Customers don’t care about why you can’t get it done; they just want you to get it done.  Before you say that that sounds unfair, I’m not suggesting they want you to defy the laws of physics and make the impossible possible (well…usually they don’t).  Let me give you a small—yes, trivial—example:

The other day I stopped in to one of the national grocery store chains in my neighborhood.  All the handbaskets were conspicuously missing.  I chalked it up to the likely case that it was some sort of cleanliness effort, what with Covid and all.  I pushed a big cart around the store for all of the three items I was picking up and when I got to the checkout, I mentioned how the baskets all seemed to be missing.  I wasn’t complaining, or even inquiring (at least not out loud…surreptitiously I was curious what the response would be) I just mentioned, “I see all your baskets are missing.”

My initial assumption was verified:  “Oh, yes, that’s because we couldn’t keep track of which ones we’ve cleaned and which ones have been left around by Customers,” was the cheery and pleasant response.  Note for clarity, I hadn’t asked why they’d been taken up, but for some reason this clerk thought it necessary to explain why.  She was perfectly nice and not at all defensive in tone, but consider what her response was meant to be:  an excuse.  Obviously she could have handled it much worse, and bruskly given me the well-tough-cookies/get-over-it routine.  Fortunately her demeanor was quite nice. […]