that you and only you are tasked out to the brim, it means that everybody at work needs to be firing on all eight cylinders in order to make it through to a calmer moment in one piece. Behind the counter, usually that rush starts in the later afternoon and runs through dinnertime. This is when you need everyone available to do their part. Drivers need to be moving, clerks need to be ringing up sales and no time needs to be wasted.

Peak times tends to mean peak stress. When you don’t have parts on hand and you have a customer who is trying (and failing) to keep from taking their bad day out on you, that sucks. When you’ve got thirty people waiting in line and four people able to help anyone at the moment, that sucks. But when someone on the team isn’t pulling their weight, that doesn’t just suck, that’s grounds for a response. There is nothing more irritating than someone who isn’t pulling their weight when they are needed the most. If they are just some lazy screw-off who is on their fourth smoke break of the hour, the solution is simple: bring them into the office, calmly explain to them that they are more useless than a torn plastic bag floating along in rainwater run-off, and cut your losses. If they don’t want to work, that’s on them. But what do you do when the worker is actually a decent individual but doesn’t have their priorities quite right? Maybe a gentle hint will help them along.  I’ll let Mitch tell you his story:

“I worked in the phone room of a high-volume South Jersey jobber/WD in the 1980s and 1990s. The phones rang all day long, and there was no call management or voice mail; they just rang until someone answered. One of our best, most experienced counter clerks was GREAT… at doing exactly ONE thing at the same time! When they  got a call (from one of his many important, loyal, and high-volume customers), he would stay on the phone while he looked up every part in his rack of catalogs, verified inventory, and wrote the invoice… no matter how busy the phones might be. He pretended he couldn’t hear the phones ringing. The rest of us had to pick up the slack for him, every damn day.

One morning before he arrived, I unscrewed the earpiece on his phone, cut a few pieces of paper to fit inside, and screwed it back on. That first day, he asked a few callers to speak up, but overall the paper didn’t seem to have much effect. So, the next morning, I put at least a dozen pieces of paper in there. The second day was GLORIOUS. He kept yelling into his phone:

“Can you SPEAK UP?”

“I’m sorry, can you SPEAK LOUDER?”

All day long, until he was blue in the face, and of course the customers (and everyone else in our store) could hear him yelling at them at full volume. It never occurred to him to try another handset.

At the end of the day, I stopped at his desk, unscrewed the earpiece, took the paper out, and handed it to him.”

Thirty-ish years later, and you can probably still hear the sound of a simmering forehead from the embarrassment. In reality, it’s not about their ability to do their job. By far and large, that kind of dedication to customer service would be a welcomed relief for managers. But to use a meme-worthy phrase: “read the room!” If there’s one ringing phone and everybody else is on the phone, okay, full workload, not much you can do about it. When that situation is going on three, four hours, or all damn day, maybe figure out how to be succinct and cut the conversations a bit short? Rolls-Royce service for Chevrolet-level customer numbers never works out.

Thank you, Mitch, for sharing your story with us! But the fun shouldn’t be limited to just one individual…If you’ve got messed-up stories from your time behind the counter, as a service advisor, or any other career in the automotive service field, share them! CLICK HERE to submit your messed-up moments…and don’t worry, we’ll make sure that your name is left out of it.