I grew up in a country with compulsory military service, which I hated like nothing before or since. I generally tried to get out of doing whatever we were supposed to be doing.

One day we did orienteering. There were seven manned posts we needed to reach. When my team partner and I got to the first one, we were told that we were the last team to arrive, by some distance. It was obvious that we had no chance of making all seven posts. So, we went to the first pub we came across instead.

At the pub, we worked out a plan. That first post was in a corner of the map. So, we decided that we would say that we “walked off the edge of the map and couldn’t find our way back in”.

We stayed at the pub until about 7 PM and then headed back to base. There we discovered that they were just about to dispatch a search party. They got alarmed when all other teams had returned and we never even made it to the second post.

They didn’t quite buy our excuse, and we got interrogated as to what the area we were at looked like. So, we responded with “there was a small road, and a lot of forest. We saw a creek.”, etc.

I don’t think they bought it, but there was also nothing they could do.

As a janitor with over ten years of experience in varied locations, I’ve seen more entitlement and rudeness than I like. One of my longer jobs was two-plus years in a large mall, where my responsibility was a massive first-floor area, which included some assorted extra spaces. Hallways, stairways, an office, and crucially for this story, stores. Or, used to at one point.

See. Cleaning is a job where your customers are both businesses and private people. Just as my customers were the people buying things from the mall and then using the bathrooms, my customers were also the folks working at the office or the stores I cleaned.

And sadly, customers everywhere can be nasty.

I was told to add a toy store to my tasks, one dreary winter. A very basic and quick, half an hour tops gig. Use our floor cleaning machine to essentially Zamboni around their floor, where I could, and then use a mop for the rest. Clean their bathroom, kitchen, and dressing area. No dusting on shelves needed! Easy, right? No.

The manager was a sweetheart and very nice as she showed me around. She was not an issue. A small store with an even tinier backroom and, somehow, an EVEN tinier kitchen and dressing area. The mall I worked at was not built for anyone’s comfort, I assure you. Many stories can be told about just the doorframes.

This one clerk, however, was… Interesting.

I would be doing my job, trying to corral the ever-present avalanche of dust, while this woman, ten or so years my senior, would nitpick everything I did. She made the usual comments about working in cleaning before and how I was doing it all wrong. At that time, I had been a janitor (with actual vocational school-level papers and everything) for over eight years! I was not a spring chicken. It all culminated on the second day of my coming to clean. This woman decided it was completely polite and normal to demand my mop frame and mop, to show me how it’s done.

I had endured her pestering for the first thirty minutes clean earlier that week. I had now also endured another fifteen-plus-minute tirade of how I was doing my job wrong. All the while, customers were shopping around us, giving her looks. I felt exhausted and frustrated. It was as if this woman had no other job to do but follow the janitor around.

To this day, I am not at all sure what her deal was. Autism? Rudeness? Mean Girl energy? I have no idea. She spoke as if to a child, in a condescending manner I know all too well, and I saw red.

I gave her my mop frame. I watched her awkwardly mop around before finishing my tasks (with my mop frame put back on my cart by the clerk) and walking out. I told my manager in no uncertain terms that I was not going back. I would not be treated like a child at thirty-plus years old, with eight years of work experience and education behind me.

My manager took the job instead, doing it on the morning shift. Oddly enough, that cleaning task never got mentioned again. I assume the clerk was too cowed to tell a male manager how to do his job. I never found out, sadly. Funnily enough, I never saw the clerk work after a month or so. I was there for a year more afterwards, never seeing her again. I even bought some products from their store during a sale!

Good riddance.

This story and the comment section prompted me to tell you a story from my past. 

This was years ago when I worked for a man who ran a business that offered many services to companies, henceforth Bossman. The main service he offered, where I worked for seven years, was a warehouse. He rented the space and warehousing services to companies that needed them.

Our biggest customer was an international logistics company, which had a client that needed a hub warehouse for their products. So, our customer bought our services and offered it as a part of their logistics chain.

The client produced cleaning chemicals, which were shipped to us. We received them, stored them, and when they needed to be shipped out, we collected them and informed our customer, who sent one of their trucks to pick them up. It was quite a repetitive job, and when you spent years doing it day after day, you get pretty good at it.

When this story happened, I had been at the company for over four years and was basically a manager without the power of a manager. 

This happened during winter. Every day, if there was new snow, a local plow driver would clear our yard. So far, the day had been uneventful, and I was working with my coworker Jen. We heard a truck approaching, and when I peeked through the window, I saw it was the truck our customer had sent to us.

I returned to finish the job I was doing, since I knew the truck driver didn’t need my help to back up to the docking bay. Except this time, he couldn’t, and first sent his assistant to ask me for sand for the yard.

The assistant walked in and asked where the sand was, and just as I pointed it out to him, the driver stormed in and started shouting. I’m not going to type everything he said, but imagine a Scottish sailor saying this:

Driver: “Why is it so difficult to get some sand to the yard? What are you even doing all day?”

I didn’t reply; I knew there was no point in arguing. I left the work I was doing, walked outside, and took the shovel from our box of gravel. [Driver] got back to his truck, and his assistant stood there, hands in pocket, while I threw some gravel next to the tires so he could get some grip and park at the dock.

The rest of their visit was pretty quiet; I saw no reason to talk with either, and after loading, they left. I thought he was just having a bad day and decided to just let it go. 

Two days later, I got a phone call from the Bossman.

Bossman: “Hey [My Name], are you busy?”

Me: “As much as usual. Anything wrong?”

Bossman: “Have there been issues with the snowplow?”

Me: “No, why?”

Bossman: “Two days ago, did the snowplow not come at all?”

Me: “No, it did, and there was no problem with snow. Why are you asking?”

Bossman: “Look, I know you, and know that you don’t cause problems. But the customer has filed an official complaint against us, and you specifically, and I’m trying to figure out what happened.”

Me: “What?!”

Bossman: “I’ll forward the message to you. Read it and reply to me when you can, okay?”

I was heated. I told Jen I needed to check an email and went to the office to see what was going on.

Bossman had forwarded me an email from the customer’s chief of operations. In short, the driver had made a claim that our yard had so much snow he couldn’t drive there, and when he asked for help, I had been rude and unhelpful and barely did anything to assist, thus he had to work extra time that day to keep up with the schedule.

All right. He wants to dance, and I accept. I wrote my reply to Bossman. This is not word-for-word, but imagine this being said by a drunk Australian who steps on a Lego:

Me: “The yard was plowed without issue. We had several trucks that day; no one else had any issues with driving to the dock, just the driver. We didn’t throw gravel into the yard in advance because no one had asked us to do so. We have actual work to do here; we don’t have time to patrol the yard with a shovel and a bucket of gravel just in case. He didn’t ask, he shouted at us, Jen and me, while we were packing the pallets he was there to pick up. I ended up needing one and a half shovels of gravel while his assistant stood there with his thumb up his butt. And one more thing. You don’t pay me enough to be shouted at by anyone. Next time anyone, ANYONE, comes here with that attitude, I will push them out, lock the door, and demand a new driver.”

I said to Bossman:

Me: “That’s my reply. Clean up the message any way you want and reply to them.”

I didn’t hear about the issue until next Monday, when the customer’s truck arrived, and the driver marched in. Before I had a chance to say anything, he took his hat off and dropped this bomb:

Driver: “I’m so sorry. I apologize for my behavior. I was having a very bad day and took it out on you. I hope you can forgive me and we can forget about this.”

I was too shocked to know what to think.

Me: “Of course, I accept your apology.”

After he left with the day’s load, I went to check the emails.

I was still part of the chain and saw that instead of editing my reply to Bossman, he had forwarded my reply to the COO. He didn’t tell me anything more, but sometime later, another driver approached me, laughing. He said that the story of what had happened has been going around. He told me that the driver is not well-liked at all by anyone.

So far, he had been banned by every major mall, factory, and warehouse in the local area, thus forcing him to drive long-distance hauls. This was really bad because he was the local union representative, and it was reflecting poorly on every union member.

The last time he had a disciplinary hearing due to complaints, the union lawyer present at the hearing had told him that if he got fired due to official warnings about behavior, the union would not back him up.

So, did he learn his lesson? Cut to four years later, I’m working at a new job, in a warehouse of a local food processing plant. While walking near the loading bay, I hear a familiar voice.

Driver: “Just be patient, the kid is new, okay?”

I go to see if I heard right, and there he is, talking with our loading bay operator.

Me: “[Driver], good day.”

Driver: “Oh, hi [My Name]. You are working here now, I see?”

Me: “Yeah, fancy seeing you here.”

 Driver: “Yeah, they gave me a new driver to train, just told your colleague to be a bit patient. New kids have to learn to be professionals like us, right?”

He gave me a friendly nudge to the shoulder and then turned his attention to his truck, where a young driver was doing his best to navigate his pallet truck out.

Driver: *To his assistant.* “Nice and steady, focus on backing out straight!” *To me.* “Nice seeing you.”

Me: “Likewise.”

And I left to continue my day, happy to know that people can change for the better.

I have an app that I use to take photos of my shopping receipts and upload them to get gift cards, so when I am asked if I want a receipt, I always say “yes”, and from time to time, variations of this keep happening:

Cashier: “Do you want a receipt?”

Me: “Yes.”

Cashier: *Crumples the receipt and throws it away.*

Me: “Excuse me? I said I want a receipt.”

Cashier: *Deerintheheadlights.jpg.*

Me: “Can I get my receipt?”

At this point, the cashier starts digging through their trash bin. Sometimes, the cashier can’t find it, and this happens:

Cashier: “Well, I can’t find it, next!”

Me: “So print me a new one.”

Cashier: “Why?”

Now, I can choose to say “because the law requires you to give me a receipt when I ask for one”, “because I need it” or “none of your business”, it really doesn’t make a difference at this point, the cashier’s reaction is to argue with me about how much of an inconvenience it is to print out a new one.

On the off chance that the cashier DOES find my receipt in the trash, I ask for a not crumpled one (I need a receipt that is legible in photos), and the cashier starts arguing that the crumpled one is fine, if I say I need a not crumpled one we are back to the cashier asking “why?” on repeat instead of tapping a few times on their screen to print the d*** receipt.

Earlier this week, I went to the hypermarket (superstore) to buy groceries and decided to browse the meat aisle for anything good marked down due to being about to expire, and found a 1.3kg box of chicken wings with a big, bold “6.46” on the price tag’s right-hand side, this one box marked down 30%. 

I didn’t notice the tag didn’t say the usual “pkt” (“package”) nor “kg” below the price, nor did I take notice that it was the only product with its price displayed in such a way (this detail is relevant to the story).

After calculating the marked-down price and agreeing that it’s a good deal, I grabbed the box and headed to the self-checkouts, scanned my things without paying attention to the prices shown, called an employee to enter the 30% discount, and just as I was about to pay I noticed the total was way off, and then I noticed the price of the wings was way off, I opened the store chain’s app and scanned the bar code to find the product, and it clearly stated the 6.46 price for “spicy wings approx. 1.3kg”, but it ALSO stated that 6.46 was “1kg” 

Annoyed and knowing how the cashiers do things in this chain, I said nothing, cancelled the transaction, put everything back in the basket, and went to take a photo of the tag. This is so that I would have something to show to the cashier when she calls someone else to go check the tag and then tells me condescendingly how the tag says the price is “per kg” and not per package, despite the fact that the tag clearly states in big bold letters “approx. 1.3kg” and “6.46” with no mention of that “per kg”.

I went back to the meat aisle, located the tag, and after confirming the price, I took a photo of it (I did find it curious that the space under the price that usually shows the unit, i.e. “kg” or “liter” or “package” or “bag” etc., was empty) and went back to the checkouts.

Me: “There’s a very different price shown for this on the tag than what these self-checkouts say, look.”

I showed her the difference.

Cashier: “One moment.”

The cashier calls on her radio for someone to go check the tag.

Cashier: “Yeah, the tag says 6.46 is for one kilogram, see how it says this contains 1.31kg?”

Me: “It states “approx. 1.3kg” and “6.46” in bold lettering, no mention of unit price “per kg” under the price where it belongs.”

Cashier: “Well, if you look at the very left edge of your photo, you can see where it says 1kg.”

Sure enough, there it is, in tiny font, certainly not bolded like the “Spicy wings approx. 1.3kg” and “6.46” both of which are. No doubt this had been done deliberately.

Me: “So, your tag puts the mention of the unit price in small font at the LEFT edge of the tag when the price is on the RIGHT edge of the tag, in a big, bolded font? You do realize that is clearly meant to deceive customers, right?”

Cashier: “…So do you still want this?” *Holds the box up.*

Me: “At that price? No way!”

I paid for the rest of my things and then went back to look for something to replace the wings on my plate that day. While I was browsing, I noticed that literally every other product in that aisle had the unit price in its proper place under the big, bolded price, except the “spicy wings approx. 1.3kg”, and for all the wing boxes from OTHER brands, the actual price for each box was printed on the box right under the bar code.

All brands of wings except for one… guess which?