A friend and I are customers in a shop, mostly just doing the tourist thing. Someone’s kids are sprinting around the store doing a hide-and-seek kind of game around the shelves. They’re noisy but not destroying anything, so I’d count that as a small blessing for the staff.

Friend: “Hey, let’s get lunch after this. My stomach is starting to gnaw at me.”

I grab my phone and use it to Google food places nearby, and we find a fish place with pretty good ratings. We’re kind of gathered around my phone, looking at their online menu.

Me: “Their parmesan pollock looks pretty good…”

Kid’s Voice: “Pollock!”

I look up, surprised, as one of the kids goes sprinting through the store yelling “pollock” loudly like he just learned a new swear word. My friend snorts in amusement, and I shrug. It doesn’t take two minutes for the other kids in the store to take up the new word.

Friend: “I guess it does kind of sound like a word you’d say when you stub your toe…”

I snicker.

Apparently, the kids’ mom thinks so, too, because she storms over to us while we stand in line and starts berating us for “teaching children bad words”.

Me: “Ma’am, I didn’t teach your children any bad words.”

Mother: “Then why are they yelling that word all over the store?”

Me: “Because they probably don’t know what it means, just that it sounds like it might be a bad word?”

Mother: *Crossing her arms* “If it’s so harmless, then maybe you should explain the word.”

She has a smirk as if she thinks she has caught me in a lie and I’m going to fumble with the explanation.

Me: *Rolling my eyes* “Fine. It’s a fish.”

Mother: *Blank stare* “Excuse me?”

Me: “A pollock is a member of the cod family.”

Her blank stare continues.

Me: “Cod. You know, like codfish? We’re going to a fish restaurant, and I want to try it.”

Mother: *Suspiciously* “If it’s called cod, then why did you call it a pollock?”

I open my phone and show her.

Me: “Because it’s called pollock on the menu.”

The woman scowled at my phone for a long time and then turned and stomped away, muttering about made-up words to hide swear words.

My friend and I paid for our items and left the store, still occasionally hearing a child’s voice yell, “Pollock!” The fish, swear word or not, tasted great, by the way.

I’m a freelance makeup artist.

Client: “I’ve been lurking on your work for months now, and it’s beautiful. I have finally decided you are the person I’d like to do my wedding makeup. The date is [date].”

Me: “Thank you so much for the compliment, but unfortunately, I’m already booked on that date. My apologies.”

Client: “But I’ve been lurking your work for months!”

Me: “Yes, but you can’t book a date that way. I need clients to make formal bookings to secure my time.”

Client: “Can’t you just cancel the other booking?”

Me: “I’m sorry, no, I couldn’t do that to a customer who has secured my time and paid my booking fee well in advance.”

Client: “Your customer service is appalling.”

Our store has just fully reopened after lockdowns, but management is mandating that customers be vaccinated. Of course, this goes down with certain groups of the population about as well as can be expected.

Customer: “You can’t force me to take a vaccine!” 

Manager: “No one is forcing you, ma’am, but we also don’t have to let you into the store.”

Customer: “It’s my right as an American to go where I please without being forced to be vaccinated!”

Manager: “This store is private property, ma’am, and we can exercise our right to deny you entry.”

Customer: “Freedom has been a right in this country since 1776! Vaccinations are an attack on those freedoms! George Washington is turning in his grave right now!”

Manager: “George Washington made Congress force all his troops in the Revolutionary War to be inoculated against smallpox, ma’am. Please try again.”

I’m a professional chef, and I have been for a few years. In Australia, apprentice chefs are trained in a sort of college where we learn about 150 recipes. Many of the recipes are provided to the students in bulky, finicky booklets that you wouldn’t really want to take anywhere with you, so I started writing some of the recipes in a separate notebook along with some other recipes I’d learned from coworkers or family members. I created a sort of pseudo-cookbook, and I would often bring this book into the kitchen so I would remember ingredient quantities and cooking times. Eventually, I would leave the book in the kitchen pretty much around the clock.

I soon found out that some of the other chefs in the kitchen were using my cookbook to check official recipes for the restaurant we worked for (as typically the head chef would have to tell them and this got annoying for everyone). This restaurant was a part of a popular sports club in the area, so consistency was extremely important to management. Therefore, having a written record of the new recipes or changes to long-time recipes was very important.

As it turned out, management had stopped making changes to the official club recipe book a few months before I even started, so my book had become the de facto official recipe book. For a while, this was no issue to me, and I kept adding new recipes to it throughout the next few years.

However, after my third year working there, I finished my studies and became fully qualified as a chef, so I suddenly became more expensive to keep on as a staff member. Therefore, management started looking for any reason to replace me with a new apprentice.

Eventually, they found someone to replace me and gave a half-a**ed reason for firing me and told me:

Management: “Take all your things and leave. You can no longer offer what we are looking for.”

So, I took everything I owned — including the notebook with all the club’s recipes — and left.

For a few days, not a whole lot happened, but slowly, the club’s reviews started complaining about bland food, dry cakes, inconsistent classic recipes, and every other food-related thing you could think of. At one point, there were fifty negative reviews in a single day. For our town, that was a massive amount in one day. It felt pretty d*** good since I felt they deserved it and left me unemployed on short notice. However, I was quickly offered a new job by a smaller restaurant whose owner knew me from the sports club kitchen.

After about a week, I received multiple calls. I answered one, and it was one of the higher managers from the sports club.

Manager: “Could you return the recipe book? The kitchen needs it back.”

I laughed but replied firmly:

Me: “It’s my book full of my recipes, so it isn’t going anywhere near you. I’ll remind you that you told me I ‘could no longer offer what you were looking for.’”

The manager clearly began to panic; he offered to give me my job back and “just let bygones be bygones”. I already had a new job, so I completely brushed off this offer and ignored him. I hung up pretty soon after that.

I started putting the recipes from my book on the new restaurant’s menu, and it began to attract a few regular customers of the sports club, so I quickly found myself with more and more responsibility and command within the kitchen. It got to the point where about a third of the menu was from my book.

This slow trickle of sports club regulars picked up speed after about three months and led to several high-level managers from the club deciding to visit the restaurant I’d helped build. They basically demanded I give them my cookbook, claiming it would be much more beneficial for the community if they had it. My head chef laughed in their faces and told them to piss off.

It’s been about two years. My head chef and I have a very positive relationship, and the customer base we have at the restaurant is better than ever.

We didn’t take every customer from the big club, but it was enough damage to their profits to scare a few investors away, and it caused a decent bit of damage to one of the higher managers’ reputations. Furthermore, the recipe issues and negative reviews led to the majority of the kitchen quitting. According to one of my old colleagues, they cited the lack of support and organisation from upper management as the final reasons everyone was quitting, and this led to an even larger dip in the quality of the restaurant food.

I also get paid significantly more at this restaurant than I did at the sports club.

I am showing an older gentleman some features on his smartphone.

Customer: “I bought this phone from one of your stores in Florida.”

Me: “That’s cool. How can I help you?”

Customer: “I’m visiting, and I don’t have a car here, so my son told me to download the local taxi app.”

Me: “I can help you with downloading the app from the app store.”

I bring up the app store.

Me: “Did he say what the name of the app was?”

Customer: “Uber.”

Me: “Oh, I can see that you already have Uber installed.”

Customer: “Yes, I installed it in Florida.”

Me: “Ah, then you’re all set. Did you need help logging in and learning how to use it?”

Customer: “I know how to use it! I just need to download the local one.”

Me: “What do you mean by ‘the local one’?”

Customer: “The local Uber!” 

Me: “Your Uber will work here.”

Customer: “But I downloaded that in Florida!” 

Me: “Yes, but it will still work here.”

Customer: “Are you serious?!”

Me: “Yes, I’m serious!”

Customer: “And if I call a taxi right now, how many hours is it gonna take for the driver to get all the way to here from Florida, huh? You’re a whole lotta stupid, you know that?”

He grabbed his phone and stormed off.