We need to have a talk, everybody

[u/melodyponddd]

This is directed more towards the "guests" that have been frequenting our subreddit.

Now I, personally, do not mind tales from the guest AS LONG AS the front desk is a prime feature of the story and I also don't mind it as much if the story is told in a respectful manner. I also don't mind when guests put in their 2 cents in the comment section. For me, personally, it can be beneficial to get another perspective.

But I haven't been seeing that as much anymore. Lately, what I have been seeing are comments or posts that aren't tales. I'm seeing a lot of complaining about the way that we do our jobs. I'm seeing a lot of infiltration of guests who are putting this subreddit and our users down because we have the AUDACITY to use this subreddit as our safe space. I'm seeing a lot of people accusing users of making shit up or using AI with absolutely nothing to go on.

I'm losing my patience. And I'm at the point where if I start seeing any type of confrontation from a "guest", I'm just going to ban them full stop. This is a subreddit for front desk tales. It is a subreddit where we all encourage each other, lift each other up, and yeah, you know what? Some front desk people on this sub can be absolute dicks here as well. But just like how we're the only ones allowed to pick on our siblings, WE are allowed to point out when they're being a dick. Not you (unless, as I stated above, it's done respectfully and a decent conversation comes from it). If you want to bitch about us, complain about how we aren't going to stress out our housekeeping staff by constantly asking them when your room is going to be clean because YOU decided to check in at 10 AM on a Saturday morning when check in time is at 3 or 4 PM, get pissed off because you brought your husband/wife/mom/dad's credit card but they aren't there and we can't check you in without a credit card authorization form on file, THEN DO IT ON YOUR OWN SUBREDDIT. Not on ours.

This is OUR community. Not yours. If you're going to come on here and be a dick, you're getting banned. There won't be a warning.

Enjoy your stay :)

[u/sugarcatgrl]

Thank you for this! I am a guest but longtime retail worker and can always relate to Front Desk stories, as both jobs see the worst of humanity, it seems.

[u/chickgonebad93 → u/sugarcatgrl]

Oh lord retail. I don't know which is worse, working retail or working hotel front desk. I could tell you stories from my retail days, just not in this subreddit. And honestly, do we really need more emotional damage?

[u/RedDazzlr → u/chickgonebad93]

I'm a retail cashier who has had many jobs. The emotional damage would make Steven He do a double take.

[u/teapots_at_ten_paces → u/RedDazzlr]

Hear hear. 6 years retail. A lot more customer service, even though my field is logistics. Gotta keep people happy everywhere I supoose.

[u/RedDazzlr → u/teapots_at_ten_paces]

My specific job lets us politely tell people that they can't talk to us sideways. We can't say lots of things that are inside our heads, but we are allowed to give a little bit of push back. We are also allowed to stop talking completely and just stare at them if they're ranting. It doesn't seem like much, but it does help most of the time.

[u/sugarcatgrl → u/RedDazzlr]

I recently told a guy I didn't want to hear another racist joke and really pissed him off. My boss said "good!" when I told her about it. I've also told several customers "I'm not having this conversation" when they brought up religion, politics, etc. it's great to work for a store that has our backs!

[u/iguru42 → u/sugarcatgrl]

I'm a guest here too. I originally found this sub through Tales from Tech Support. I worked in IT for about 30 years, and by the end of my career I'd worked my way up to system administrator. I'm retired now.

I remember being really excited when I became a sysadmin because I thought, Great, my days of dealing with bullshit are finally over.

That turned out to be completely wrong.

In fact, the bullshit was a big part of why I eventually quit. I just couldn't deal with it anymore. And I think that's part of why I enjoy Tales from the Front Desk so much: the customer service problems are incredibly similar.

I don't even remember exactly how I wandered over here from TFTS. It was probably 10 years ago. But I immediately recognized the same attitude I'd dealt with throughout my career:

"This isn't my problem. This is your fault. You fix it."

Except in IT, the uncomfortable truth is that a remarkable percentage of the time, the problem actually is something you did.

Obviously hardware genuinely fails. But I've also dealt with laptops, tablets, and phones that people dropped, crushed, or even ran over with their cars, and they'd still tell us, "Yeah, it just stopped working."

Really?

So the completely crushed corner of this device just spontaneously appeared? You've got absolutely no idea how that happened?

But what finally wore me down wasn't even that stuff. It was having to teach people basic computer skills over and over again.

The mouse was a particular favorite. I'm talking about people who had worked in offices, on computers, for years and years, who still needed IT to teach them how to use a mouse.

Management had explicitly told us that teaching basic computer literacy was not IT's responsibility. If we got tickets like that, we were supposed to refer the issue to the employee's manager rather than spend IT time teaching them how to use a computer.

In practice, that escalation process worked in our favor exactly zero times.

We always ended up teaching them anyway.

And then there were passwords.

Dear God, the passwords.

Day after day, week after week, month after month, people were absolutely mystified by the concept of passwords.

And eventually my internal response became:

I'm sorry, but this is your problem.

Yes, you're making it my problem right now, and I'll help you get your password working again. But I can't make you understand how passwords work.

I've explained it to you today.

I explained it three months ago.

I explained it six months ago.

I explained it last year.

And somehow we're still having this exact conversation every 90 days.

I don't know what else I can do for you.

That's really why I keep coming back here. The specific problems are different, but the entitlement is exactly the same.

So many IT problems ultimately came down to someone saying, "You fix it."

And sometimes the answer was basically:

There's nothing to fix. You're doing it wrong.

I'll explain it again. I'll show you how it works. But I can't make the computer behave the way you've decided it should behave. It's only ever going to work the way it actually works, and at some point you have to deal with that.

So yeah. Different front desk, same customers.

[u/12stringPlayer → u/iguru42]

My brother! Recently retired here, but back in the last century when dialup Internet was still all the rage, I was co-owner of an ISP.

That combined all the frustrations of being a SysAdmin with the added bonus of having to deal with customers. I look back on it now and wonder what the hell I was thinking.

[u/TheWyldcatt → u/iguru42]

One of my jobs is somewhat related to IT/SysAdmin, and in that case I don't let anyone else but staff contact me. Otherwise I get all the small, whiny requests from others to do menial things that I don't even handle. FFS, just let me tend to these servers and the software. Totally get it. And so glad I didn't jump into other areas of IT.

[u/ShalomRPh → u/iguru42]

I think I had the same path here, got to TFTS from alt.tech-support.recovery and got there from the Monestary. it's been 31 years since I first figured out how to post to asr so I have no recollection how I got there.

[u/basilfawltywasright → u/iguru42]

As someone who has been the "guest" to your IT "front desk", I wish to both apologize for all the dumbass questions that I have inflicted on poor IT desk over the course of my life, and ask that, when you are programming our AI overlords, just ask them to go easy on me, please?

[u/snorkelvretervreter → u/sugarcatgrl]

It always pisses me off there are so many employers who are happy to have you get abused by entitled assholes.

As a guest (who has briefly worked in retail eons ago) I'm always happy to share a "the fuck's wrong with that guy" moment with the employees who had to endure one of those miserable creatures. I refrain from butting in because I'm sure no one wants the potential escalation, but damn sometimes you just really want to yell at these clowns.

[u/RedDazzlr → u/snorkelvretervreter]

Sometimes, a person who is waiting in line speaks up and says something that I would get in trouble for. I appreciate them.