During the latest health crises and civil unrest, most firearms stores have been completely wiped out of product. This is particularly true for states with heavy restrictions on what they can have.

As a sales rep for a firearms wholesaler, I am well aware of the desperation of many of these dealers. They are trying to stay in business and cannot get product to sell. One of my restricted state customers knows by now that I only call him if I have guns that are okay to ship to him.

Customer: “I’ll take it.”

Me: “Great!”

Customer: “Matter of fact, I’ll take two.”

Me: “Perfect! That’s exactly how many I have. And one of the other.”

Customer: “Fantastic! Get them here as soon as you can!”

Me: “On it!”

Customer: “Thank you so much. Now, what did I buy?”

Twenty years on the job, and this was by far the easiest and most memorable sales call ever.

I work in a warehouse; I believe we’re several hundred thousand square feet. The warehouse has an order pickup counter for local customers on one end of the building, clearly marked with lots of signs. The rest is your typical industrial warehouse with conveyors, forklifts, and lots of moving parts.

Even if you’ve never been here before, the presence of all the machinery would tell most people with common sense that only authorized personnel should be in the actual warehouse part.

I’m headed outside for a break, and I glimpse somebody wandering around on the upper-level racks looking lost. He’s not wearing safety glasses or any protective equipment, and he has the wide-eyed stare of someone who clearly doesn’t belong here.

I run up the stairs to him.

Me: “Excuse me! Can I help you?”

Guy: “Yes, thank you. I’m looking for where I can pick up my order?”

I’m not sure how he got in the building, as all the doors except the one to the pickup counter require an employee key fob to get in. Maybe he followed an employee in? In any case, I have no idea how he could have found himself in the middle of the warehouse on the SECOND FLOOR with conveyors going down both sides and thought, “Yes, I am probably headed in the right direction.”

I used to work at a big club warehouse in customer service. The job was great, and members were usually awesome, but every now and then I’d find the most entitled jerks to ever walk the earth. Based on the way they treated me and others, I can only assume they didn’t even see us as human. We were only lifelike robots built to ring up their items and load their carts.

One such incident that proves my assumption happened on a super busy Saturday. It was POURING outside. Members were fighting over parking close to the door and then bolting for the entrance as if their lives depended on it. As a courtesy to members, on rainy days, we always had someone outside in the front of the cart return bay to dry off the carts. This day was so busy; members were coming in faster than I could dry carts for them. Most were super nice and patient; they waited in line for dry ones and almost everyone thanked me. A few, who were in a hurry or didn’t care about dry carts, just skipped the line and grabbed a wet cart.

One such member rushed up and grabbed a wet cart from behind me. Sometimes carts get jammed or snagged together. Usually, it’s the buckles for the kiddie seats getting tangled, but sometimes it’s a warp in the cart from damage. This poor member grabbed one such warped cart and it dragged its buddy with it. The member attempted to dislodge it. He yanked. He twisted. He shook them violently. Then, he looked to me.

Member: *Demanding* “Help me get these carts separated!”

Me: “Can I offer you one of these dry ones, instead?”

Nope. He wanted THAT cart specifically for some reason. I abandoned my drying rag and attempted to pry the carts apart. It was like trying to separate two buffaloes in a horn lock. They refused to budge. I looked at the metal flap that allowed the carts to “nest” into each other. I saw where it was snagged and reached in to coax it free. I placed my other hand on the lip of the second cart to give me leverage while I untangled them.

Member: *Loudly* “Come on! I’m in a hurry!”

He decided I was clearly too incompetent to separate them, so he reached out to give the front cart one more tug.

At that exact moment, I loosened the second cart and the front cart sprang free. It launched forward… catching my thumb between it and the second, stationary, cart. I heard the POP sound of my thumb dislocating a few seconds before the pain hit me. I yanked my hand free and managed to stifle my choice profanity with less firing-worthy words. Something like, “Sucking sticks of saffron on a ship!” My supervisor witnessed this and still tells people it’s his favorite outburst.

The member just looked at me like I was nuts.

Member: “There! All I needed was a cart. Was that so hard?!”

I was cradling my oddly shaped hand.

Me: “Sir! I think you broke my finger!”

The member just shrugged, huffed, and walked into the warehouse. It looked like he forgot I existed the second he took his eyes off me.

My supervisor witnessed the whole thing but was more worried about me, not the member. He pulled me aside and radioed for ice. Lucky (or unlucky), I am very pain tolerant. It was not the first joint I’d dislocated. I also know the easiest way to end the pain is to reset the joint. I fiddled around with my weirdly dangly thumb until I felt it “click” back into place. My whole thumb was swollen and turning a lovely shade of purple.

My supervisor sent me inside to write up an incident report and sent a posse of employees into the store to find the member and sentence him to banishment, but, as it was insanely busy, they never found him. By far the worst… customer… ever.

At least I got an extra day off and a great macabre story out of it!

I work in an area where NFL owners, professional athletes, and the like live. One of our regulars is some guy who has spent his life wallowing in orange spray tan and has the whitest hair one can imagine.

Every day, he comes in and orders a green tea; literally a teabag with hot water. No matter what, there is always something wrong with it: too hot, too cold, cup is weird, whatever.

During my last two weeks at the store, this guy comes in when we’re being slammed. He orders and I call out:

Me: “Green tea latte for [Customer #2].”

Notice I did not say, “green tea.” He comes up and snaps:

Customer #1: “Excuse me, it was green tea. It’s literally water and a tea bag. How stupid can you be?”

I turn toward him and look him dead in the eye.

Me: *Loudly* “That’s not even your f****** order! Every time you come in here, it’s something else. If we’re so stupid, then go to another location.”

He stepped back and didn’t say anything after that.

My partner and I found ourselves needing to buy a car at short notice. We narrowed down our choices of second-hand cars online and then arranged test drives for two cars in the same dealership, a branch of a national chain. I spoke to a salesman who offered us an appointment time. There was a little bit of confusion during the call over my first name, as it is a traditional Irish name that sounds a little like a Biblical name but is spelt completely differently.  

We arrived promptly, and then sat and waited for fifteen minutes until the salesman I had spoken to sauntered in with no apology or explanation for his lateness. After some small talk:

Salesman: “[My Name] is a bit funny, isn’t it?”

He laughs at his own insult.

Me: “Nope, it’s just Irish. It can sometimes be confusing over the phone, though.”

We did the necessary paperwork, gave him all the details of the cars we wanted to see, and waited a few more minutes for him to locate them in the lot, and then he took us out to look at them.

Salesman: “Do you have any pets?”

Partner: “Yes, a cat.”

Salesman: “Ugh, you don’t want a cat; they don’t love you. I have a puppy!”

Fortunately, at this point, we arrived at the right model and colour of car… except it was £2,000 more expensive than on the website and the license plate number — which we had provided the salesman twice at this point — didn’t match. He had taken us to the wrong car, either through incompetence or a clumsy attempt at an upsell. We finally got to the right vehicle.

We noticed that he hung the rear test drive licence plate from the windscreen wiper rather than the boot latch as we had seen at another dealership, but we didn’t think much of it. Then, we got in the car and found it was nearly out of petrol — not a great start — and completely out of windscreen fluid — even worse as this means the car was technically illegal to drive until the fluid was refilled. We had no way to tell whether the car had no fluid because of a leak or if it simply hadn’t been topped up. We spent five minutes in the car before my partner was too uncomfortable to keep driving and we returned to the dealership. While we waited for the salesman to notice us, we took the first chance we had been given to inspect the car and realised that the boot wouldn’t open. The guy came over to see how we were doing.

Partner: “The car is completely out of windscreen fluid and almost out of petrol.”

Salesman: “That’s all right!”

Partner: “Okay… And the boot doesn’t open.”

The salesman tugs theatrically at the boot handle.

Salesman: “Oh, the latch must just be broken.”

Well, yes, I thought, that’s the problem! And it explained why he hung the test plate as he did; clearly, he knew about the issue and was hoping we wouldn’t notice.

Me: “Right, well, can we look at the other one?”

Salesman: “Yeah, just let me get it.”

We waited another ten minutes for him to find the car.

Salesman: “Actually, it’s out of petrol, so I’m just going to nip across to the petrol station. Sit tight.”

After another twenty minutes of waiting, we had now been in the dealership for over an hour and we had spent maybe fifteen minutes in the presence of an actual vehicle. We explained the issues with the first car to the branch manager who had been lurking near us through most of our appointment, and he was just as dismissive as the salesman. We decided — in hindsight, far too late — to cut our losses and leave, but we first had to explain ourselves to another salesperson, the branch manager, and then the salesman himself, who returned with the car just as we were making our escape.

The whole thing was so weird and awkward that I left a negative review explaining how rude and strange the salesman was and saying that we didn’t feel we could trust cars from that dealership, so we would purchase elsewhere. We got a standard, “Sorry about your experience; we will investigate,” reply and thought that would be that. But a few weeks later, I happened to notice that the reply had been updated at some point:

Social Media Representative: “We’re pleased to hear you have been contacted and have accepted our apology.”

This was a complete lie; we hadn’t heard from them since we fled the dealership a month earlier. I added an edit to this effect to the review and have had no reply. We have since bought another car from somewhere completely different, and it is serving us very well, but the whole situation still leaves a sour taste in my mouth.