You Have Now Reached Customer Service Hell. Welcome.

I'm completely convinced that somewhere just south of the Palm Beach/Broward County line there is a sign that reads "You have now reached customer service hell. Welcome."  Seriously, aside from the beaches and the crime, it's the one thing that South Florida is best known for.  It's fairly common to have a fast food worker that won't make eye contact with you, and forget telling anyone that they made a mistake on the order.  I have been glared at multiple times like it was my fault there were only four nuggets in the six piece meal.

Unfortunately, it's not just fast food chains that suffer from bad surface, after this weekend at Aventura Mall, I wanted to call the store manager and go ballistic about the completely rude salesperson at Express...and then I realized, she was the manager.  Of course.  You have to realize that Aventura is not just a mall.  It's like the gourmet restaurant of malls.  You won't find a Claires or a Charlotte Russe, but you will find a Betsey Johnson that sells one-of-a-kind $700 sundresses, a Michael Kors, a Bloomingdales, and a Macy's.  There is a Gamestop now that I think about it, but it's at the same end as JC Penney and PacSun...the cheap end of the mall.

So this weekend I went shopping at Express with my mom.  To me express is like Starbucks, a little pricey but totally worth it, and I could spend hours just basking in its aroma.  And since it was after Christmas, I had lots of giftcards to use (thank you friends and family) which is annoying since apparently no one wanted to sell me anything.  Seriously, the girl manning the dressing room was completely annoyed when I asked her if I could try some clothes on.  She barely looked at me before unlocking the door and walking away...she didn't even tell me her name!  And then when I needed a new size (smaller - yay!) and hung my jeans over the door in the universal sign of 'hi I need a new size,' I ended up waiting so long that I had to send Kaitlyn around the store searching for what I needed.

To top it all off, as we were checking out the girl in charge of directing people to the right cashier (seriously, wouldn't it be more helpful to get behind a register yourself?) yelled at my mom.  Here's a transcript:

Girl: This is the line for purchases, you have a return
Mom: Ok?
Girl: (shouting) Esta es la linea para...
Mom: I speak English, you don't need to yell at me in Spanish
Girl: Well, I told you three times where to go
Mom: I'm sorry, I didn't hear you correctly
Girl: I'm sorry you didn't hear me...but I told you THREE times. (Seriously...who's this rude??)

Ok, so there's a little bit of bitterness in me because on top of all this, I am embarrassed to admit that at the beginning of December I applied at Express as holiday help.  I had to apply online - apparently that's how they do it these days, and I had to take this online personality test and answer questions like "with 5 being strongly agree and 1 being strongly disagree answer the following question: I am a much harder worker than anyone else that I know."  Seriously, how do I know?  But apparently if you answer 3 for every single question, you don't get the job - which is embarrassing because now that I've seen who works there, I'm wondering how badly I had to fail the personality test in order to not get the job...seriously...I have a college degree...what's wrong with these people!!  I suppose it's all for the best, I didn't really want to work over the holiday anyway...but the discount would've been nice...

Lots of love (with very little to no bitterness) from the Florida Chick