Mommy on a Mission...well Almost

Last night after supper, with two hours left til bedtime, we decided to pack up the kidlets and go rent a movie. As often happens, K passed out in his carseat within minutes of hitting the road, so rather than waking him and hauling the cranky crew through the store, I decided to go in myself and quickly scour the shelves for the night's entertainment. The store was quiet, only a few customers, a Dad with a young daughter, and few single renters like myself.

As I got to the new release wall I overheard two employees talking loudly while they restocked the shelves. Apparently some passive aggressive customer had grabbed fistfulls of the older movies and thrown them in on the new release shelf. The employee who discovered the pile of rogue movies was angry to say the least. He went off on a (loud) rant about this amount of work it would be to restock the old movies, and ended his tangent by saying "&%$#, I hate my life".

Now, my first real job was working at a video store, actually, the same family video store I was in last night. I once opened the store to discover that some clever individual had urinated in the return slot the night before so that an entire bin of soaked movies had to be sorted through and repackaged. Bearing this in mind, a dozen old movies thrown in with the new releases really didn't rank that high on the annoying scale, and certainly didn't qualify for an f-bomb.

Thankfully K wasn't with me in the store. If he had been then it would have been a different situation. But it did make me stop and think. See, I remember working my first customer service focused jobs, and really liking it. I remember feeling proud when I did my job well, smiling and greeting, going above and beyond. Sure, I wasn't perfect, I was a boppy 16 year old who probably spent just as much time gossiping as working. But I can promise you one thing, I was there to do my job well, and I never had a complaint, not even one. So it seems to follow that one of two situations had occured:

Situation 1: Common sense and Common courtesy are really not that common at all. Time and time again I've gone shopping with my two kidlets in tow, only to have to listen to stock clerks discussing the latest party, (with plenty of colorful expletives), or gotten attitude when asking a question, or gone through an entire transaction without so much as a hello from the clerk.

Situation 2: I have turned into a crotchety lady well before it was due. I'm sure everyone has encountered that customer who is just mad. And it wouldn't matter what you did or said, they'd find a reason to be mad.

Last night at the video store I bit my tongue. Maybe I should have said something to that clerk. I thought of speaking to a manager (although I later found out he was the supervisor on shift), I thought of calling the office and making a stink, but I didn't. I didn't want to make waves, my child wasn't there, no harm no foul...right? But maybe I should have. Maybe I should have been a moral warrior, a Mommy with a mission. What would you have done?