One man set out to collect 100 rejections in 100 days by asking random people what he thought were requests so unreasonable that they would unhesitatingly refuse to comply, and filming the process. He was stymied on the third day when a Krispy Kreme employee named Jackie went out of her way to accommodate him.
I could have told him that he would discover this. I find that there are plenty of people who will go to great lengths to help total strangers with no expectation of any benefit in return but simply out of the goodness of their hearts.
But that should not take away from the fact that Jackie seems like a real sweetheart.
I’ve found it’s usually the folks in the jobs with the least prestige and pay that are the most kind-hearted. For example, on Sunday I went to Target looking for a copy of a movie that was on sale. There were none of the shelf so I asked a harried salesclerk, who politely listened, asked me to wait, and returned with a copy. Turns out it was a copy she was planning to buy for herself. When I told her I didn’t want to take her copy out of her hands, she assured me she could probably get a rain check. When’s the last time some CEO at the head of a huge corporation was willing to do something similar?
I agree. You know what worries me? That some higher up will see the video and punish Jackie for ‘wasting’ company time complying with such requests and giving away free doughnuts to boot.
It is not an unreasonable fear. Remember when a lifeguard was fired because he went outside the area of responsibility of his employer to save a swimmer in distress?
Reminds me of my time at subway. We had a fair number of odd requests and did almost all of them.
Bravo Jackie.
Krispy Kreme should figure out how to make linked doughnuts.
They’ll do a brisk business with topologists if no one else.
Maybe he should have asked Jackie to make a Klein bottle.
It could be the first doughnut to be published in a peer-reviewed journal!
It’s amazing the lengths some people will go to to accommodate others. I hope Jackie get a promotion
While I certainly do not want to downplay Jackie’s efforts (or Tracey’s Target employee’s kindness or Michaeld’s time at Subway), there is a dark side here that I think is important to acknowledge:
Depending on the culture of the organization, there can exist a significant power difference between employees and customers (and, the lower the status of the employee in an organizational hierarchy, the greater this power difference can be).
In America, an employee saying, “No, this cannot be done.” to a customer can result in the employee experiencing:
* verbal abuse
* threats of physical violence
* actual physical violence
* organizational retaliation up to and including loss of one’s job.
When it comes to creating a humorous video blog, employees — especially those in the service sector — are not ‘random people’; they are people who might be caught in the very frightening situation of having to figure out a way to accommodate unreasonable requests.
For more on this perspective, I would highly recommend Barbara Ehrenreich’s fantastic book:
http://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/0312626681
This is not surprising. Most people don’t like to say “No” and a lot of companies have policies that encourage employees to make every reasonable effort to deal with customers’ requests, even to the point of absurdity.
I worked at KMart part-time for a couple of years and was told repeatedly not ever to leave a customer without answering his questions or fulfilling his request. Frequently this policy was summed up by supervisors as “Company policy says that you don’t leave until the customer is satisfied or buys something.”
What the hell! I got paid by the hour and usually it was more fun to hang out with customers than to stock shelves.
Now, I want a doughnut. Krispy Kremes are awesome (though they do bring you closer to death a wee bit quickly).
Not to be outdone in kookiness the Al Qassam brigade named its missile fire against the Israelis “Operation Shale Stone” in reference to the Quran sura 105.4: