My boss is a pretty easygoing guy, but he’s uptight about garbage and telephones.
He hates it when people who don’t pay to stay in one of his campgrounds use the trashcans in one of those campgrounds. He feels like he shouldn’t have to pay to haul off trash brought in by someone who didn’t pay a camping fee. I think it’s better for people to deposit their trash in a trashcan—any trashcan—than to drop the garbage on the side of the road.
I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.
In the past, I wasn’t subjected to his uptightness about telephones because there were no telephones where I worked. Not only was there no electricity or running water at the campground or day use area, there were no telephones. There were no landlines, no satellite phones, and no cell phone service. My boss didn’t have to worry about me letting the teaming masses use the company phone because there was no company phone.
Now that the mercantile is open, there is a company phone. It runs off a satellite or works through the internet—I don’t really know. All I know is that the phone is necessary for doing business, so the mercantile has one.
The company I work for pays for a phone plan offering unlimited calls within the United States. The way I understand it, the phone bill is the same whether one call or a hundred calls or one thousand calls are made. The boss has invited employees to use the phone whenever we need to make calls within the United States, but he doesn’t want the general public using the phone except in emergencies.
My boss understands people may need to use the phone in an emergency. I think he’s even a little proud he’s making it possible for folks in need to call to 911. However, even though we’re in a remote location, he doesn’t consider routine car problems an emergency. Maybe he’d be ok with using the company phone to call 911 if a car burst into flames, but he doesn’t want us to let people use the phone to call AAA (a toll free call even if the phone in the mercantile didn’t have unlimited free long distance calling) for help with a flat tire or a lockout or for a tow.
He’s never said why he doesn’t want people to use the company phone to call for help in situations of auto trouble. If it’s a matter of people tying up the company phone, well that I can understand, but he’s never cared to explain himself. He’s also never said what he expects people whose cars don’t run to do in order to get help. The nearest pay phone is ten miles away from the store. I suppose someone with a broke down car would have to hitchhike to the payphone and ask to have the AAA driver meet there.
The Big Boss Man’s desire to keep the phone off of the ears of the public in cases of car trouble is all well and good, except he’s not the one who has to turn away the young mother with three kids and a car making a grinding noise or a group of just-out-of-their-teens young people who locked their keys in the truck. The job of turning people away usually falls on me, and I hate it. How do I explain to someone stuck in the mountains without cell phone service that my boss doesn’t consider their emergency a true emergency? It’s the worst part of my job.
One Sunday afternoon, the situation was a little easier for me.
A young man stepped up to the counter and asked me if the store had a phone. He was probably in his mid-20s and tall.
I asked him if he was having an emergency. I expected him to tell me about some problem he was having with his car.
He said he was sort of having an emergency. I thought he probably wasn’t having an emergency at all if he described it as sort of an emergency.
He said he needed to call his boss to say he wouldn’t be coming into work.
Even I didn’t see that as an emergency. He had a problem, maybe, or a situation, but certainly not an emergency.
I told him my boss didn’t want customers to use the phone except in cases of fire, flood, or blood (my words, not the words of my boss). I told him about the scenic lookout where he might be able to get cell phone service. I told him about the payphone ten miles away. I very politely sent him on his way. I’m sure my boss would have been proud.
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