So…I have been teaching Digital Photography for the last 3 months without an actual photo printer. Apparently, even though a veteran teacher who got the digital photo program approved at our school and also teaches two sections of the class could be working on the project of researching and purchasing printers, it is my job. I’m not bitter, per se, just slightly exasperated that this task fell to me as a first year teacher. Anyhow, I have been too swamped to really address the issue all semester, and finally got the process started last week. I talked to the nice lady in the front office who controls all the money (as far as I’m concerned, anyway) and she said I just needed to bring her an invoice that stated exactly how much the printer/supplies would be and the school would cut me a check. Sounded simple enough.
So today, like the dutiful little employee that I am, I used the first day of my Thanksgiving Break to go get said invoice from Office Depot. I brought the little slip with all the printer’s information to the front of the store, explained the situation to them, and politely asked them to create an invoice for me. I wanted two items: the printer and a media cart to put it on. The poor guy at the front of the store looked panicked and then radioed for help. Along comes Mr. Crabby Manager to help Dylan and I in our quest. He made it immediately clear how inconvenient our request was, and impatiently strode to the back of the store to get a price on the cabinet I had requested (seriously, I had to jog to keep up with him). Then he abruptly tells Dylan and I that he’ll be back and leaves us there.
5 minutes pass…and Mr. Jerk Face appears at the front of the store next to a slightly more competent clerk. He rattles off a lengthy set of instructions to her that involves returning the printer and cart, then reselling them, making a copy of the receipt and marking that invoice. Really, really now? He couldn’t have just created something in Word during those 5 minutes he disappeared? This didn’t have to be all that official. The school just needed something to prove the price. So, the slightly more competent clerk…we’ll call her Bertha, starts trying to help us. Meanwhile the guy standing next to her (the employee who panicked at the beginning of the story) can’t figure out how to do an exchange for another customer. Now we have the Mr. Bad Customer Service Manager stalking back and forth between the two clerks barking directions, and finally Bertha just completely abandons us to help the new kid..who we’ll call Biff from here on out.
And there’s a line. This goes on for 10 minutes. Evidently, answering the phones is more important than helping a customer standing right in front of you, helping another employee also takes precedence. To top it all off, Bertha is asking Dylan and I questions about what she’s supposed to do.
Then just when it looked like we might get out of there by the end of the week, we hit the road block. I needed my invoice to reflect tax-exempt prices, because after all, I work for a school, and this is for the kiddies. I explained that I did not bring the tax-exempt certificate with me today, but that I knew I needed to present it at the time of purchase, and was more than willing to do so. I had obviously offended Bertha at this point though, because she snottily replied that that would not work, Office Depot didn’t operate that way. I HAD to be set up in their system. We gave them the district name and phone number and Bertha and Mr. Creep-o Maximus when over to another computer to try and look the school district up.
After another 7 minutes had passed, Dylan went over to tell them to nevermind…we were pretty fed up at this point. When he reached Bertha andMr. Fonzanoon they informed him that they were going to have to ring everything up with taxes because they couldn’t get into their system to find out if my school district was in it. Dylan told them that we would go elsewhere and they just blew him off. No “Sorry we’re completely incompetent and can’t tell our butts from our heads”, no “Hey, our bad, we just lack both the intelligence and courtesy to do our job well”. Nothing.
It was truly a ridiculous experience, so I decided that I would report the situation to Office Depot through their website. It worked with our drycleaners, and I thought that the incident warranted some kind of attention. But…lo and behold, Office Depot doesn’t have that feature on their website. From a few minutes of web research it appears that they have a Complaint Phone Line that is absolutely worthless. Thus, I have now unleashed my irritation on my blog. I doubt that I will ever give Office Depot my business again. I wouldn’t have minded them not being able to help me, but they made me feel like such a pest and were just so darn incompetent that I can’t justify supporting them any longer, despite my unnatural fondness for school supplies.