Sales Soar When You’re Not A Snot

I was running a small cafe in a wee seaside town for what was SUPPOSED to be a month. It turned into nine months because of complications with the owner’s surgery, but it was mostly fun, fine, and a little eye-opening… until this woman came in.

[Woman] had decided to make her own business from home selling vegan-meatball-type things.

Me: “That’s lovely, but we make everything in our kitchen and cabinets ourselves, and we are proud of it.”

She would not accept this as an answer and actually threw two of these balls over the counter at me to give to the owner. I knew now why my friendly waitress called me from the back to deal with this woman.

After assuring her that I would pass them on, she demanded the owner’s personal number. There was no way in h*** I was about to give that over. [Woman] argued, and argued, and then argued a bit more, getting a bit louder in the process. Finally, I told her:

Me: “What about your rude bulls*** attitude makes you think we’d even consider working with you?”

As she was standing there with her mouth open, I saw, tucked under the till, a single blue card: one of our not-used-in-over-a-year business cards that had been discovered in an old folder a few days earlier.

I handed that over without a word. [Woman] snatched it like a child and stomped out and waited by our wall-length windows. The look on her face when I answered the call from inside the shop was the best part of the week. I’d already said she wasn’t getting anyone’s personal number, so why she thought I had broken and given her anything other than the shop number was beyond me.