In my teenage years, I worked as a sales assistant for a chain of well-known garden and DIY stores in the UK. After a year, I was unofficially promoted to a pseudo-supervisor role (i.e. I was meant to supervise the checkout workers but I wasn’t paid more for doing this) which gave me a chance to observe some of the events of the one week [Coworker] lasted between his being hired and being fired.

[Coworker] was the sort of guy who seemed to fit the stereotype of a teenage stoner almost perfectly. His behaviour was bizarre and he had no filter talking to customers. He wasn’t exactly hostile, but put it this way: anything that you might have dreamed about being able to say to customers he would just say. Here are a few examples of some of the events.

Event 1:

[Coworker] was caught on video standing in an aisle staring at a pack of lightbulbs for half an hour.

Event 2:

A customer asked [Coworker] to help them find an item, but as he was still learning the layout and products, he was struggling a little. The customer made some sort of comment. 

Coworker: “Find it yourself, then.”

And he walked off.

Event 3:

I was working the returns desk and put out a general call for an assistant to help answer a telephone query. [Coworker] answered the phone (which, unfortunately, was located at the returns desk), spoke to the customer for a few minutes, and then said:

Coworker: “Who do you think you’re talking to?”

He then slammed the phone down and marched off before I could ask him what was said, which meant that I had to deal with the matter when the extremely angry customer called back a few moments later.

Event 4 — the one that actually got him fired:

[Coworker] came in for a morning shift and then disappeared. Multiple calls were put out for him, but nobody knew where he had gone. Then, after about half an hour, I saw him storming back out the front door with his coat on, followed a few paces behind by one of the managers. I asked what was going on and was told that [Coworker] had come in, clocked in, and then gone upstairs for a nap in the staff room instead of starting work.

Why he thought he could get away with that, I don’t know, but it seemed like a fittingly bizarre end to his week with us.

It is the early 2000s when UK retailers still commonly accept cheques in payment. Our tills will print the transaction details for the customer, but we will need to handwrite details from their cheque guarantee cards on the reverse of the cheque to process the payment.

A couple comes to my till with a trolley full of various DIY products like wallpaper, paste, and assorted tools coming to a total of around £100. The transaction starts as normal until they provide the cheque guarantee card. This card is of a type I haven’t seen before and I am initially confused until I spot a particular bit of info.

Me: “Pardon me, I think you may have given me the wrong card.”

Customer: *Instantly aggressive* “No, I didn’t. That is definitely my cheque guarantee card.”

Me: “I’m sorry, but if you look at this box, it says, ‘This is not a cheque guarantee card.’”

Customer: “I don’t care what it says. That’s what the bank gave us and is definitely my check guarantee card. Just take it!”

Me: “Do you have some other form of payment? I really don’t think I can take this card.”

Customer: “No, I don’t! You have to take it.”

Me: “Let me go speak to my boss and see if there is anything we can do.”

I leave the counter and speak to my boss to explain what’s going on. They tell me to take the customer to the return counter and see if we can phone the bank and authorise the check by phone, something we typically do as standard for business customers.

I find someone to swap in for me at my till which now has a queue and take the customers to the return counter, ring them up again there, and phone the bank as instructed. Sweet miracle of miracles, they pass security and the bank authorises the payment — although they do also ask me to inform the customer that they will need to apply for an actual cheque guarantee card.

Do they thank me for sorting this out for them? Nope.

Customer: *With a sneer* “See! The customer is always right.”

So far, it’s the only time in my life someone has actually said it!

We are going through a massive heatwave. Air conditioning is extremely rare and everyone is a little irritable from the heat. Eventually, I can’t handle it, so I decide to get some ice cream to cool down, and unsurprisingly, there’s a queue. This specific shop makes fresh churros to order and some people are ordering them so there is a small backlog, but it’s nothing crazy.

A woman walks up behind me and I immediately know she will be trouble when she starts huffing. Some other people begin to glare at her for this, which only makes her more annoyed as she begins whining in annoyance.

We all know she wants to skip the queue so she won’t have to wait, but none of us are letting her do so. By this point, there are maybe fifteen of us waiting and there are three people inside; one is taking orders and the other two are fulfilling orders. Once they have caught up, the one taking the orders walks out and asks us to queue in a U shape so people can access other shops. Most are fine with this, but not this woman. Once the worker goes back inside, she brings her phone out, and this is what I hear.

Customer: “This f****** stupid b**** thinks she can tell me what to do when she won’t go inside and do her own job. Lazy c***s, the whole lot of them. It’s not a difficult thing to do, so who does she think she is not serving me?”

The people in front of me turn to her in surprise at this, but I don’t, having dealt with people like this daily for years. I am able to tune her out for the most part, but she just keeps ranting to whoever is on the phone with constant huffing, whining, and moaning. I am beginning to reach my tether with her when she comes out with the following.

Customer: “Why are they taking so long?! I shouldn’t have to wait like a servant. Can someone move so I can order?”

I don’t hear the next part of this rant as I am let inside, but from what I see, she gets into an argument with people in the queue. I order and wait. The woman comes in and orders a lot of something that is backed up. The moment she is told there is a wait, she goes into a rage.

Customer: “How dare you tell me to wait?! I am a professor at [University five minutes away] and I will not be treated like this! You will serve me right this moment, and if you do not, I will be complaining!”

Remembering years of being the one on the receiving end of this, this does it for me.

Me: “Hey, it is 30° (86° F), most people are off as it’s a weekend and not everywhere is back open yet. We are all tired and desperate for something to cool off. Unlike you, we were taught how to wait our turn. You have been stomping your feet, you have been whining, you have been huffing, and you have been complaining non-stop because you’re not being treated like something special. Now either wait your turn like an adult or stomp off as an overgrown, spoiled three-year-old!”

I got the harshest glare ever for that, but those who were also waiting began to say similar things. She proceeded to stomp out with her nose in the air and not-so-secretly screaming in annoyance, as she hadn’t fully closed the door. Once I finally got called to collect my order, I noticed a hastily written thank-you on a napkin. It wasn’t much, but it felt good to put someone like her in their place for once.

A popular attraction based on a well-known series of sci-fi horror films travelled the UK and came to my hometown a few years ago. It was a bit like a cross between a theatre performance and an escape room. Actors dressed as marines from the franchise would rescue the audience and try to help them escape through several set-pieces as aliens attacked them.

I was very excited to go, having missed it every time it was in the city previously, so I arranged to go see it with folks from my office. There were multiple performances each night, and our tickets were booked for 20:00. When we bought them, we were told very firmly that we needed to be there at 19:50 sharp, so when the night came, we were there exactly at 19:50.

We checked in at the box office and then milled around in the bar area for a while until we were told to sit down and wait. We took our seats and waited and waited and waited…

When it was about half an hour after our show was due to start, I asked the person who checked us in when our show would start.

Employee: “Did you just get here?”

Me: “No, we’ve been here since 19:50!”

Employee: “Which group are you?”

I pointed.

Employee: “Well, the group next to you was here first, so we’re taking them in first. It’ll be about half an hour before you get seen.”

Me: “But our tickets were for 20:00, not 21:00.”

Employee: “That doesn’t matter.”

Unfortunately, I’d made plans to meet up with friends at 21:30 based on when the show was expected to end, so I told my colleagues that I couldn’t wait. We demanded the money back on our ticket, which was very reluctantly handed over.

However, as annoyed and disappointed as I was, I couldn’t help but laugh at the explanation we were given by the box office at that point: “Sorry, but one of the aliens called in sick.”

Many years ago, a popular mobile phone service provider noticed that a lot of their call centre’s time was being taken up with complex billing questions (and not-so-complex calls which took longer because customers wanted to complain about legitimate charges).

Up until this point, all of their contact centre agents were expected to deal with any and all types of customer queries including sales, first-line tech support, and other general queries. To address the perceived problem of billing queries taking up too much time, the business decided to create a dedicated “Billing” support team. I was hired with around twenty other agents to staff it. We were given comparatively intense and detailed training on the billing and payment systems but were not trained in any other areas.

Now, this would have been fine, but our team didn’t have a dedicated phone line, and customers being customers, callers would regularly ignore the system prompts and come through to us with unrelated questions which would then have to be transferred to other agents.

This would also be fine except that the other teams hadn’t been briefed on us and didn’t believe that we couldn’t handle questions that weren’t about billing issues. That all leads to this conversation I had with a coworker during an attempted transfer.

Me: “Hi. I have a customer on the line with a query about their upgrade. As I’m part of the billing team, I can’t answer their queries. Can I pass them through to you?”

Coworker: “No.”

Me: “Sorry? What do you mean, ‘no’?”

Coworker: “My manager says that there is no such thing as a billing team and that you need to stop transferring calls you don’t want to deal with.”

Me: “Ooookay. I don’t know what to tell you other than that we absolutely do exist and that we have had no training in anything other than billing. Can you please tell me your name again and give me your manager’s name so I can escalate this?”

Coworker: “I’m [Coworker], my manager is [Manager], and I’ve alerted them to this conversation and they are listening. Let me put you on hold and have a quick word with them.”

A few minutes later, during which I apologised to the customer for the delay:

Coworker: “Okay, my manager says to accept this call but to tell you that no other transfers will be accepted and that they will take it up with your manager.”

I spoke with my manager after the call. He rolled his eyes and told me that he couldn’t believe people were still complaining about this. However, a few weeks later, the company pulled the plug on our team and integrated us into the main pool of agents after a little further training.