I work at a gas station. A guy comes in at 2:15 am.

Customer: “Gimme a bottle of tequila.”

Me: “I’m sorry, sir, but we can’t sell alcohol after 2:00 am.”

Customer: *Getting mad* “I’m not leaving until you do.”

Me: “That’s fine. I get paid by the hour. I’ll just mop around you.”

Customer: “I’m calling 911!”

He gets on the phone and talks for a moment before hanging up.

Customer: “I spoke to 911, and they said you’re being a d**k for not selling to me.”

I don’t budge, so he ends up doing this three times. I don’t think he is really calling 911 until the cops actually show up!

Officer: “Sir, you’re breaking the law by using 911 for a non-emergency.”

Customer: “What do you mean, non-emergency?!”

He was escorted out.

Some customers want the impossible, and they’ll go to ridiculous lengths to get it. Check out more impossible demands in our roundup: 10 More Hilarious Stories About Customers Demanding The Impossible

My mom, my siblings, and I are on the way to visit a relative in Germany, and on the way there, we stop at a gas station for lunch and refueling. I initially take a bottle of water and a snack, while my family takes sandwiches, but while we’re walking out, my eldest brother’s sandwich slips out and falls, splattering on the cement untouched.

I decide to go back and buy him a new sandwich, but as I try to pay the cashier, he points at me, saying something in German I can’t understand.

Me: “I’m sorry, I can’t really speak German.”

The only words he could say in response were “water no paid” and “police”. I made a valiant effort to prove I had already paid for that bottle of water once, but to no avail. The cashier was clearly losing his temper, so I went out and asked my brother for the receipt for the meal… only to find out it had been thrown away already.

With the cashier screaming at me, and only holding my lunch and the water bottle, I rushed back and begrudgingly paid for the bottle twice.

I do understand his point of view, but I have never seen shoplifters going right back in with the stolen merchandise, or indeed go to legitimately pay for anything!

I had a small leak in one of my tires, requiring a refill every week or so until I had the time to get it fixed. Since this was the same as the interval for refueling, it didn’t bother me too much, until one of those times I stopped at a gas station and the following happened.

The air pumps there were always free to use (since it’s considered a safety issue), and the downside of this was that it was not unusual to see the pump out of order.

I stopped at the pump (which was turned on, as usual), set the pressure, and attached the hose. Only when I couldn’t hear the compressor kicking in after several seconds did it dawn on me that it was not actually functional, and since there was no pressure in the tank, it drained my tire instead of filling it, making it completely flat.

After some swearing, I figured I had just enough pressure left to crawl to another gas station across the street. But, trying to be a decent person, I went to the station’s convenience store to inform the clerk of the issue, so other drivers would not have the same problem.

Me: “Hey, just so you guys know, the air pump isn’t working properly. You may want to put a sign on it or something.”

Clerk: “Oh, we know.”

Me: “You… know?”

Clerk: “Yeah, it’s been like that for a while.”

Me: “And you didn’t think to put a sign, or at least turn it off completely?”

The clerk stares at me blankly for a couple of seconds.

Clerk: “I don’t know. What’s the harm, anyway? Just go to the other station.”

Me: *Dumbfounded* “You are aware of the fact that when the air tank is empty and someone connects the hose to his tires, it actually removes any air they had left in them? I came here with a drivable car, and now I have a flat!”

Clerk: “Oh.”

Me: “…”

Clerk: “…”

And that was that. No apology — I didn’t actually expect one — and a look that was a mix of “So, I was wrong, who cares?”, “What do you expect me to do with that?”, and “It’s still not my problem.”

I swear, some people are not only incapable of doing the bare minimum of their jobs but also of caring the slightest about other people.

After an incident with the underwater Internet cables running to our state, a large amount of the island has no Internet connection. This means most EFTPOS machines aren’t working, either. My service station got lucky and is completely unaffected; everything is working fine.

A customer pulls up and looks at me excitedly.

Customer: “I’ve got cash!”

Me: “We’ve got working EFTPOS machines!”

Turns out he always carries cash just in case and was excited to be proven right today! I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so disappointed that they could pay by card.

The store building at this petrol station is tiny. We only sell cigarettes, snacks, drinks, air fresheners, and that sort of thing.

There is no cash register at all; we have a desk calculator and a clipboard. That’s it. Instead, to balance the till, you do a complete inventory of the store at the beginning and end of every shift — so many of each type of chocolate bar, flavour of chips, type of soda, etc. — noting the numbers on an inventory sheet. It isn’t too onerous, as there are only something like a hundred different items in the store.

You subtract the number of each left at the end of the shift from the number at the start of the shift, multiply by the price, add all the items’ amounts up, and that’s what your till should contain. It works surprisingly well.

Working the overnight graveyard shift — 11:00 pm to 7:00 am — you see some real characters. One night as I was finishing my shift, a guy came in and saw what I was doing. He asked about it, and I explained. He then spoke cockily about how he could make life difficult for me by buying a bunch of different things and how I would have to recount everything.

So, he did, in fact, buy a dozen things, gloating about how much work he was causing me. After handing him his change, I quickly scratched out “17” and wrote “16” for the first item and went down the sheet changing the number for each of the things he bought.

I guess he forgot about subtraction. He stormed out, unhappy.