Customer: “I want the chicken and dumplings soup with no dumplings or carrots.”

Me: “The soup comes premade, so I’m afraid—”

Customer: “You are not afraid, but you will be. I’m friends with the owner. I want the chicken and dumplings soup with no dumplings, no carrots, and no excuses.”

I bring the order to the back, and some of the kitchen staff sigh. They knew exactly who this order came from.

Coworker: “Every week, she tries something like this. Don’t bother bringing this to [Owner]; he won’t have our back.”

Have you ever tried to separate tiny little balls of cooked dough and tiny diced carrots from soup? That was not fun. The customer even had the audacity to send it back because there was one tiny bit of carrot remaining.

Then, she sent it back again saying it was too cold, even though I had microwaved it to warm it back up again. I maliciously complied; I put the soup in a sauté pan and got it screaming hot.

She then complained that it was too hot to eat. You can’t win with some people.

Related:
Some People Just Want To Watch The World Burn, Part 29
Some People Just Want To Watch The World Burn, Part 28
Some People Just Want To Watch The World Burn, Part 27
Some People Just Want To Watch The World Burn, Part 26
Some People Just Want To Watch The World Burn, Part 25

My great-aunt broke her shoulder at one point. She lived alone (she was a fairly recent widow) but was doing well enough. She had pain meds for the arm.

One morning, the neighbors called her daughter.

Neighbors: “You need to come get your mother. She’s wearing a nighty and fur coat, and she’s hiding money in the bushes.”

One very concerning hospital visit later, it turned out that [Great-Aunt]’s pain meds were prescribed wrong. She was on a WAY higher dose than she should’ve been. Not sure if there were interactions with her other meds, but after the drug problem got sorted, [Great-Aunt] was back to her normal, sane self.

The family giggles about the mental image of [Great-Aunt] in her lacy nighty and best fur, hiding money in random shrubbery. (We can do this because she was okay at the end of the day. We wouldn’t laugh if it’d been something more serious or permanent.)

I am checking out a customer who is here with her daughter and her mother, so three generations of women. The daughter — four years old — is having a great time talking to herself. The grandmother seems to be upset by this.

Grandma: “It’s totally inappropriate for her to have an imaginary friend, and I’m embarrassed by it!”

Mom: *To Grandma* “You get on your knees every night and talk to your sky friend and ask him to forgive you for gambling even though you play the lottery every week. She’s a four-year-old girl. What’s your excuse?”

When I was about ten, my father and I were fishing from a pier in Florida. There were people every few yards, so it was pretty crowded so early in the morning. I’d been fishing for a while so I knew a bit about it, even as young as I was.

There was another father-son duo behind us on the other side of the pier. Everybody talked to each other in those days, so it was a pleasant outing.

Suddenly, the kid, maybe five or six, got a bite, and his dad was helping him reel it in.

As soon as the fish came out of the water, the kid hollered:

Kid: “It’s a baby whale! Daddy, I caught a baby whale!”

All the people within earshot took notice and watched as the kid reeled in his first blowfish.

Back about twenty years ago, a vegetarian friend was on a bus tour of Russia. At one point, the whole group had a banquet. All the other tables had food piled up. The vegetarians were at a table together, and in the middle was a large pot of soup. One member of the party dipped the ladle into the soup, and it came out with a whole chicken!

They complained to the waiter, explaining that they don’t eat flesh, so the waiter removed the chicken from the pot and walked away.

End of story, they did not eat that night. Hopefully, they had snacks back in their hotel rooms!