It’s the middle of the day, and I’ve just finished with a customer when I hear a page for a manager to come to the checkout desk. There were three of us, me and two upper managers. The other two were at the back of the store, so I let them know I’ll go up. When I get there, I see our lead cashier and one of our cashiers by the computer.

The cashier is near tears. [Cashier] is a friend, and I didn’t learn until much later that the customer had called her a f***** b****.

Me: “Hey, hun, what’s going on?”

Cashier: “I can’t deal with this. If that woman says one more word to me, I swear to god—”

Me: “What’s going on?”

The lead cashier replies:

Lead Cashier: “We can’t find her membership, and she’s p***ed.”

Now our membership is entirely electronic. We tell our customers the best way to keep it available is to simply download our app and log in with their account info, which keeps their barcode handy to scan whenever they shop. If they choose not to, we can look up their membership through our computers with their email. [Lead Cashier] has the customer’s name and email written down on a paper slip and says they’ve tried to look it up multiple times.

Me: “Alright, hang here for a sec while I go talk to her.”

[Cashier] and [Lead Cashier] are okay with this plan.

I walk over to the register where the customer is waiting and, in my most obnoxiously pleasant customer service voice, call out:

Me: “Oh, hello! I understand we’re having some difficulty finding your membership. Not to worry, we’ll get it sorted out in a moment. Could you just verify this is the correct email for me?”

The customer stares for a moment before opening her mouth to unleash her hellfire like a California Barbie turned Charizard.

Customer: “Are you f****** kidding me? Are all of you people so f****** stupid?! I’ve been over this a dozen f****** times with them already! You are the only ones who have this issue every f******* time! Why can’t you just—”

Cue static, white noise, more cursing, maybe the insinuation that my mother is a goat, who the h*** knows. I mostly just stopped paying attention as this continued for a solid twenty seconds or so.

I see her pause for breath and take the opportunity to jump in, again with Obnoxiously Pleasant Mode still fully engaged.

Me: “I understand, ma’am, and I’m very sorry. Now, could you verify this email for me, please?”

She stops. She stares. I stare back. Her eye may have developed a twitch.

Through clenched teeth, the customer hisses out her email, confirming that yes, it was written down correctly.

Me: “Thank you so much. Now, I’ll go see what I can find for you.”

I turn to head back to the computer and leave the customer stewing in her funk and muttering angrily. While I’m looking into her account, one of the other managers hurries over, apparently having heard the customer’s shouting from across the store.

Other Manager: “What’s happened?”

I sum it up as simply as I can.

Me: “Lady needs meds.”

[Other Manager] requires a few more details than that, though, so I explain what’s going on and say I’m doing a deep dive into her orders to find her membership and figure out what’s wrong with the account.

Other Manager: “I’m just going to discount her purchases and get her out of here; she’s being way too disruptive.”

[Other Manager] walks over to the customer and opens her mouth to tell her exactly that, but the customer cuts her off with another geyser eruption of hate. [Other Manager] stares at her, wide-eyed, and tries to cut in to let her know that we just really want her gone and will do nearly anything at this point, and we’re just going to comp her a discount, but the customer just does. Not. Stop. [Other Manager] just turns to me and mouths, “Call [Highest Level Manager].”

While poor [Highest Level Manager] and [Other Manager] are trying to deal with the customer, I’m continuing to look into the membership, looking through the orders that are linked with her name until I finally find the payment for the membership.

There’s a TYPO in the email linked to it.

So, with our memberships, they’re basically logged as an order and can be done either at home or in the store with an associate. And depending on the order number, you can tell if it was done through a store’s server, through corporate (calling our customer service number), or at home.

By her order number, it was DEFINITELY done at home.

As I bring up the details on the membership, I hear the customer screech:

Customer: “I want a f****** refund for this useless f****** membership!”

Her ANNUAL membership is set to expire next week.

Eventually, her husband comes back into the store (apparently, he ran the moment she started getting angry) and asks her:

Customer’s Husband: “What the h*** are you doing?! Why do you always act like this?! This wouldn’t keep happening if you’d just downloaded the god-d*** app like they said we should in the beginning!”

For f***’s sake.

Our recruitment manager walks into the office, looking mad. She approaches a coworker and I, as she’s chatty with us.

Recruitment Manager: “Just a heads up, but I might just murder your boss.”

Coworker: “What did [Boss] do now?”

Recruitment Manager: “We just spent all day interviewing candidates for [position] and—”

Me: “—and let me guess, he went for the cutest, youngest woman even though she was likely the least qualified.”

Recruitment Manager: *Blinks.* “This… is common knowledge?”

Coworker: “That he hired a hot young woman isn’t, since that just happened today. Why it happened, that [Boss] is a big ol’ pervert, is common knowledge, however.”

Recruitment Manager: “And… no one has gone to HR about this?”

Me: “Plenty of times, but [Boss] is pretty senior, and he hasn’t actually been caught doing anything bad other than making inappropriate comments.”

Coworker: “They keep slapping him on the wrist, but after hearing some of the stuff he’s revealed to us, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s into that.”

Recruitment Manager: “Ewww. Not ‘eww’ about being into that, by the way, but ‘ewww’ as in he told you he was into that.”

Me: “Well, now we can add you to the list of people who know about him.”

[Recruitment Manager] brought her concerns to HR. Apparently, she was concerned enough about this new hire’s well-being that HR actually took steps to make sure [Boss] wouldn’t be left alone with her at any time, which is a huge f****** red flag if you ask me, but what do I know?

About two months later, I just got back from a business trip and happened to be talking to the recruitment manager again, when [Coworker] rushed up to us.

Coworker: “Welcome back! Did you hear about [Boss]?”

Recruitment Manager: “I was just about to tell her!”

Me: “I just got back from a trip. What happened?”

Coworker: “Apparently, he was so inappropriate with [New Hire], and so often, that she secretly started recording audio on her phone every time he approached her. She went to HR with the recordings of him inviting her to go over and swim in his pool while the wife and kids were away, and so yesterday he was sent straight to his desk to collect his things.”

Recruitment Manager: “The amount of flabbers that I did not gast are uncountable.”

Good riddance! And [New Hire], despite being hired under bad circumstances, ended up thriving with the right training.

It’s a very busy day, so we’re relying extra heavily on our numbered ticketing system. A customer comes up with his ticket number, showing 89.

Customer: “I ordered before my friend! Why did she get her food before me?”

Me: “Your ticket is 89, and she’s 86, so she ordered first.”

Customer: “I know what happened! We both put our orders in at the same time! Don’t try to tell me I’m wrong!”

Customer’s Friend: “What’s going on?”

Customer: “This b**** be trying to gaslight me with numbers!”

Our previous CEO was leaving, and a new one was hired. He was poached from a pretty well-known organization down in the city. A bigwig there, coming to be a bigwig here. He still lived down in the city but rented a place closer to work and went home on weekends. Must be nice to be on “two houses” kind of money.

Not long after he started, he went on a company trip. He didn’t need his laptop, so he left it at home down in the city. During that time, we had some kind of email outage. Not massive, but it took us an hour or two to diagnose and fix.

While the emails were down, we got a call from the CEO. He wanted to know what was going on, and we explained that there was an email outage that we were working to resolve.

He got short with us and demanded we get it fixed so that his secretary could handle the emails (as if we weren’t already trying, and as if his telling us to do so would cause it to be fixed faster because he asked us), and said that if we weren’t able to get it resolved, someone would need to drive over two hours to his house in the city and retrieve his laptop so his secretary could access the cached emails there. We said we’d keep trying to fix the email server, and soon enough, we did get it fixed. Made up crisis averted, I guess?

Well, word got back to the rest of management, who pulled him aside and said that his behaviour isn’t the way we handle these sorts of issues. No apology from him, of course, but the dude got told to pull his head in.

He’s been gone for a few years now, but whenever we have an outage, we all joke that “if you don’t get this s*** fixed, you’ll need to drive six hours to collect my laptop, kiss my wife, and bring it back (the laptop, not the wife, the wife hates me) so I can stare blankly at it until this s*** is fixed!”

I was looking to rent a basement room in a large older home. The owner of the place lived two hours away, so a person renting a different room in the home was asked to show me the place. I was optimistic since it was a spacious room and a private bath for a reasonable price.

Other than the lack of natural sunlight, the basement room looked great. Unfortunately, it didn’t sound great. I could hear a TV playing old sitcoms at a ridiculous volume coming through the walls, presumably belonging to someone renting another room. 

I was saved from having to ask about the TV because when I looked into the closet, I found a note taped up inside.

Note: “Yes, the TV is always that loud, even at 3 AM. No, the Landlord will not do anything about it.”

The man showing me the room seemed surprised by the note and uncertain how to respond. All he could say was he hadn’t had issues with the TV, but he also confessed he lived two stories up and so wouldn’t be aware of what happened in the basement.

When we got to the private bathroom, I found another note hidden in the shower stall itself.

Note: “Hope you like freezing cold water because that’s all you will ever get here.”

I found one last note taped hidden away next to the power box.

Note: “Computer, Space heater on low setting. Any other electronics: pick two at most. A space heater on high setting will never work. Enjoy winter.”

The man showing me the house begrudgingly admitted that these last two notes were fairly accurate, the old house couldn’t handle modern electricity demands without flipping a circuit breaker, and the water heater couldn’t keep up with the demands of everyone in the home.

I politely informed the man I’d decided not to rent this home, at which point he confessed they had already taken down other similar notes; the ones I’d found were simply tucked away in places no one had looked recently to notice. He confessed the landlord would no doubt force him to remove all the notes so the next person who came to see the home wouldn’t see them. At least I got a fair warning, but I feel sorry for the next people to consider the room.