I worked in a deli. This lady came in every couple of weeks for “about $20 worth of very thinly sliced Prosciutto” — her exact words — and she wanted a plastic deli sheet between each paper-thin slice of meat. It took a couple of minutes to do when most customers could be helped in under a minute.

We would prepare it for her while she stared daggers at us. We’d nicely bag it for her, and multiple times in front of the counter (while other customers were waiting) she’d open the bag and check to make sure we didn’t put two slices between a plastic sheet instead of one.

Once she was satisfied, she’d walk away. No thank-you, no acknowledgment of the time it took, and no apologies to the customers waiting while she blocked the counter. She was so rude.

One time, someone “sliced her meat too thick” (after she approved the slice) and she made him do it all over again.

While at school, I had free school meals. When I started high school, they were introducing fancy thumbprint scanners for paying. I got £2.10 a day which, conveniently, was the same price as dinner with a little pudding.

When year twelve starts, I get the same amount every day, but dinner with a little pudding increases in price to £2.20. I start having a slice of toast at break time and a panini at lunchtime and save up the 10ps that are leftover. While I could just alternate between having a pudding or not each day, I decide instead to save up those 10ps and treat myself to a milkshake every couple of weeks. After all, I can’t usually have one since I’d have nothing to eat for lunch.

There are no problems with this until, one day, I’m waiting for my friend and check the machine that lets me know how much money is on my account on a whim. The balance is negative. I did not know the balance could go negative. I assumed that if I tried to buy anything costing more than I had, I wouldn’t be able to buy it. Also, there is some mild panic because I wasn’t buying anything I couldn’t in the first place, right?

Turns out the paninis had increased in price by about 20p without me noticing. I’d just assumed there were no issues because I hadn’t had any issues buying anything. After this, I mess around with what I get a bit more, always double-checking it’s under the £2.10 I get, to try and pay it off with the leftover money.

This takes a while and I have very little self-control; some days I get something more, like the £2.20 dinner with a little pudding, and tell myself it’s okay if I spend half the 20p I saved yesterday on eating this today. However, I don’t remember to keep checking the machine to watch the debt go down. 

Fairly late into the school year, I’m called to the kitchen’s office. My debt has grown to £10. I’m almost an adult, but I’m fairly sheltered and this feels like a lot of money to me. Plus, I’m a huge crybaby, so I feel like a pathetic mess as I try to explain to the lunch lady through tears that I don’t know why it’s gotten that bad.

She explains to me that I never was able to stack up my lunch money. If I don’t spend all of the £2.10 I got today, it will reset itself tomorrow. So, all that time I thought I was saving up for something extra, the extra I spent went straight into my debt. The £2.10 I got each day was for me to buy food, so it wasn’t allowed to be used for the debt.

The long and short of it is that I need to bring in physical money to pay off what I owe the school. All I can think is, “My dad is going to kill me.” This is not an insignificant amount of money, and my sister was recently grounded for stealing a similar amount to buy herself sweets, and there’s a lot of other “stuff” going on at home which means my dad isn’t in the best of moods. I’ve basically just done the same thing, and I do not want to get in trouble.

Thankfully, it was my birthday or something the other day, and my dad gifted me a £10 note. I was saving it for the next time we went to a big store so I could buy a book. My dad does not take the news well that I am going to spend it on school lunch. I listen as he lectures and lectures about how much of a waste it is to spend my money on food that is temporary when I could spend it on something that will last. It’s all stuff I already know, but this is what I’ve decided I’m going to do.

Eventually, the pressure of keeping it from him gets to me and I break into tears and explain why I need to use it on the food. He goes quiet, tells me it’s stupid that the school let me go into debt, and tells me I’m stupid for not keeping better track of my money. Then, he gets on the phone and goes full rage mode on whoever it is at the school that answers.

When he gets off the phone, he tells me that the debt I gathered was cleared. Also, I’m now able to get a dinner with a little pudding every lunch and the dinner ladies type it in as £2.10. He also tells me that if my balance ever goes negative again, I will be paying for it myself since I’ve now been warned.

It is kind of embarrassing to face the lunch ladies after that. I didn’t mean for my dad to go nuts at them. I didn’t mean for him to weaponise my disability or our family circumstances at them. Still, though, they didn’t treat me any differently other than the price adjustments. They are very nice people.

A few years ago, I was working in a video game shop. A guy in his mid- to late twenties came in already angry as he had dropped his phone in the parking lot and cracked the screen. He was arguing on the phone with his father, getting increasingly irate as his dad wouldn’t buy him a new one.

Then, the card reader failed because his chip was broken, he knew it was broken, and he had no other way to pay. He screamed like a feral warthog, football-spiked his phone onto the floor, snatched it back up, and stomped out, leaving me to sweep up shards of glass.

When I was fifteen, I was working in the drive-thru at a fast food chain. I was handing this man his change when he grabbed my wrist and tried to yank me out of the window.

I pulled back really hard and slammed the window on his hand. He sped off without his food.

My panic attack was so bad that my manager begrudgingly sent me home. I quit two days later.

I work at a video game store. We had a teenage boy who would come in and hang around for thirty minutes to an hour, staring at me until I acknowledged him. When I did, he would pitch me his entire Assassin’s Creed spinoff trilogy.

At first, I tried to rationalize it away; he was probably neurodivergent and excited about Assassin’s Creed but perhaps lacking in social skills. However, if I told him I had to pause on listening to him — he would talk for over thirty minutes, and I had a job to do — I could feel his eyes boring into me. The second I looked at him again, he’d move closer and talk louder. Sometimes he’d stare me down in total silence while I was facing the opposite wall.

My district manager wouldn’t let me kick him out, so whenever another manager was working with me, they’d pretend the store needed something from the dollar store and send me over there. The first time, he waited a full hour inside of [Video Game Store] for me to come back, so after that, I had to stay in the dollar store until one of them texted me that he was gone.

The last time I ever saw him, he followed me around demanding my phone number or email address.

And the worst part is, I know other women at the company had it much worse. There was an unofficially blacklisted customer at another store who didn’t get any phone calls about preorders or anything because he would sit in his car and attempt to follow the store manager home after memorizing which car was hers.