In the mid-2000s when I was nineteen, I worked for an eighty-two-room hotel. We had a conference center that fit maybe 300 people. We had a guy who used us several times a year (I will call him Carl) who put on different trainings for police officers. Carl was a higher-ranking police officer and trainer. He was a very nice guy, probably in his early forties, and he would buy our staff dinner and bring treats and snacks — really an upstanding guy. He always left us glowing reviews. We always put him in a room close to the front desk at his request, and he told us to call him if we ever needed anything. As part of the deal with him, we blocked out a large number of rooms for the conference over a three-day period — discounted rooms at the state rate. We would have twenty-plus cop cars in the parking lot. It was nice having them there; we always felt very safe, and they were usually a good group.

This particular night, I was working by myself on the 3:00 to 11:00 shift. For one of the major trainings they did several times a year over a three-day weekend, we had probably thirty agencies staying. Some of them had booked rooms with the FIRM agreement that we’d bill the agency for the rooms; however, the guests needed to provide a credit card for incidentals. Some of the agencies covered everything, but not all. Most agencies sent their staff with agency credit cards to be used for incidentals.

One lady came to check in around 5:00 pm. She was a police officer from about four hours away in a medium-sized city.

Me: “Okay, ma’am, may I please see your credit card for incidental charges?”

Guest: *Rudely* “I don’t need to give you that!”

Me: “Ma’am, your agency will cover the room and tax, but a credit card is required for incidentals.”

She proceeded to argue with me, yell at me very loudly, and basically act like an all-around entitled jerk. It went on for close to ten minutes: me explaining the policy between us and her agency, and her refusing. I never once raised my voice or did anything to her. At one point, I started shaking because of how loud she was being.

Me: *Politely* “Ma’am, please calm down.”

Guest: “Wow, look how you are shaking. See? That’s from how aggressively you are talking to me!”

Finally, she told me:

Guest: “Fine! I’m going [Hotel across the parking lot]. You are extremely hostile and I’m not comfortable with you.”

That hotel was sold out of their state rooms, and they’d charge at least $189 a night versus our $70 block rate.

The lady went outside to talk to her husband. He quickly stormed in with her behind him and started going off on me.

Husband: “You were extremely rude to my wife! I could hear you raising your voice at her from all the way outside!”

I was pretty puzzled considering I had never yelled or raised my voice; I had merely repeated our policy several times and given her her options. He continued to go off on me.

Within a few seconds, Carl came down the stairs and politely introduced himself to this man and woman.

Carl: “I’m Carl [His Last Name]. I’m the one in charge of the trainings, and I set aside the block of rooms. Which agency are you with, ma’am?”

She showed him her badge, and they were super friendly to each other. Carl then very quickly asked what the issue was, and she explained how I had “treated her very badly”. He then pulled out his cell phone.

Carl: “If you want, feel free to stay at the place across the street, but as it stands, you attending the training this weekend will not be happening.”

Guest: *Absolutely shocked* “Why not?!”

Carl: “I happened to be sitting up there catching up on some reading for the training, and I heard everything.”

He gestured toward the little seating area at the top of our main lobby staircase. He liked to sit in the common areas and listen to the interactions, and honestly, I’d had no idea he was up there.

Carl: “I heard the entire interaction: everything you, your husband, and [My Name] said. Your behavior was completely unprofessional. I have no tolerance for someone who, one, acts like you have as a police officer, and two, lies about what has happened. This weekend’s conference probably won’t benefit you in the long run. I’m going to go ahead and contact your chief of police since I know him, and we’ll see how he wants to handle paying for the empty room I booked for you since it won’t be used now.”

The lady and her husband left without saying a word, just pure shock on their faces. Carl went upstairs to his room on his cell phone, and I could no longer hear him.

Carl did follow through on his word, and the lady’s chief was NOT happy at all. The chief called the hotel within an hour. He told us to go ahead and charge incidentals to the credit card we had for the rooms for the remaining attendees, and he apologized for her behavior. He said he had told his officers they would need to give their own credit cards before they left and said he didn’t realize this would be such an issue.

Carl also apologized profusely for her behavior, and he said he was sorry I’d had to stand there and take that. I explained that it wasn’t his fault, and he politely told me that I was very kind and professional and that he appreciated me and everything our hotel did for his program and the other police officers. He later bought me a nice dinner from a local Italian restaurant, and he sent our hotel a nice gift basket after the conference. He made sure to tell our general manager how polite I was, how our customer service was top-notch, and how that was what kept bringing him back to our conference center.

I never found out what became of the lady. But to think she was a police officer. Yikes!

A teenage girl approaches me as I am checking tickets for a theater screen.

Teenage Girl: “Excuse me. There’s someone in my seat, and they’re refusing to move.”

I get cover for my position, and I follow the girl into the theater, checking her ticket on the way. In her seat is an older woman with a group of children.

Me: “Excuse me, ma’am. You’re in this customer’s seat.”

Customer: “She can move somewhere else. I need to sit here with my babies!”

She gestures to the four children next to her.

Me: “May I see your tickets, ma’am?”

Customer: “You may not! You saw my tickets on the way in, and that is enough violations of my privacy!”

Me: “I’m not trying to check your personal details, ma’am, just your seat number.”

Customer: “Not happening.”

Me: “Ma’am, either you show me your ticket or the movie is ‘not happening’. Pick one.”

The customer rolls her eyes, scoffs, and makes a long song and dance about slowly opening her bag, followed by slowly opening her purse. She glacially hands over a crumpled-up ticket.

Me: “Ma’am, you’re seated down at the front, in row A.”

Customer: “Those are terrible seats! My babies will get bad necks!” *Glares at the teenage girl* “Why does this b**** get to sit in the nice seats and my babies have to sit down in the front?”

Me: *Looking at both tickets, as well as the teenage girl’s receipt* “Because this customer purchased her ticket online about two weeks ago, and you purchased yours five minutes ago at Concessions. Now, please let this customer have the seat that she paid for, or I will have to ask you to leave.”

Customer: “I’m not moving!”

Without skipping a beat, I get on my radio.

Me: “Security to screen seven, please. We have a customer who needs escorting from the premises.”

Customer: “Wait, you were serious?!”

Me: “You thought I was joking?”

Customer: “Fine, fine! I’ll move!”

Me: “No, ma’am. You didn’t move when asked multiple times. That time has passed. You now need to leave the theater.”

Customer: “F*** you! I paid for my tickets, and I deserve to see this movie!”

Me: “And everyone else who paid also deserves to see the movie — without you causing a scene. Please leave.”

The customer stubbornly remains in her seat, and the security guard is unable to remove her; he can’t physically touch her unless she’s being violent. We have to wait for the police to come and forcibly remove her, by which time the movie is half an hour late.

The best part about the story comes at the end. The four kids next to her (mostly teenagers) have been silent and well-behaved during the whole interaction. Since it’s a PG-13 movie and it’s the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday, I ask them if they’d like to accompany their mother or stay and watch the movie. 

Kids: “That’s not our mother! We don’t know that woman! We thought she was talking about someone else!”

Because I mentioned this story in a comment on this NotAlwaysLegal story, and it’s apparently rather popular, here’s the whole shebang.

I worked in a fast food restaurant, and this was my third robbery in as many months. I’d been working doubles due to an especially cruddy general manager calling in every day, and I was just dead on my feet as the only competent manager left in the store willing to work. (I was not paid enough to deal with that, but that’s a fiasco for another time…)

It was about 10:45 pm, and we were getting into the first big after-bar rush that hit us when my drive-thru cashier heard a rattling sound in the lobby. None of us thought much of it; it was an old building, after all, and it was summertime, so we just figured it was the AC unit. We got through the first rush mostly fine, if absolutely barren for fried foods, so I decided to just drop some fries and make everything else to order, as late as it was. 

The rattling sound came again, louder this time, and I was cussing my way back up to the lobby to make yet another maintenance report when all of a sudden, this scrawny guy in his twenties appeared from behind the pop machine. For reference, the center of the dining room was hidden behind this behemoth, so we had no clue he was out there in the slightest. 

At first, I thought that I’d locked him in and started apologizing profusely; I was on day fifteen of seven, but I felt awful that I’d missed a customer…

So I’d thought. 

He demanded chicken tenders and all the cash in the store, waving what I (and my coworkers) thought was a knife. He was definitely high on something, and something inside me simply… snapped. I told him in the deadest voice I’ve ever produced:

Me: “You’ll be waiting ten minutes for the fryer. And I only have fifty bucks available. All the other registers have been removed and the cash dropped, and I just cleaned out the drive-thru’s excess cash before the last rush.”

I’m guessing it was due to the drugs, but he simply nodded and shuffled over to wait at one of the tables. In the stronger light over the table, the knife was revealed to be a piece of metal. I started the tenders, had my team hide in the back while I grabbed my phone, and breathed a sigh of relief when the sheriff’s deputy and a squad car showed up. 

The guy got pretty new bracelets and an attempted robbery charge.

And I made him pay for the tenders.

Related:
Forget Nerves Of Steel; This One’s Got Nerves Of Retail Exhaustion

I work at a big box store as a cashier. I grew up very conscious of waste and so I started out trying my best to give customers as many shopping bags as they needed and no more. We have tiny bags, normal bags, and giant bags.

A customer is buying just one or two normal-sized bottles of Gatorade. They are just about the perfect size for a single tiny bag, so I started to bag them.

Customer: “Wait! I don’t want that bag; I want the normal bag! Those heavy bottles will go right through the plastic!”

As this is my first retail job and I am very young and naïve I guess I still thought I was a normal human being when wearing the uniform. I also know those bags have pretty much the same strength because they have the same construction, just a different size. I am confident that the tiny bag will hold those bottles fine, so I say, a little confused:

Me: “But it’s the same plastic?”

Customer: “…Cancel my order and I’ll take my business elsewhere. Or maybe we should get a manager?”

Me: “Here’s your normal bag, ma’am. This is your total. Thank you and goodnight.” 

She went straight to the customer service desk to complain about me anyway. The shift manager and the desk clerk came to me after she’d talked to them and left in a huff. Apparently, they were both baffled by her story and needed me to even clarify what she wanted. One of them said, “But… it is the same plastic?”

In the early 2000s, I was working at a large church (over 2,000 members), and on Sundays, I ran the audio and video booth. We had three services: a 7:00 am early service, the main service at 10:00 am, and a late service at 11:30 am. Each service ran for about an hour and fifteen minutes.

One Sunday, during the 10:00 am service, the pastor’s wife went into labor — three weeks early. The pastor left in the middle of his sermon, and the youth pastor took over. The youth pastor did a great job of taking over and wishing the mother and baby well, and that service wrapped up early.

We had a quick meeting to decide what to do about the 11:30 service, and the youth pastor volunteered to give a sermon he had prepared for the youth group later in the week. It was his first time giving a sermon in front of that many people up on the big stage. He was nervous and rolled through it quickly, and then he forgot about the closing songs, so church ended at 12:15 instead of the normal 12:45.

Everyone had cleared out of the church by 12:30-ish. I shut down all the equipment, turned out the lights, and went down the hall to make sure the lights were out in the classrooms, like I normally did.

One light was on, and I found another church employee who worked in the nursery on Sundays. She was sitting in a rocking chair rocking a toddler, and I saw tears rolling down [Employee]’s face.

Me: “What’s wrong?”

She could hardly speak, she was so upset.

Employee: “This child’s parents dropped him off before the early service and never came back. He’s been here for almost five hours! The parents didn’t give us a contact number. All I know is his first name.”

I immediately called the youth pastor, who quickly turned around and came back to the church. The child was very out of sorts, either hungry or tired. We had snacks but no food, and there wasn’t really a place to put a kid down for a nap. I ran to get some chicken nuggets while they figured out what to do.

When I got back, a couple had pulled in right in front of me.

Man: “Where is everyone?”

Me: “Church ended early today.”

Woman: “Oh, okay. We’re just here to pick up our son.”

I wasn’t about to get involved with the drama, so I just unlocked the door and let them in.

The youth pastor was livid and lit into them.

It turns out the parents wanted some time alone and had been dropping their kid off at church and then leaving to go do stuff. They had been doing this for weeks — just dropping him off around 7:45 am and coming to pick him up around 12:45 pm.

Here is the part where the parents were really entitled: they got mad at the youth pastor for ending church early. They yelled at him for “endangering their child” and threatened to sue. The dad was up in the youth pastor’s face, and I thought they might fight, but the youth pastor was a BIG dude, and I think that kept the dad from doing anything else.

I didn’t stay in there; I went into the next room with [Employee] and the child and gave him the nuggets, which he gulped down.

The parents finally took the kid and left. The youth pastor and his wife took us to lunch because we (mostly [Employee]) were still upset by the whole thing.

I think about that kid a lot. I hope his parents didn’t abandon him. I wish I had a follow-up, but as far as I know, they never came back.

Related:
Some Parents Are Way Too Comfortable Leaving Their Kids With Strangers, Part 3
Some Parents Are Way Too Comfortable Leaving Their Kids With Strangers, Part 2
Some Parents Are Way Too Comfortable Leaving Their Kids With Strangers