I’m the manager of an independent supermarket in outback Australia. We are the only proper supermarket within 100 kms. The original owner has passed away and his family has sold the supermarket. It has not been made known publicly who the new owners are.

The day the new owners take over, a woman whose family owns a large cattle station comes in. She is known to be extremely rude and has made many workers cry and more than one quit. The original owner refused to ban her as she would spend several thousand dollars once or twice a month. She often comes in and demands that we do her shopping for her, which is a service we do not offer. The problem is that the list she leaves will have things like “bread” written. Not what type, just “bread.” No matter if the same one is given as the previous time, it is always wrong and she causes a huge scene.

I’m serving a customer at the service desk and cigarette counter when she interrupts.

Rude Customer: “You!” *Snaps her fingers in my face* “This needs to be done. I’ll be back in an hour and it had better be right this time.”

Me: *To the original customer* “Please excuse me for a minute.” *To the rude customer* “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but personal shopping is not a service we offer.”

Rude Customer: “I don’t care. You need to do what I say. Now get to it. I don’t have time to deal with idiots like you.”

Me: “Ma’am, I am not your slave. You have interrupted the customer I am serving, and quite frankly, I’m sick of the way you treat me and my staff. You need to apologize and learn some manners or find somewhere else to do your shopping.”

Rude Customer: “Listen here, you little s***. You do as I say, or I’ll have your job!”

Me: “Ma’am, you need to leave. You can come back when you’ve learnt some manners and are ready to apologize or you can shop elsewhere.”

Rude Customer: *Yelling* “I’ll have your job for this, you stupid piece of s***! I’m very good friends with the new owners and I’ll make sure you’re fired. I’ll make sure my groceries come out of your pay! You’ll regret ever crossing me, you stupid slut!”

One of the new owners who has heard everything comes out from the back.

New Owner: “Is there a problem here?”

Me: “This woman has caused many problems in the past and is now causing a scene. I’m banning her.”

Rude Customer: “Who the f*** are you? I’ll have everyone in this s***hole fired!”

New Owner: “Ma’am, you need to leave before I call the police and have you trespassed. You are no longer welcome here.”

Rude Customer: “F*** you! You have no idea who I am! I’m calling the owners and having you both fired!”

Me: “No need to call them; you’re already talking to them. You have been asked by both owners to leave. Now, I suggest you do and stop making a bigger idiot of yourself than you already are.”

She stands there for a minute turning several interesting shades of red before storming out.

New Owner: “Is that the woman you told me about?”

Me: *Slowly calming down* “Yes, and man, that felt good.” *To the original customer* “Sir, I am so sorry for that.”

Customer: “Heck, you have nothing to apologize for. What a b****. That was the best thing I’ve seen in years. I feel like I should be paying for the show! Thank God you guys won’t put up with the crap some people around here try to pull.”

A few days later, the rude woman’s husband came in and apologized for her behaviour. We agreed to allow anyone from their station but her to shop with us, but if she sets foot back in our store, the police will be called. I love being my own boss!

Related:
Getting Owned By The Owner, Part 15
Getting Owned By The Owner, Part 14
Getting Owned By The Owner, Part 13
Getting Owned By The Owner, Part 12
Getting Owned By The Owner, Part 11

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I have been playing baseball since I was about eight years old and this story takes place when I am eleven, in 1991.

There are a couple of league rules for our age group and the most important one is no cleating. For anyone unaware, this means that when you slide into base, you are not allowed to put your foot in the air with the spikes/cleats on the bottom of your shoe into the person guarding the base. You have to keep your feet down when sliding. Anyone that cleats will be kicked out of the game and suspended for other games or kicked from the league, depending on the infraction.

The season has just started, we’re only a few games in, and everyone is having fun. Today is the day my mom is volunteering at the concession stand, so she’s not down by the field watching my game. She can see us playing from where she’s at, but she can’t pay attention to all of the game since she’s helping people. My dad is working; he can’t be at the game at the start and will be around about halfway through.

The game is still pretty early, just starting the third inning. I’m put in to replace the pitcher. I take over the mound and there is a runner on third. The runner is the biggest kid in our league. He’s in sixth grade, but he’s already a good foot taller than most of us and weighs a good sixty pounds more than most of us, too. 

I strike out the first batter I go up against. Two more outs to end this inning.

The next batter hits a pop fly out to shallow right-center field. The outfielder comes in and makes the catch, and the runner on third tags up on the base and starts to run to home plate, but he holds up as the outfielder throws the ball to the catcher. Unfortunately, the throw from the outfielder is wide and the ball goes behind the catcher and rolls to the backstop. My job now is to help cover home plate. The catcher runs back to the ball, turns, and tosses to me. Because the throw to home plate was bad, the runner on third runs home in an attempt to score.

I’m now straddling the side of home plate, waiting for the ball to come to me so I can attempt to tag the runner out. I catch the ball and swing my glove down to make the tag, but the runner slides into home and cleats me. He ends up cleating my left arm, kicking my arm out of the way, and forcing me to drop the ball. At the time, it doesn’t hurt, and I turn around to take a few steps to where the ball landed. I go to scoop the ball off the ground with my glove, and when I try to turn my arm, that’s when the pain strikes me. I drop to the ground in agony, clenching my left arm.

One of the other parents runs up to the concession stand and gets my mom. She comes over with a bag of ice and we end up leaving for the ER to get x-rays.

About thirty minutes after my mom and I leave, my dad shows up and he sits in the bleachers and starts watching the game. After about fifteen minutes, he notices that he doesn’t see me on the field and asks one of the moms sitting near him where I am. The lady tells him what happened and that I left to go to the ER.

My dad looks at the lady, with a deadpan face, and asks, “Did he make the out?”

The lady is so upset with my dad’s lack of concern — because she doesn’t understand that he’s joking — that she punches him in the arm, actually leaving a bruise, and tells him he should be ashamed of himself. My dad tries to tell her he was joking, but she wants nothing more to do with him.

The kid that cleated me broke my arm, and he is never kicked out of the game or suspended for cleating. In fact, he never receives any kind of disciplinary action against him… probably because he is the kid of one of the coaches. The kid develops a bad habit of cleating others until someone gets tired of it and cleats the kid back.

X-rays show a fractured ulna, and because some strain is put on the ulna when you twist your forearm, I can’t just have a short cast put on. I have to have a full arm cast — from my hand to my bicep — for six weeks.

I spend the summer being unable to do most things — playing ball, hitting up the pool with friends, and wrestling. The upside is that my mom feels so bad for me that she takes my younger brother and me to an amusement park. I can ride some of the roller coasters, and as we stand in line for a ride, one of the employees sees me and asks why I am waiting in line and not using the accessible entrance. He says I should be using that entrance and gives us a pass to use them. We get to bypass the long lines and I have a blast that day.

The head housekeeper texts me a picture from a nonsmoking room as evidence that the guest smoked in there. There’s an empty blunt package in the trash along with cigarette ash and burnt and unburnt bits of weed all over the desk. It also smells of smoke, though that’s complicated to document in a visual medium.

I go to charge the card, but no one is surprised it doesn’t go through for the full $250. I’m petty, so I go ahead and try a few increments down until the card goes through for a lousy $25. Oh, well, it’s our $25 now. If nothing else, it will inconvenience the a**hole.

Twenty minutes later, the guest calls, asking why I charged $25 to his card.

Me: “There was evidence of smoking in the room, so we had to charge you the smoking fee.”

Guest: “Smoking fee?”

Me: “Yes, when you checked in you signed a registration card and one of the things you agreed to was a $250 fee if you smoked in a nonsmoking room.”

Guest: “But the charge was $25.”

Me: “Yes, that’s all your card went through for.”

Guest: “But you said the fee for smoking in the room was $250?”

Me: “I guess you can come pay the rest in person if you want.”

He hangs up and honestly, I don’t think he is coming to pay the rest. I am right; he tries a different tactic. He calls and says he was supposed to be in a smoking room. I check and confirm that was not the case; he booked a nonsmoking room.

Guest: “But the girl at the front desk was supposed to have switched it to a smoking room.”

Me: “Regardless of what she was supposed to do, it was a clearly marked nonsmoking room and you agreed when he signed the registration card not to smoke in it.”

Guest: “That doesn’t count, because I didn’t read it!”

You may be aware that’s not how that works.

I basically repeatedly tell him that it doesn’t matter that he thought it was a smoking room, and the fact that he was so blatant about smoking in the room is not evidence that he thought it was a smoking room because plenty of people do that in nonsmoking rooms. He asks for managers’ names and my coworker’s name.

Me: “Tell you what, sir. Let me check the cameras from that time and see where the breakdown in communication happened. Depending on what exactly happened, I’ll see what I can do for you.”

Guest: “Well, I was outside, so…”

Me: “Oh, don’t worry. We have full audio on all our security cameras; I’ll be able to hear both sides of the conversation with no problem.”

I could hear his confidence just plummeting as he asked me how long that would take. I said maybe ten minutes tops; he said he’d call back in twenty.

As I went to have a look-see at the cameras and I texted the coworker who checked him in to see if she remembered the interaction at all. While he was perfectly friendly and all during check-in, there was no mention of a request to switch rooms. My coworker called me back and confirmed the same thing.

I wonder if he’s going to call back, or if he knows the game is over.

It’s my first week working as a dealer at a casino, and I am placed in the back because during that first week, everyone makes mistakes constantly and it’s easier for the “floor” to watch us. But some players know this and willingly seek out the weaker dealers, because if your dealer makes a mistake and there’s a dispute, it usually goes in the player’s favor.

A player sits down at the blackjack table next to mine, and starts betting heavily, $400 to 500 per hand. At one point, he has a twelve and the dealer has a six, in which case anyone will tell you to stay and hope the dealer busts. He stays, the dealer has a two under, then pulls a six, and then a four, for a total of eighteen. The guy starts cheering and says, “Sixteen!”, trying to convince the dealer she has to pull another card.

It works; the dealer pulls a king, and then she looks down and counts twenty-eight. She immediately turns to the floor, who explains that the dealer had eighteen and the player has lost, and as the king was exposed, it has to be “burned” or discarded. The player begins screaming and cursing, but she takes the money and there’s nothing he can really do.

Now the player has a meltdown. He realizes that he can’t win but that in trying to confuse the dealer, that king would’ve been his next round. No guarantee it’d actually be a good hand, of course, but it has a better chance of being something good. He’s yelling and screaming, and the floor calls over the pit boss, who also has to call over the shift supervisor, who all explained that an exposed card has to be burned.

At this point, in front of everyone and on I don’t know how many cameras, the player screams that the money means nothing to him, throws his drink at the dealer, and then grabs about $3,000 of his chips and throws them against the ceiling. It’s raining chips everywhere. Security then grabs him. Some of the workers gather the chips they can and give them to him. He’s given his cash, escorted out, and then banned from the casino.

Sadly, though, he does not get a pair of shiny bracelets or a free car ride to the hotel with the orange jumpsuits.

The poor dealer held it together on the floor, but in the break room, she was sobbing. But since then, she has ended up becoming one of the better dealers.

About a year ago, I would regularly go out for coffee with some of my coworkers. I stopped doing so after a while. These two stories are why.

Story #1:

Male Coworker #1: “Hey, [My Name], how’s it going?”

Me: “Ehh, been better. My daughter’s boyfriend just broke up with her, so she’s really down.”

Male Coworker #1: “Don’t worry; she’ll find someone else.”

Me: *Touched* “Yeah, I suppose you’re right—”

Male Coworker #1: “Women have a knack for finding their next meal ticket. She’ll have another boyfriend by the end of the week, guaranteed.”

Me: “…”

On another occasion, a different male coworker made some really disgusting, racist comments about a political figure I admire, and when I called him out on it, he insisted that he was “entitled to his opinion.” I got up and walked away.

And I haven’t been back.