CONTENT WARNING: Child Abuse

There’s a big, limited-time sale on a certain kitchen appliance that I want. I go to the store to get it.

When I get to the aisle it’s in, there’s one left on the shelf. There’s another woman browsing in the aisle, and she’s got a large child, maybe three or four, with her. She’s carrying him against her hip. There’s no one else in the aisle.

I grab the appliance I want and start leaving the aisle.

Woman: “Hey, you! That’s mine.”

“Then you should have grabbed it yourself,” I think. I don’t verbally reply, though; I’ve long since learned it’s a bad idea to engage with these types of people.

Woman: “Hey! Listen to me when I’m talking to you!”

I keep walking.

Suddenly, something slams into my back and knocks me into the shelves. The shelves are, apparently, not very well anchored. Product goes flying.

I’m mentally disorganized by the blow. I remember clutching at my box and attempts being made to pry the box out of my hands. I also remember essentially attempting to crawl under the fallen shelf because it seems “safer”.

The next thing that I remember clearly is several store employees around us and the woman screaming that I broke her child’s arm.

I glance at the child, expecting this to be some sort of exaggeration, and notice that his arm does not look right. I’m not a doctor, so I have no idea if it was broken, dislocated, or what, but that arm looks WRONG.

I then notice that the store employees are mostly ringed around me like they expect me to be some sort of violent menace.

Me: “What happened?”

Employee: “She says that you had some sort of violent episode, attacked her and her child, and knocked the shelves over on them. Are you okay, sir?”

I reply while attempting to stand up:

Me: “I feel like I’ve been… I feel like I’ve been… I didn’t attack anybody.”

Employee: “The police and paramedics are on the way, and we’re pulling the security footage. Please don’t stand up.”

Me: “Okay.”

The store manager gets there before the police do. He mutters something to his employees, and soon they’re circled around the woman instead of me. She doesn’t seem to have noticed the change.

The police arrive next. The store manager talks to them, and they arrest the woman. She rages the whole time about how they should be arresting me and how I hurt their kid.

One of the officers kneels next to me.

Officer: “Can I take your witness statement?”

Me: “Yeah, but I still don’t quite understand what just happened.”

Officer: “Tell me your version first, and then I’ll explain what we saw on the security footage, okay?”

Me: “Okay.”

I tell them, essentially, the first portion of this story.

Officer: “Well, on the security footage, it looks like she hit you with her child.”

Me: *Pauses* “I’m sorry, what?”

Officer: “Yeah, she grabbed her kid by his legs and slammed him into your back.”

Me: “F***.”

Officer: “Would you like to press charges?”

Me: “Yes.”

The paramedics got there next. They took both me and the child to a hospital… in separate ambulances. For me, nothing was broken, and none of my injuries were an immediate risk to my health. I asked about the child, but I was told that medical privacy laws meant they couldn’t even tell me if the child ended up at the same hospital as me, let alone if the child was “okay” or not.

I later was asked to give a deposition in preparation for a court trial, but when I showed up for my scheduled deposition, I was told that the trial had been canceled because the woman took some sort of plea bargain. I was not told any details of the plea bargain.

I work at a fast-food Mexican place. Two customers come in, and one orders a few items that are quite cheese-heavy.

Customer’s Friend: “Wait, aren’t you, like, super lactose-intolerant?”

Customer: “Sadly, yes.”

Customer’s Friend: “And you’re ordering this much dairy?”

Customer: “When you’ve lived with lactose intolerance as long as I have, you learn that some foods are just worth whatever comes next.”

Me: *Not getting involved* “That’ll be $12.99, please.”

Customer: “Thank you. Side question: would you say the flush strength in your customer toilets is quite high?”

Related:
This Cannot End Well, Part 4
This Cannot End Well, Part 3
This Cannot End Well, Part 2
This Cannot End Well

This story is part of our Customer Situations That Will NOT End Well roundup!

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I am an American teaching English in China. We are winding down after the last classes on a Friday evening. I’m in the back with our boss and one of the two head teachers when we hear a crash coming from the front room accompanied by the sound of lots of scattering little pieces.

Boss: “Sounds like someone dropped the Lego box.”

Me: “That sounded pretty loud. I’ll check it out.”

I jog out of the teachers’ office and around to the front room. I pass by the Lego building area and nothing is amiss there. I head to the entrance and, to my shock, I find one of the double glass entrance doors completely shattered on the ground! Two of our local Chinese workers are talking with an elderly woman and a younger woman, and there is a crying five-year-old boy with a bloody cut on his head. I run back to the teachers’ office.

Me: “It was our door! A kid broke the front door!”

Boss: “A kid broke our door?!”

Me: “There’s glass everywhere and a child is bleeding. You need to come out here and deal with this.”

The three of us returned to the scene of the incident. The head foreign and head local employees were talking with the mother. I didn’t understand much of what was going on because the discussion was almost entirely in Chinese. However, at one point, the elderly woman (who had been mostly silent during this event) objected to something the younger woman said. The old woman punched the younger woman in the shoulder and said some angry words to her.

I later learned that the elderly woman was the younger woman’s mother and the child’s grandmother. The younger woman was trying to put the blame on us, but her mother was having none of it and making her take responsibility for her son’s actions.

We had to close down the area for safety concerns and direct everyone out of an alternate egress point. A guard was hired to stand watch all night since we could no longer secure the main entrance. The door was boarded up and eventually replaced — with another double glass door that honestly looked worse in quality.

The security camera footage showed the boy running into the door and pushing it all the way open. He kept pushing it after it had reached its limit. Since he was small, he was putting all his force against the lower part of the door, causing it to flex. Tempered glass is under pressure and does not react well to being bent, so it shattered and collapsed. The top 20% of shattered glass stayed in one chunk until it landed on top of the boy, which is what caused the head wound. He received a few stitches in a hospital but was otherwise all right.

The head employees visited him in the hospital. Confronted with the video evidence and Grandma, the mother did not attempt to hold our business responsible, and insurance paid for the replacement door.

CONTENT WARNING: Fatal Car Accident

My wife and I are raising my ten-year-old son, my eight-year-old niece, and my seven-year-old daughter. We adopted my niece more than a year ago. My sister was a single mother, and my niece, sister, and her boyfriend were in a car accident caused by a drunk driver. My sister and her boyfriend both died.

My niece survived but was paralyzed from her lower back down, and she had to come to terms with her mom’s death, adjust to living in our family, and learn how to live her new life in a wheelchair.

At first, we were worried about how our kids would react to their cousin living with us. She wasn’t close to us before; the reason we were adopting her was that she didn’t have anywhere else to go. Our kids had met her a few times before. Due to the hospital’s health crisis regulations at the time, the only visitors allowed in the hospital she was staying at were adults, and they really preferred that those adults were my wife and me. We tried to have the kids talk on Zoom, but they never really connected. My son in particular can be very resistant to any changes at home and was pretty upset already about the ways we were changing our house to make it more accessible.

We brought my niece home after a few months in the hospital, and as expected, my son wasn’t incredibly happy about this. He didn’t say anything to her face about it, but she could tell he wasn’t happy about her being there.

The next morning, I woke up at seven, and as I went into the kitchen to start making breakfast, I saw my niece’s wheelchair… but no niece in it. I heard strange noises coming from the living room, and I walked in to see my son with my niece sitting on his shoulders, my niece being very small for her age. They were both giggling and laughing and searching for something on the mantle above the fireplace.

I got my niece back into her wheelchair and asked what happened. All that they would tell me was that my niece’s glasses had somehow ended up on the mantel. My son was too short to see it from where he was standing, and my niece was too nearsighted to find her glasses without wearing them, so they were just doing their best to work together to find the glasses.

I was upset that my son had just picked her up and put her on his shoulders, and we had a long talk about safety, but I’m also incredibly relieved; it’s been six months, and my son, niece, and daughter are best friends. I asked my son what changed, and he just said that it was impossible to stay mad at his cousin when she’s such an amazing person.

Both of my kids are very patient and supportive of my niece’s trauma, anxiety, and physical disability, and my niece is incredibly loving and grateful in return.

This story is part of our Highest-Voted-Inspirational-Stories-Of-2023-(so far!) roundup!

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I have a very large chest. This happened a few years ago after my chest went through its last growth spurt. I went into the only lingerie store in my small town to get resized. I explained up front that I knew they didn’t carry my size but would like to be fitted so I had a better idea of what to order. The girl took me into the fitting room to get a few measurements.

Clerk: “Good news! We actually do carry your size on our website, but not in-store. Although, we do have a few fitting bras for you to try on so you know what to order. We can even place the order for you in the store so you’ll get free shipping.”

Me: “Oh, cool. The last time I was here, you didn’t carry a large enough size.”

Clerk: “Yeah, we just expanded our size range. You’re a 38DDD.”

Me: “Are you sure? Usually, the band size I wear is a 34. My best guess is that I should be around a 34G.”

Clerk: “Yes, you probably just wore the old ones and they stretched out with you so they seem to fit.”

I found this statement to be incredibly rude, but she seemed utterly clueless, so I just let it go, mostly because I wanted to see where this was going.

Me: “Okay, that doesn’t seem right to me, but I would be happy to try them on.”

She came back and handed me two bras. I tried them on and they were awful; they were both too small and too big at the same time. I considered just leaving, but I wanted to see if I could get her to fit me correctly after she saw how bad they were. Just to note, I did have the loose bra-fitting T-shirt on.

Clerk: “Is it okay if I come in and check the fit?”

Me: “Yes, but I was right; these do not fit at all.”

Clerk: “Oh, no, those fit you perfectly.”

Me: “No, they don’t. They are so tight on my chest that my boobs are mushrooming out the top, and the band is so loose that if I raise my arms I’ll fall out of it. I can even fit my entire fist in the band.”

I lifted the shirt slightly and showed her that my fist did in fact fit in the band with extra wiggle room.

Clerk: “No, it’s supposed to fit like that. You have just been in the wrong size for so long you’re just used to a tight band. Having a band too tight is what causes back pain.”

Me: “I don’t have back pain. And what about the fact that I have mushroom boobs?”

Clerk: “You just need to push them down farther, or try on the full-coverage option if you don’t like having cleavage. It fits you fine.”

Me: “This is the full-coverage bra. There’s a difference between cleavage and spilling out, and no, it doesn’t. Could you please remeasure?”

She gave an annoyed sigh but did remeasure me.

Clerk: “I’m getting the same numbers. That is the correct size. Would you like me to place an order for you?”

I didn’t say anything. I just lifted my arms and shrugged my shoulders and, as I predicted, the band slid up over my chest and stayed there even after I dropped my arms down.

Me: “Is this supposed to happen? I really don’t think this is the correct size.”

The clerk stared at my chest for a second with the band now across the top of my boobs, not under them, and without saying a word, she turned and walked out of the dressing room. I got dressed, left the store, and never went back.