About 1% of people waste 80% of my time

 Monday is paperwork day.

That means printing out the invoices that came in over the past week, sorting out the layaway payments, updating the work list and assorted other bookkeeping tasks.

What I noticed is that a very small percentage of dumbasses and general scumbags waste an amazing amount of my time.

At any given time, I am dealing with one to three scammers who place orders with the intent to rip me off by getting a double refund. They order something, act all squirrely, cancel the order, get their refund check and THEN file a claim with their credit card company that they didn't get their order so the credit card company refunds them. Each once of those assholes uses up about 4 hours of my time in doing all of the paperwork that is required to document that they did in fact get their refund in order to dispute their fraudulent claim with the credit card company.

That is four hours that I am not able to work on YOUR gun because scam artists from Houston, TX and Tuskegee, AL have nothing productive to do with their lives and would rather rip off small businesses than actually be employed. To be fair, the Tuskegee, AL scammer is a convicted felon, an open white supremacist whose email avatar is the KKK iron-cross emblem and probably NOT employable, but still.

The other group of people who waste a tremendous amount of my time are dumbasses who cannot follow simple directions. I'm talking about people who take advantage of our layaway program but won't follow the instructions to tell us what layaway they are paying towards when they make a payment. There are a few guys who have been told repeatedly to please include their invoice number with the payment but absolutely ignore it.

This is my day. Dealing with thieves and idiots who can't or won't follow directions.

If you send in you mortgage or car payment, you include a payment stub that has your friggin' account number on it, don't you? It isn't too much to ask for people to whom we offer a no-charge layaway plan to do the same thing: tell us the invoice number you are paying towards. I wonder if they mail in an envelope full of cash to their mortgage company without an account number and expect the payment to be credited to their mortgage?

I spend HOURS each week tracking down who these people are...and it is only a small number of people.

Just like when you belong to an organization like a gun club or whatever and 10% of the people there do 90% of the work....about 1% of my customers waste 80% of my time every week.

This evening, I reworked the web code on the layaway payments page to add a text box for an invoice number that must be filled out in order to proceed with making a payment. The goal is to make it idiot-proof. It is only a matter of time before someone accepts the challenge and builds a bigger idiot. I have my theories on who it will be....