I’m a freelance makeup artist.

Client: “I’ve been lurking on your work for months now, and it’s beautiful. I have finally decided you are the person I’d like to do my wedding makeup. The date is [date].”

Me: “Thank you so much for the compliment, but unfortunately, I’m already booked on that date. My apologies.”

Client: “But I’ve been lurking your work for months!”

Me: “Yes, but you can’t book a date that way. I need clients to make formal bookings to secure my time.”

Client: “Can’t you just cancel the other booking?”

Me: “I’m sorry, no, I couldn’t do that to a customer who has secured my time and paid my booking fee well in advance.”

Client: “Your customer service is appalling.”

A customer storms up to the counter and aggressively asks to speak to me, a manager.

Customer: “I came through your drive-thru this morning, and the guy who gave me my chicken sandwich called me a racist word! I want a free meal!”

Me: “The drive-thru isn’t open this weekend while it’s being repaved, all the staff this morning have been women, and chicken sandwiches are off the menu until we can fix a supply issue. Anything else you want to lie about?”

Pause.

Customer: “F*** you!” *Storms off*

Two women approach me, and one of them places a ruined pair of shoes on the counter.

Customer #1: “I need a refund! These just fell apart!” 

Me: “I can see that, ma’am. It looks like they got wet.”

Customer #1: “Well, yes, I put them in the washing machine.”

Me: “Ma’am, these are a delicate pair of shoes. You should wipe them to clean them, not put them in a laundry machine.”

Customer #1: “Well, there weren’t any instructions telling me not to!” 

The customer’s friend looks up from her phone and seems dumbfounded.

Customer #2: “Dear God, Barbara. It’s because of people like you there’s a tutorial video on YouTube on how to drink water…” 

Related:
Why Contracts Are A Gazillion Pages Long, Part 4
Why Contracts Are A Gazillion Pages Long, Part 3
Why Contracts Are A Gazillion Pages Long, Part 2
Why Contracts Are A Gazillion Pages Long

When I was in college, I worked part-time in the building that served as the central hub for the college campus. No classes were held there, but the building had conference rooms, an auditorium, restaurants, and a computer laboratory, where I worked. The computer lab also sold software and printouts. Plus we were expected to help students on occasion, so we had basic office supplies on site: staplers, pens, etc. 

Like any other retail place, we had regulars. Most were fine, but one guy was just weird. He bought a copy of MS Office once and then just walked around the place a bunch of times, never using the computers, studying, or anything. He would frequently stop by and ask to borrow a pen, and then he would go back to walking around the place some more. I don’t think I ever saw him actually write anything down with the pens. 

One day, he asked to borrow a pen from me, and I gave it to him. He gave it back a few hours later, and I was disgusted to find that he had chewed it up. 

Me: “No, I’m not taking this pen back. This is now your pen. Keep hold of it now, because I’m not letting you borrow any more pens from here.”

[Weirdo] took the pen and left without saying anything. I didn’t see him for the rest of the day. 

On my next shift, which was late afternoon to close, [Weirdo] was there again, because he always was. 

Weirdo: “Can I borrow a pen?”

Me: “No. Last time you were here, I gave you a pen to keep. You can use that pen, and it should be fine because it was two days ago.”

[Weirdo] left immediately without saying a word. No arguing, no hassle. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. 

Later in that same shift, I was getting a bit hungry, so I called a member of the setup crew (other student employees who set up the auditoriums and conference rooms for events) to cover for me a bit because I wanted to get some dinner at one of the restaurants in the building.

I came back twenty minutes later to find the place swarming with police.

Me: “What in the h*** happened here?”

Setup Crew Guy: “[Weirdo] came in with a large axe and just started prowling around the place! I called the police, and they arrested him.”

I never saw [Weirdo] again after that. To this day, I wonder if [Weirdo] would have tried to murder me with an axe because I wouldn’t let him chew on a pen. If that’s the case, I’m glad he wasn’t smart enough to check the restaurants in the building.

I’m a professional chef, and I have been for a few years. In Australia, apprentice chefs are trained in a sort of college where we learn about 150 recipes. Many of the recipes are provided to the students in bulky, finicky booklets that you wouldn’t really want to take anywhere with you, so I started writing some of the recipes in a separate notebook along with some other recipes I’d learned from coworkers or family members. I created a sort of pseudo-cookbook, and I would often bring this book into the kitchen so I would remember ingredient quantities and cooking times. Eventually, I would leave the book in the kitchen pretty much around the clock.

I soon found out that some of the other chefs in the kitchen were using my cookbook to check official recipes for the restaurant we worked for (as typically the head chef would have to tell them and this got annoying for everyone). This restaurant was a part of a popular sports club in the area, so consistency was extremely important to management. Therefore, having a written record of the new recipes or changes to long-time recipes was very important.

As it turned out, management had stopped making changes to the official club recipe book a few months before I even started, so my book had become the de facto official recipe book. For a while, this was no issue to me, and I kept adding new recipes to it throughout the next few years.

However, after my third year working there, I finished my studies and became fully qualified as a chef, so I suddenly became more expensive to keep on as a staff member. Therefore, management started looking for any reason to replace me with a new apprentice.

Eventually, they found someone to replace me and gave a half-a**ed reason for firing me and told me:

Management: “Take all your things and leave. You can no longer offer what we are looking for.”

So, I took everything I owned — including the notebook with all the club’s recipes — and left.

For a few days, not a whole lot happened, but slowly, the club’s reviews started complaining about bland food, dry cakes, inconsistent classic recipes, and every other food-related thing you could think of. At one point, there were fifty negative reviews in a single day. For our town, that was a massive amount in one day. It felt pretty d*** good since I felt they deserved it and left me unemployed on short notice. However, I was quickly offered a new job by a smaller restaurant whose owner knew me from the sports club kitchen.

After about a week, I received multiple calls. I answered one, and it was one of the higher managers from the sports club.

Manager: “Could you return the recipe book? The kitchen needs it back.”

I laughed but replied firmly:

Me: “It’s my book full of my recipes, so it isn’t going anywhere near you. I’ll remind you that you told me I ‘could no longer offer what you were looking for.’”

The manager clearly began to panic; he offered to give me my job back and “just let bygones be bygones”. I already had a new job, so I completely brushed off this offer and ignored him. I hung up pretty soon after that.

I started putting the recipes from my book on the new restaurant’s menu, and it began to attract a few regular customers of the sports club, so I quickly found myself with more and more responsibility and command within the kitchen. It got to the point where about a third of the menu was from my book.

This slow trickle of sports club regulars picked up speed after about three months and led to several high-level managers from the club deciding to visit the restaurant I’d helped build. They basically demanded I give them my cookbook, claiming it would be much more beneficial for the community if they had it. My head chef laughed in their faces and told them to piss off.

It’s been about two years. My head chef and I have a very positive relationship, and the customer base we have at the restaurant is better than ever.

We didn’t take every customer from the big club, but it was enough damage to their profits to scare a few investors away, and it caused a decent bit of damage to one of the higher managers’ reputations. Furthermore, the recipe issues and negative reviews led to the majority of the kitchen quitting. According to one of my old colleagues, they cited the lack of support and organisation from upper management as the final reasons everyone was quitting, and this led to an even larger dip in the quality of the restaurant food.

I also get paid significantly more at this restaurant than I did at the sports club.