Today was an all-around awful day for tips in general, but this was something else.

A guy came in and sat at a table in the bar. Then, a woman showed up. Both got coffees to go and sat around on their computers for a while. I dropped the bill off. The guy paid in cash and the woman thanked him for paying. He was a nice guy. He got up and left a five-dollar bill on the table under the water I had brought for him.

I assumed that was it, so it surprised me to look over and see the women snapping at me. She wanted to order food. Okay. I got her order. The five-dollar bill was still there. I should’ve grabbed it. I put in the food order and finished.

I noticed the woman moving tables. I went to bus the first table and pick up the tip… but it was gone.

She paid with a five and a couple of ones and left me the change, which was less than a dollar.

So, she stole the tip to pay for her food, made me bus two tables, was rude, and camped at the table for one or two hours… and still people wondering why the service industry is struggling.

There’s a customer who is a regular at both of my restaurant’s locations. He comes across as friendly. Honestly, I don’t care if a customer is nice as long as they don’t give me trouble. I have a coworker who likes to make conversation with customers and likes to kiss up to them in order to persuade them to come back again.

This particular coworker was serving the friendly regular his food. He ordered a jumbo soup ($7.70) and a jumbo pepper shrimp ($20.35). In the process of ringing him up, he told me:

Customer: “I can only afford the soup.”

So, I charged him for the soup only. But then, he was kind of charming my coworker.

Customer: “I can get the money at home later and come back to pay.”

Meaning that he would take the shrimp without paying first but would pay later.

In my mind, I was thinking that he should just come back some other time when he could afford it so that we didn’t have to chase him down for the money. But my coworker, who is also kind of my superior, told me to give him the shrimp because she assumed he would pay because she “knows” him.

This was on Friday. On Monday, I got a call from her.

Coworker: “The guy from Friday didn’t pay. You should expect him to show up today to hand over the money. I had to pay out of my own pocket to cover the cost of the shrimp on Friday.”

He never came. It’s been a week and he still has not paid the $20.35 for the jumbo shrimp. I hope my coworker learned that it doesn’t matter what kind of “relationship” you have with a customer; you can always be in a position where they can take advantage of your kindness and use it against you.

Coworker: “I hate that we all have to wear masks! I got a fake vaccine card from eBay so I can stop wearing one. I’d never use an experimental vaccine!”

I told my direct manager I was concerned about this because, while I’m vaccinated, I’d rather not catch any variants from some mouthbreather. 

He brought it up to our upper management. It turns out one of them is immunocompromised, and they fired her on the spot. I honestly feel kind of bad, because we are already short-staffed, and she was a hard worker, just apparently an idiot.

I work for a small company where you need to wear a lot of hats. As a result, our Sales Director is also in Human Resources, which would be fine if she wasn’t also a pathological liar.

Because we are a startup, we rely on a major benefactor. In fact, he rents out the office space to us for $200 a month. Every year, though, [Sales Director] gets it in her head that we need to move closer to the local university where the owner is a professor. We never do.

This takes place as she is telling the company that [Coworker], a major contributor, is leaving. It is also worth noting that I just got accepted into the Master’s program and plan to leave to pursue that at the end of the year.

Sales Director: “We are going to try to move closer to central [City] to be closer to the university in the next two months. We want to shorten your commute, [My Name] and [New Hire], so this is for you!”

It really wouldn’t shorten my commute, and again, she did this every year to “boost morale”, so I suppressed an eye-roll and thanked her.

No, they didn’t move. Yes, she got [New Hire]’s hopes up to try and sneakily retain him.

Me: “Thank you for calling [Company]. How can I help you today?”

The caller describes a problem that three particular coworkers are trained to handle. They don’t get in until noon, and we have been asked to simply take a message and offer a callback, as we are not permitted to discuss employee schedule information with customers. I offer the lady a callback and she leaves her number.

Twenty minutes later, the same customer calls in describing the same issue.

Me: “Madam, I have your number. Our agent will call you back as soon as they are available; we won’t brush this off.”

Caller: *Yelling* “You told me that three hours ago and I’ve called at least six or seven times, and you idiots just either put me on hold, transfer me to someone else, hang up on me, or tell me someone will call me back! This is poor customer service! I want the manager! Now!”

I’m the only agent on the floor for the first two hours due to the low call volume in the early mornings.

Me: “Madam? We only opened forty-five minutes ago.”

Caller: “Bulls***! You open at six in the morning!”

Me: “Not since two weeks ago when our hours changed. Our automated greeting states that, but in case you missed it by pushing a button for our department, opening hours are now 9:00 am until 10:00 pm, so I don’t know who it was that you were calling six or seven times and getting transferred around or put on hold or hung up on by since 6:00 am, but it wasn’t [Company]. No one was even here.”

Caller: *Click*

Not today, lady. Not today!