I am Trevor

I’m a fan of the site notalwaysright.com.  Especially this one. (True story by the way)

If you aren’t familiar with the site, it’s stories people tell about when they worked customer service and had to deal with difficult customers.  Something I know way too much about as I’ve worked at three different record stores.

Like the time when we were having a sale on rock T-shirts and my co-worker told me to go look at what a couple of our customers were doing.  As I turned around the corner they had spread the T-shirts across the floor and were standing in the middle deciding which one to get.

Or the time I was ready to close the store and a woman came rushing in holding an iPod knockoff.
And in a panic said, “This is thing isn’t working! Nothing I’m doing will get it to work.” 
To which I replied, “We don’t sell MP3 players.”
“Yeah I bought it on Ebay.”
“Ok?”
“Fix it.”
“Well… I don’t know how, I don’t even know what this is.”
“You work in a store like this and don’t know how to fix this?”
“Do you even know what store you’re in?”

Other times you had to deal with less funny more dehumanizing people talking on their cell phones while pay for stuff. Or even worse the angry for the sake of angry customers.

People who get angry because you checked their ID when they used a credit card are just wrong.  If someone stole my credit card I would hope that someone checks their ID.  Identity theft is huge but they decide that instead of saying thank you, they’re going to yell at you and treat you like a piece of dirt.

I was complaining about customers one day.  I was getting pretty worked up and saying that they were all jerks.  Then I realized that these people were actually a small portion of the customers we got. Most of the customers we’re really nice people, who just came in to buy a CD.

It was the rude ones who stood out in my mind.  The good ones got pushed to the peripheral.

When I realized this it became a lot easier to deal with the bad customers because I new the good ones were right around the corner.

There were so many nice people that came in my store.  I had so many great conversations with people but it was the awful ones that defined in my mind what a customer was.

I think we do this a lot in everyday life. We let the negative stand out and ignore the good.

So my new goal is to work on rewiring my brain to find joy in the amazing and write off the awful.  Instead letting the terrible fester and ignore the awesome.

Let’s do the same.  Let’s start embracing the awesome.

Like this for instance.