Pent-Up & Pissed Off

I'll tell you, even though I enjoy my Seinfeld blog, Bobsblogaboutnothing (http://bobsblogaboutnothing.blogspot.com/), there's something very therapeutic about spilling your guts out about life's daily travails. I happen to have had a trio of incidents recently with a common theme that got me so pissed off that I had to temporarily resurrect my Pissed Off In Pittsburgh blog.

The common theme is "customer service idiots who don't know what they're talking about but are extremely confident that they do." One of my basic philosophies is that there are 4 combinations of competence and confidence. You have people who are competent and confident (insufferable, but nice to have around in an emergency), competent and lacking confidence (unlikely to lead in a crisis, but unlikely to make mistakes), incompetent and lacking confidence (these people know their limitations, thank goodness), and the most dangerous category, incompetent and confident (the last President, for example).

Anyway, here are the 3 examples of the last category I have encountered:

1. My wife needed a couple of links removed from her Twist-O-Flex watch band, recently purchased at WalMart. I have had this done at WalMart many times before. So I went to the store in Fox Chapel, where the idiot behind the jewelry counter confidently stated that one cannot remove links from a Twist-O-Flex watch band! I was so pissed off that I ratted her out to the store manager (I'm sure that did a lot of good). I then looked up the instructions on the Internet and did it myself.

2. I was looking for this frozen polenta stuff that they have at Trader Joe's but I couldn't find it. So I asked one of the store cretins dressed up in his tropical costume where it was located and he looked at me like I was an absolute dope and said that Trader Joe's has never, ever had frozen polenta in its entire history, like he was some kind of Professor of Advanced Trader Joe's studies. So when I was checking out, the cashier asked if I had found everything that I was looking for, and I lept at the chance to complain about Mr. Polenta Know-It-All. She was actually nice enough to find another store employee who took me directly to the frozen polenta in question.

3. I wanted to get some cash from a pre-paid debit card I had received in return for completeing a survey online. You can't use it at an ATM but the website of the sponsoring bank said you could go to any bank and ask for a cash advance. I went to the PNC at the corner of Fifth and Craig with this intent, whereupon I was told by a very confident teller that there is absolutely no way that my request could be honored, again with the implication that I was an idiot for asking. Unfortunately, I did not have the website documentation with me at the time, so I went back to my office and printed it out. I then went to another PNC branch armed with my printout, but I didn't even need it, because the teller at this branch said it would be no problem. However, there was a $25 minimum on any cash advance, and I only had $2.36 left on the card.