Main Character Fantasy 14
Important context: my sandwich store operates on a military base, meaning we do three to six times more business than an average store does on any given day. Our lunch rush might be a hundred and fifty units for the peak hour, whereas a normal store might make thirty to sixty.
A few months ago, we had a guy come in just before the start of lunch rush and begin his order while it was still slow. After completing it, he began to order another sandwich, then another, then another. The line was beginning to form.
He reached sandwich number thirteen, meaning that by this point, the entire store was full of people waiting, and all thirteen sandwiches were lined up on the cutting boards. His fourteenth was his last. When he finished that, he got over to the veggie side and had no clue what he wanted on any of them. Each one was for a different person.
It’s worth mentioning that this customer was what I will delicately refer to as a somewhat… challenged individual. In this situation, that meant constantly trailing off and getting distracted throughout the entire ordering process, significantly extending things.
After multiple texting and phone call sessions and some serious study of his disorganized written order sheet, he manages to complete the vegetables. The line is out the door by this point.
He comes to the end of the line where we are about halfway done bagging his sandwiches, only to start angrily telling us that he wants each individual name written on the stickers of the sandwiches, our one to fourteen numbers just weren’t enough.
I can’t remember any of the specific names, but every single name was an extremely weird out-of-pocket nickname (like something that could never possibly be in a birth certificate). I think one may have been “Smiley.” Once that is finally done, he approaches the register.
I s*** you not, this motherf***er pulls out a rubber-banded stack of credit cards as thick as a deck of playing cards and informs us that he intends to pay for each and every sandwich individually, one to each card. No, they were not in the order he placed them.
Ultimately, this douche clown cost us quite a lot of business in the form of walkouts and took about thirty minutes to move through the system. Our lunch rush was a horrific nightmare because of how backed up we were without ever having had a fair chance to get off the ground.
Because of this one single guy, we made so many policy changes, from the maximum number of sandwiches ordered, methods of payment and everything in between.
