I had to deal with a really creepy customer last Friday at work.

I am probably in a minority in that I prefer shelf stacking to being on the tills. I never realised how much I hate being on the tills until Sunday because in recent weeks I’ve mostly only been filling shelves. I probably only hate being on the tills because I am a social retard and every interaction is just an opportunity to put my foot in it. And then proceed to smear ‘it’ all over my face.

Last week I was preparing myself for another evening of proudly re-stocking the stationery department. I arrived a bit late for work because I was at university, so I was only properly getting up and running just when the shop was about to close. When I arrived on the shop floor I was asked if I would cover the tills just for five minutes until the shop shut. No bother, I thought, there won’t be many customers and if there are they’ll probably leave me alone because they think I want to go home.

I was thoroughly unprepared to be met with one of the weirdest customers I’ve ever been faced with. And that’s saying something.

A young woman — looked as though she was in her late teens or early twenties — came up to pay for her goods, just a couple of bottles of juice and some crisps or something. The girl struck up a conversation. I can’t remember exactly how the conversation started, but early on in the conversation the woman said, “What are you up to once you’ve finished?”

I thought it was a pretty weird thing to ask, but I guessed the customer was just trying to be friendly and conversational. I don’t really like having a conversation at the till anyway, and given that I wasn’t really expecting to be on the tills in the first place my small-talk-o-meter was set to −5. I didn’t have an answer to the question, because I hadn’t given one inch of thought to what I was going to do after work. So I just gave the honest answer: “Pff, dunno.”

The customer was trying to help me scan the goods. At least I think that’s what she was doing. She just lifted up the scanner. As if that would be any help to me! She didn’t realise that I need to press a button to get it to scan, so I had to wrestle the scanner out of her hand so that I could press the button. The juice still wouldn’t scan. It turned out that she only succeeded in unplugging the scanner from the till.

She pressed on with the conversation: “I suppose you’re just wanting to get finished now.”
“I’ve only just started!”, I replied. “Well, I started just after five.”

The customer was confused. “I thought you shut at six.”
“We do, but I’m filling shelves.”
“It’s a bit pointless just to have you in for one hour.”
The customer seemed a bit too desperate for me to be finished at six. “I’m filling shelves until nine.”

Obviously realising her error by lifting up the scanner the last time, she decided instead to hold out a bottle of juice for me. But she had no consideration for my physical position because the way she held the bottle meant that I would have had to have been double jointed in order to point the scanner at it. Besideswhich, I still had to find the barcode. Again, I had to grab the bottle out of her hand in order to scan it.

By this stage I was beginning to feel a bit sorry for my customer. She was trying to be helpful, and I felt bad that I had to literally grab her good intentions out of her hands. But why was she trying to make such a point of being helpful?

The customer’s next question confirmed my suspicions. “Are you going out tomorrow, Duncan?” Aargh. I hate it when customers say my name when I’m at work. I dislike the fact that strangers know what my name is while I don’t know theirs. There was an asymmetry in the relationship between me and my customer that made me uneasy, and this particular question didn’t help.

“No,” I pointedly said. This is almost always my answer to that question. I don’t really like going out, especially on a Saturday night.

But I actually have a damn valid reason why I rarely go out on Saturday nights aswell. I work every Saturday night. Despite the fact that this customer was weirding me out, girls acting interested in me are about as common as red mercury. So I decided to at least extend the courtesy of giving her a decent excuse. “I’m working tomorrow.” I rolled my eyes as if to add “unfortunately” to my sentence without actually saying it. But I think I was secretly glad that I had the excuse.

At that point the conversation fell kind of flat. It might have been the way I said “no”. The girl had been deflated, but she had one final question. “Do you like your job, Duncan?”
“’Salright I ’spose,” which is what I always say when I’m asked about my job (what else can you say, really?). “Worse things happen at sea.”

There was no response. I didn’t want the conversation to end on this frosty note, so after a short pause I tacked on a “Don’t they?” to elicit a response.
“Yeah,” she mumbled. That was the end of the transaction.

I wasn’t really sure what to make of it. I had all sorts of questions about it running through my head. It seemed as though the girl fancied me (as unlikely as that is — I was unshaven and I’ve been desperate for a haircut for at least a month), but I was worried that I had been quite rude to her.

I was just trying to do everything in my power not to engage her in conversation because I just wanted to get on with putting pencils on shelves. And I certainly wasn’t going to flirt with some random stranger at work, especially when a colleage could be lurking round the corner.

Later that weekend I told the story to my friend who works in BHS. It immediately rang a bell to him.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Did she have a friend with her?”
“Yes, she did!”, I said as exclamation marks appeared above our heads, à la Metal Gear Solid.

It probably reflects badly on my flirty customer that the only physical trait I can remember about her is the fact that she had a spotty cleavage. I’m guessing — although (i.e. because) I can’t remember — that she was quite plain looking. I definitely fancied her friend a lot more. She looked older and acted more mature, mostly because just hanging around in the background is automatically more mature than chatting up a random till boy.

Anyway, my friend had almost exactly the same experience as I did. It was closing time, and they were asking what he was doing when he was finished work and all the rest of it. Except his conversation lasted half an hour! He led them down the garden path for all that time before dropping the bombshell that he has a girlfriend.

Now I was guilt free, but not worry free. It seems as though these two girls are going around shops at closing time, chatting up the dude at the till and presumably trying to get them to meet up or something after they’ve finished work. I am a numbskull when it comes to people, but I think the polite word for this approach is “unconventional”. The impolite word would be “mental”.

What happens to any of the people that accept their offer? We need to find out if any retail workers in the Kirkcaldy area have gone missing in the past couple of weeks.

Seriously though, I feel a bit sorry for those girls. We know they’ve been doing this for at least two weeks, presumably with no success (the fact that they resorted to me is telling, I think). There are probably at least a dozen Langtonian sales assistants who have been left confused, thinking the same thoughts as I have.

I am no relationship expert, but I know that somebody needs to tell those girls that if they are going to get anywhere they need to be less creepy about it. And maybe try a pub instead of a workplace.