I recently (yesterday) had a bad experience with a person working in a customer-service industry. She, the cashier/employee of the establishment, was the only point of contact I had with a person there — in fact, she was the person who represented the “company” to me.

And she sucked. Rude, condescending, snide remarks — she made the other girl I was with burst into tears. I don’t have feelings so that didn’t happen to me but I did get upset enough to ask for her manager’s number and today, I spoke to her manager.

In the usual routine of what follows this type of incident, I restated the incident to the manager, she apologised, and offered me something for free.

But then she did something I did not expect, she tried to justify her employee’s actions by saying something around the lines of “____ is a very nice girl but she does have the tendency to come off as very harsh and rude. She doesn’t mean it.”

I was a bit baffled by that statement because quite frankly, I don’t care if ____ serves meals to the homeless in her spare time, she had 60-seconds to interact with me and in 60-seconds she didn’t appropriately demonstrate the qualities that I, if I ran that place, would want my employees to show. With that said, I’m not sure who is more at fault: the rude employee or the manager who tried to justify it.

Thoughts?