Now, with that understanding in mind, I can tell my story from today. I was at work, and it was super duper busy, and I got paged to the paint department. I was greeted by an extremely cranky elderly woman who told me that her husband got the wrong product and the wrong color, but that he'd already opened it. I looked at the can and realized that not only had he opened it, but it was custom tinted and he'd used a third of the can. I tried to explain to her that we can't take back custom tinted paint, especially when it was a third gone. She snapped at me that it wasn't a third, he'd only used "this much," indicating a spot about a third of the way down the can. She said, "Don't you just sell your returns at a discount?" I told her, again, that we don't take back tinted paint, and we don't have returns. She indicated a group of cans and snapped, "What about those returns?" I told her that those were cans that were waiting to be picked up. (Isn't that special?) At this point I took the can and went and talked to my father. I was more inclined to smack her in the head with the can then to give her credit. But we agreed to make her a can of what she wanted and give her $10 off. I went and offered her the deal and she rather snottily conceded it was better than nothing. So I pulled up the formula for the color she wanted and tried to make it, while answering the phone, the radio, and tell someone that I'd be right over to my (now fully functional) licensing terminal to sell a park pass. I called my mother in and she made the paint for the customer and I sold the park pass.
A few hours later, the couple came back and they had a piece of wood and their new can of stain with them. She told me that it was the wrong color and that it was way too blue to match her house, not the sample she chose, but her house. (Isn't that special?) I opened the can and dried a sample so that I could compare the two. While I was drying the sample, she kept trying to ask me questions. I told her that I could not hear her over the dryer. I took the samples outside and looked at them. I went back in and told her that it was definitely a lighter gray than her color, but it wasn't blue. There was no blue in it. She argued with me, so I just kept smiling and working to fix it. At this point I compared the stain we made to the color card that SHE had chosen. It was an exact match. So now we had made 2 different cans of stain for them, both of them being the exactly right color that they had ordered and neither time was she happy. Somehow it was MY fault that her husband picked a color that didn't go along with her color scheme, OR that SHE picked a color SHE thought would match her house, and we made it perfectly and it didn't match her house. I managed to correct the new stain so that it matched her board PERFECTLY! While I was drying the latest sample, her husband walked up and asked me a question. She informed him that I couldn't hear over the dryer, and they left me alone while I finished. I went outside and compared the samples in natural light, and they matched seamlessly.
I went back in and showed them the samples and told them it was fixed. She said, "We'll owe you BIG time IF this matches." (Isn't that special?) I informed them that to my eye it matched perfectly. She said, "Well, we SHOULD be happy with this, shouldn't we?" And her tone made my fingers positively ITCH to grab the rubber mallet and start playing Whack-a-Mole with her.
A few minutes later, as I running back and forth getting change for tills, and ringing up customers, we had a brief pause and Tyler says to me, "Wow, you're way busier than me and you're so cheerful and happy." I told him, "Only on the outside Sweetheart, only on the outside. Inside is a dark and scary place!!"
