BAD SERVICE PROMPT
You Just Walked Out Like You Had Nothing Else To Do and We All Had To Wait
There was no explanation and no one who came over to help
I get wanting to leave work right when your shift is over. I’m not completely sure that’s what happened in this case. The young man was sure in a hurry after finishing his last shower before he left for the rest of the night around 10:15 pm.
Then there was nothing for a few minutes. We were only second in the queue for the truck stop showers. We figured that it was the perfect time to come in and wait for a shower since when we had checked an hour before, there were 13 people waiting for those very same eight full showers that previous hour. Seeing that we were going to be second in line was a relief in itself.
We were fine waiting a few minutes without the line moving. Then we waited ten, fifteen, twenty minutes. The minutes clicked by slowly as we started to wait for it a little more impatiently. We didn’t necessarily have to stand while we were waiting. We just can’t hear the low announcement volume when they call the customer and the shower number. The screen shows it much more clearly.
After all, my partner walks with a cane and I have a severe gait in my step so standing was hurting both of us at this point. We wanted to sit back down but more people started getting added to the queue and we were now watching a screen that showed nine people waiting after a half hour of nothing moving.
The funny thing is, other than the one empty shower we knew about, we also saw three people leave the shower in the same time frame so we know we weren’t waiting for people to leave. We were potentially waiting for someone to reset the bathrooms and showers for all of us to enter.
Some of us were even willing at this point to go into dirty showers and clean them ourselves if it meant that we no longer had to wait. The other thing, too, is that the price of the shower had just recently gone up from $15 to $17 at this place so this already added to everyone else’s frustration. We were standing there anxiously now. It had been 45 minutes. Nothing, no movement.
The guy that was waiting ahead of us had been waiting five minutes longer than us. I couldn’t stand still anymore. I went to the front counter and asked the manager what the hold-up on the showers was. She said that the young kid had left and that there was a backup of dirty towels and no clean ones to replace the current dirty ones. All of the towels currently in each of the truck stop shower stalls were all wet and dirty. I mean, who was going to come over and tell us if I hadn’t asked? Really?
On top of that, all of the floors were very moist and humid and no cleaning had been done on all eight showers. Yeah, at this point, we hadn’t noticed but there were no occupied showers and we were all waiting for towels to dry in the drier. The manager herself then had to go back there and cover the back after I came and asked her about it.
I’m not saying that she was the one who gave us poor customer service. She wasn’t. She was just oblivious at the time to what all the fuss was about for the most part until she checked and until I spoke up after waiting for 45 minutes. I felt that the maintenance/porter that was responsible for cleaning the place left too early regardless of if he was off or not. He knew that there was a rush. He saw us all waiting.
Thinking back, I couldn’t understand what he said to me when he passed me just after I purchased my shower but it must’ve been, “Peace, you’re on your own,” or something like that. That had to be what he had said at this point. We were all dirty, sweaty, aching, and growing increasingly impatient. Believe me when I say that you don’t want to be the cause of at least eight sweaty truckers being angry after driving all day.
None of these guys were very happy about being kept in the dark and all of us waiting looked very uncomfortable. After many attempts to get the door open, the manager finally let all of us wait in line one at a time until the line was cleared out. The funny thing is that when she left as well and we were done with our shower, we came back out to show that all of our numbers were still showing in the queue.
I suspect that the reason for this is instead of typing in our codes at the door, the manager had just let us into each shower stall and that didn’t automatically clear out our numbers. I knew that after the fact, that would certainly anger anyone who came later. I told the new cashier about the situation and she just shrugged and said, “Oh, well, that’s not my job. Not my problem.”
See, I don’t know how these places are managed and operated but if I was a random person passing through and heard that attitude from an employee of a place, I’d be pretty pissed off. I mean, I was certainly pissed off about it but I knew it wasn’t my place to force her to clear the queue.
I just left the store shortly before midnight to go back to our truck and headed there with some snacks and a plan to sleep after our lower bodies started giving us a massive throb and we didn’t feel much more energized after a frustrating shower.
UNRELATED LESSON: There are 300 calories in a slice of Pizza Hut’s 14" large pepperoni pizza. If you eat the whole pizza, you will easily exceed the recommended daily caloric intake for a single person in a day coming to 2,400 calories. For perspective on other things that you could eat that would total the same amount of calories but probably have better nutritional value for you is just over 46 cups of carrots, 29 cups of blueberries, or 27 bananas.
I mean, I don’t know how you would feel after eating the blueberries and/or bananas, especially how long you’d spend on the toilet after such a chore. I can barely eat two whole bananas as is and 27 just seems like total potassium, sugar, and fiber overload. The same goes with blueberries but imagine all those antioxidants running through your body with all that blueberry goodness.
Blueberries are my favorite fruit for a reason but even I don’t think that I could eat 27 cups of blueberries in one sitting or even in one day. 46 cups of carrots? Forget it, I remember that thing our moms used to tell us as kids that carrots are good for our eyes. I don’t know how much better I can see without my glasses if instead of finding them and wearing them again, I just stick to a regimen of eating 46 cups of carrots a day. That actually sounds pretty vomit-inducing.
I probably wouldn’t do any of these things. I think that the valuable lesson we learned here today, kids, is that fruits and vegetables are excessive and bad for you and you should just go ahead and eat that Pizza Hut large pizza all by yourself in one sitting. You won’t spend hours on the toilet doing that, or will you?
