Are you stupid? (Room 101)

Member Name: mattydalton

Product:	Room 101
Date:	27/12/03 (105 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy life, Less stress

Disadvantages: None

Having thought long and hard about what things I would most like to banish to Room 101, I was surprised to find that the majority of my choices were work related. Ironically, I do enjoy my job to a certain extent. Having walked out on job after job in the past and spent a lot of time on the dole, I have turned into a workaholic. "But what do you do" I hear you cry. Well, if you read my profile you would already know. I work in a taxi office. Not a great job, admittedly, but I earn over £15000 a year. I have to work a lot of hours to earn this, but it doesn't really bother me.

Most of you reading this are probably thinking, "sounds like an easy job, all you do is sit on your bum answering a few phones". Sounds like a doddle doesn't it. Well believe me, it's not. This brings me nicely to the first thing I would choose to put in Room 101, awkward customers. Here is a typical conversation.

Me: Where from?
Customer: I want to go to town.

Now forgive me if I'm mistaken, but I'm sure I just asked "Where from". Am I right? Of course I am, and some soft cow on the other end of the phone is telling me where she wants to go. Are you deaf or just plain stupid? Moving swiftly on, here is another example of a stupid customer.

Me: Just walk down to the office and join the queue.
Customer: What's the number for there?

Well, duh!! You're speaking to someone in the office, so it would be obvious to say that you had already rung the bloody number. Normally, I will counter this stupidity with my own deliberate stupidity and tell them the number it is in the street. Here comes another example.

Me: We're fully booked at the moment mate, I can't take any bookings.
Customer: So, how long will one be?

Here we go again. Mr Stupid has picked up a phone and rung for a taxi. If we?re fully booked and can't take any bookings then obviously we will not
be sending you a taxi. So let's return to the question with this perspective. The question would then be "how long will the taxi be to get to me that you are not sending" Now, when you think about it, you just asked a stupid question! Stop it!

Imagine this. The time is twenty to eight. A customer phones up and I tell him

Me: I've got nothing for half an hour mate.
Customer: Will that get me to town by eight o'clock?

Obviously this customer never learnt how to tell the time properly. If it is twenty to eight and I can't get him a taxi for half an hour, he won't get it till ten past and that obviously makes it impossible to get into town for eight o'clock, because we can't travel back in time yet. Sorry mate, we've got taxis, not time machines.

Abusive customers really used to rile me, but now I just laugh at them. Here's an example of a recent conversation I had with someone.

Customer: Can I have a taxi from the Esso in Hoole?
Me: There isn't an Esso in Hoole, there is an Esso in Boughton or a Total in Hoole.
Customer: I'm at the Esso in Hoole.
Me: There isn't one mate.
Customer: Fxxk off, Kxxxxxxd!!!
Me: HaHaHaHa
Customer: What are you laughing at you fxxxxxg dxxxxxxd?
Me: Who's the dxxxxxxd mate? You're the one not getting a taxi. Hahaha

At this point I hang up, the customer clearly more riled than me. The sudden contraction of turret syndrome this customer encountered while trying to come to the terms with the fact that there is no Esso garage in Hoole, you may agree, is quite a strange phenomenon. Totally unnecessary, and quite frankly, downright obnoxious behaviour. This lad, for no apparent reason, has launched a scathing verbal attack on an innocent victim. As I've already said, it doesn't bother me anymore, but some people can get quite upset. They're in the wrong job, you may say, but they sho
uldn't have to take abuse like that off anybody while working.

The other annoying thing about working in a taxi office is the perception people have of the job. This perception is developed from what we see on the television. If you watch Coronation Street, you will regularly see Steve McDonald with his feet up chatting, with the phone ringing once every three hours. Well this just isn't true. The firm I work for has 240 cars and does an average of about 4000 jobs a day. That works out to nearly three jobs a minute. Not a lot, you may think but this includes the dead hours between 3am and 7am. On a Saturday, we will regularly take 5500 jobs, that's almost 4 jobs a minute. Now think about what a conversation may entail, and how long it will take. Firstly we have to ascertain where you are and with so many people wanting to tell you something totally different, this can sometimes take some time. The old dears like to chat a lot and it is very difficult to get them off the phone sometimes. It seems a bit rude to just hang up. We just haven't got time to talk to people. We are paid to book taxis. All we need to know is where from, where to, what time and possibly a name. A trained customer can book a taxi in about 6 seconds, with some of the rambling customers taking three or four minutes simply for an enquiry. They want to tell you why they have to make a trip and the after a while they decide to ask you how much. For God's sake, hurry up will you! Now can you appreciate how hard it is to take four jobs a minute average with this going on.

Stupid people again amaze me in these stakes. Quite regularly, a customer who has waited half an hour in a queue outside the office will demonstrate their stupidity as soon as they get in the car. "Is it busy mate?" is the fatal question they ask. Well of course it's busy , why do you think you have waited half an hour? Do you think we're all sat round playing cards or somethi
ng, and now and then we decide to take someone home. Not quite. Other people will phone up at ten past five in the evening and act surprised that they have to wait fifteen or twenty minutes for a taxi. "But I have a train to catch in fifteen minutes", they will say. Well, duh!! It's rush hour, so traffic is particularly bad, with total jams in some places. Even if we had a car sat outside your door when you phoned we would struggle to make it to the station in time. Any simpleton should be able to work out that you really should leave more time at this particular time. The disappointment this type of customer experiences is due to television again as whenever you see a film, within two seconds of someone deciding they want a taxi, one drives by for them to hail. The general public really believe this is how it works. Well it doesn't.

Anyway, I feel I better end my rant about work related items I would like to chuck into Room 101, never to be seen again. I think I will move on to a different subject before I bore you all to death. My next choice for eternal exile to Room 101 would be television and radio commercials. I watched an old episode of Eastenders on UK Gold recently that would originally have lasted about half an hour. Because of the amount of adverts shown on this channel, the episode took forty minutes to watch. Thanks UK Gold. You just wasted another ten minutes of my life with visual displays of items I would not even consider buying, or already know about anyway.

Another annoying instance when I have experienced advert rage is when I was watching a football match for the first time on Eurosport. It was half way through the first half, I was watching my beloved Liverpool in the UEFA Cup, and the bloody greedy buggers started showing adverts!! Well, hello!! I was watching the bloody football!! I've just missed two minutes of a match I had been wanting to see, and for all they know, that could have turned out to ha
ve been the best two minutes of the match! How can you people go to sleep at night, knowing how you torment people like me? They even have adverts in the middle of F1 races now. How bloody stupid is that. Theyre having a race you idiots. Do you really think I tuned in to watch bloody adverts. I wanted to watch the F1, duh!!!

I don't want to ramble for too long, as you may begin to see me as a whinge bag, so I will include only one more thing in my selection for eternal damnation in the walls of Room 101. There was only one choice for my final selection and that had to be beetroot. I absolutely loathe beetroot and everything about it. The smell of it makes me feel sick, the fell of it is just horrid and the taste is just absolutely minging. If I was faced with the choice of eating a plate of beetroot and death I would choose death, and I'm being serious. That is how much I hate it. A lot of people reading this may like beetroot, but I think it is similar to Marmite, in that you either love it or hate it. So equally, there ought to be a fair few people reading who agree with me on this one. Please tell me you do!! It's not just me, is it?

So then, let's have a brief re-cap of my selections for Room 101

1. Ignorant customers
2. Stupid customers
3. Customers who think time travel is a reality
4. Abusive customers
5. The perception people have of how taxi firms are.
6. Adverts
7. Beetroot

Now I know, what you're thinking. You're thinking that this is a rather strange list of choices for Room 101, particularly with a lot of them emerging from a job which I claim I enjoy. Of all the things to choose e.g. foxhunting, war, drug addicts, animal testing, cruelty to children, etc.. I go and choose bloody beetroot. Sorry, but they are my choices.

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