Senorita Loca!

May 31st

Today, at Ann Taylor Loft, a crazy woman came into the store and harassed me. Well, she didn't exactly harass me, and she wasn't visibly crazy, either... However, I KNOW she was crazy, and she had it out for me!

I was doing markdowns of our May line, which included a great deal of very drab-looking browns, yellows, and oranges, when I encountered her. I had been marking down shirts, pants, skirts, sweaters, and jackets for nearly three hours, without incident, and I had actually begun to feel that I was getting the hang of this tiresome chore, which I had only done once before, when I couldn't find a pair of pants.

This specific pair was midnight brown, and, according to our computer, only came in lettered sizes (XXS, XS, S, M, L, XL), which meant that it was out of some sort of a knit (T-shirt-like) material. They were baggy, and had a naturally wrinkled look to them, which went well with the rest of our peasant-like clothing this month. It reminded me somewhat of a drawstring skirt we had in, and so I walked over to the pause-point we had those skirts hanging on, to see if one had accidentally been mixed in with the skirts. This happens often when, in the middle of a rush of clients, an associate will put back an item in the wrong place, like with the same style, but wrong cut, or the same color, but wrong style altogether.

As I approached the pause-point, the woman was browsing through the skirts. She was about 5'5", Hispanic, had short, curly, white hair, about half as wide as she was high, and was very intently staring at and sorting through the skirts I had previously marked down from $35.00 to $19.99. I figured she liked the price, and I found out that I was all too right. She pulls out a pair of XL pants, which resemble the skirts closely, only longer and sewn together in the middle like pants, not open and connected like a skirt.

She looks at me and smiles. It was a devilishly, devious smile that only Satan himself could make look so sweet and innocent; because, you see, the pants had been originally priced at $44.00, and so when marked down, would have been $24.99, and not $19.99, like the skirt. She had obviously noticed the difference in the original price of the skirt and the pants, and had already unfurled a plan to get the pants at a discount.

Before she can even hold the, what would be, size sixteen pants to her swolen hips to see if it would sufficiently hide her tail, I inform her that those pants had been marked incorrectly. She, acting surprised (and poorly), looks at the tag and replies "Oh! Really? Well, what are they supposed to be?" After she hears the correct price is actually $5 more than what she sees there, I swear her head spun around 180 degrees to reveal a different woman; strong, resolved, and determined to save those cinco dollars.

I ask her if I can have the pants, to change the price, and she immediately adds them to her minuscule pile of clothes to purchase. She replies, "No, no, you see, I am customer, and I already see this, this number here," pointing to the midnight brown, drawstring, wrinkled, gauchos. "I am customer and I get that when you mess up." I immediately attempt to defend myself by pointing out they were put in the wrong location and I marked everything in that spot, yet she only repeated her broken-English assertion. I then tried to say that the computer will ring up the correct price and not that one, we do not type the price, the bar code tells the computer what to do, but she just smiles even wider and talks even faster, saying "No, no, no, no, I get it like this... I already see it before you fix, I see it, already I see it."

I simply stare at her, dumbfounded for a few seconds, and turn around and proceed to change the prices on the remaining pants in the skirt section.

I later moved the pants to another location to prevent future mix-ups, and informed my manager what happened so she would know ahead of time that she would have a bitch asking for a price that is $5 lower than what is on the computer.

So, that was my day at the Loft, I marked-down the rest of the clothes, back-stocked the new product that came in yesterday, and organized the sale section. It was fine, except for the bitch from Mexico.

I should have called the INS to our store... That'll teach her to mess with a low-paid part-time employee of a retail store in a mall! You threaten my job, woman, you get deported!

-FTG