I was in Rome a few years ago. We were allowed to go into a church and look around — as long as we were very quiet as some people were praying. My family and I respected these rules.

Then, suddenly, an American tourist yelled out:

Tourist: “Whoa, they’re speaking that Latin s***!”

Everyone turned and glared with sharp shushing noises.

As we left, we overheard the American tourist being scolded by her family.

Tourist: “Is it because I swore?”

Friend Member: “Yeah, but you also said they were speaking Latin, but it was Italian.”

Tourist: “Ohhh! Yeah, I didn’t think any of them looked Latino.”

I work at a touristy place in a market in Florence. We offer a lot of tourist guides in several languages for all visitors to the market for just a few Euro. A couple speaking Spanish walk up and pick up the Portuguese guide.

Me: *In Spanish.* “Excuse me, that’s not the Spanish guide.”

Tourist: *Annoyed.* “I can read the cover so it’s the Spanish one!”

Before I can explain he throws a couple of Euro coins at me and wanders off. About half an hour later they’re back, both with a ಠ_ಠ look on their faces.

Tourist: “You ripped us off! You sold us a fake Spanish guide!”

Me: “That guide is in Portuguese.”

He looks at it more carefully and sees the Portugal/Brazilian flag represented in the corner of the flag.

Tourist: “Then give me the real one! Stupid Italians can’t write Spanish properly!”

He snatches the Spanish guide this time, still complaining that Portuguese is some form of Italian-Spanish. 

Related:
Totally Estúpido! Part 33
Totally Estúpido! Part 32
Totally Estúpido! Part 31
Totally Estúpido! Part 30
Totally Estúpido! Part 29

My manager is as flexible as a bronze statue; that is to say, not at all. It’s amazing when it comes to demanding pay from the boss or shooing away bad customers, not so much when any deviation from the script happens.

The shop I work at sells cloth by the meter and sewing accessories. We don’t usually carry denim, and when we do, it’s not a lot. 

A customer comes to me.

Customer: “I need half a meter of red linen fabric and one meter of light blue denim.”

Me: “Sorry, madam, but we don’t carry denim. But we do have red linen!”

Customer: “Oh, dear, no denim? At all?”

Me: “Yeah, no denim, sorry.”

Customer: “It’s important to me. Do you know anywhere in town that might have it?”

Me: “You can try at [Other Shop], or ask [Charity Shop] if they have any old jeans…”

Customer: “Right, charity shops! Thank you so much! Now, back to the linen…”

And I proceed to do the sale.

Toward the end of my shift, my manager calls me into the office.

Manager: “You know, you aren’t supposed to tell customers to shop somewhere else. That’s basic logic. I’m disappointed you’re acting like this.”

Me: “But… when did I do that?”

Manager: “I have seen your interaction with the old woman who needed denim. You told her to go at [Other Shop] specifically.”

Me: “Well, I still had a sale. Besides, it’s not like we had any available.”

Manager: “When customers ask you where they can find something that’s out of stock, you’re supposed to tell them to wait until it’s in stock again, no matter what.”

And then my manager wrote me up — for “ruining a sale” that was not going to happen and not blowing off a customer.

I work in a post office in Italy. An old American lady came in at the last minute today and was… very odd. Some things about the interaction made me very puzzled.

She came in carrying an enormous bag that severely limited her movements. When she tried to reach for a document she had on her person, she spent something like two minutes trying to retrieve it, and I honestly have no idea where she pulled it from.

She had to send this document, a birth certificate. She was extremely protective of it and basically was wary of everything I did regarding this document. She had an envelope with her, for instance, and she wanted to protect it at any cost — despite the envelope being put in our own [Company] envelope. She wanted to write the address on the envelope, even though that was useless, since the envelope was inside ours.

Also, the envelope had one of those weird sides that you have to wet to make sticky, and she asked us if we had a sponge to do that, as if we were in a 1960s post office. When I denied that, she licked her finger, smeared her spit on the side of the envelope, and sealed it. She then asked us to seal the envelope even further with scotch tape. When I pulled out the normal tape, she insisted that I use the wide one — the one we use for cardboard. Again, this was all useless.

Me: “Okay, that should take three business days to ship.”

Customer: *Puzzled* “What? It was possible to send documents in one day twenty years ago!’

I suggested that maybe 9/11 had changed the protocols, and she grudgingly agreed.

She became alarmed when she saw that I had labeled the contents of the shipment, “Documents – general business”.

Customer: “No! No one must know that these are business documents!”

That label simply means that the documents are generic; even birthday cards would be labelled this way.

At the end of the shipment, we usually send the receipt with the tracking number to the email address and phone number provided by the shipper. I did this and told her I had done so. She grew pale.

Customer: “I wish you hadn’t done that yet. My phone has been stolen, and whoever has stolen it will be able to look at my data. I shall have to go to the Carabinieri [Italian army] and have the phone card locked.”

Me: “Don’t worry, there is just a notice of the shipment. The receipt proper is via email. The phone message only has a tracking number.”

Customer: “A tracking number?! Are you f****** stupid?! Now criminals will be able to steal my shipment!”

Now, that makes no sense. A tracking number only tells you what happened to a shipment. You cannot modify the shipment nor even know what is being shipped. Still, she said:

Customer: “How could you be so f****** stupid?! Now I have thrown away all the money I spent to get this birth certificate. I wish I had never come here!”

Me: “Next time, I advise you to exert some politeness.”

Customer: “It’s okay. It is not your fault.”

Me: “I guess it’s my bad genes.”

My aunt had a baby supplies shop. It was small, compact, and placed in a fairly upscale area. Might not seem too important, but it’s to stress just how weird this interaction was.

She once had a teen girl come into the shop, dawdling and idling in it for an uncomfortable amount of time as she looked at the wares. Figuring by the body language she wasn’t shopping for a relative, my aunt made the second best guess she could think of.

Aunt: “Are you alright there? Is there something you’d like to know you’d need?”

The girl gasped and blushed, stammering something while looking away.

Aunt: “Do you need help? You can tell me.”

She was expecting to be told something about her being anxious at the idea of becoming a teen mom; or a grim tale of being knocked up by a close relative; or something about how to hide it from her parents. And yet…

Girl: “D-do… do you think any of these pacifiers could fit an adult’s mouth? Or the baby bottles?”

My aunt blinked and, she told me, stared at this girl in bafflement for an uncomfortable minute, unable to come up with a proper answer.

Aunt: “I don’t think so, but you could try with the biggest sizes we have…”

The girl sheepishly bought some pacifiers and a baby bottle. My aunt denied knowing what was going on. I have certainly figured it out, but I don’t have the heart to explicitly tell her the girl was involved in some sort of BSDM scene.