I’m working the evening shift alone. It’s the policy that when we’re alone and need to use the restroom, we wait until every customer has left and then we lock all of the doors. It’s a little after 10:00 pm and I’ve been waiting for two hours for the store to clear so I can take a quick pee break.

I lock the doors, put a sign up explaining what is going on, and take care of business.

A few minutes later, I open back up and help the customers that have been waiting outside.

A man comes to the counter. He’s a regular but doesn’t talk very much. He’s physically very intimidating, so I’m a bit nervous.

It turns out that he just wanted to make sure I was safe. He saw the people outside, but didn’t see me, so he pulled a U-turn on the highway and rushed over to make sure I was okay.

Thank you, sir.

(It is Black Friday. A customer comes in to do a return on several TV mounts. She has no receipt, and the purchase was not made with her rewards account or with her card. Eventually, I find two of the three TV mounts on her brother’s account. They were purchased almost a year ago.)

Me: “I’m sorry, but we can’t do the return. It’s way outside the return policy and I can only find two of them.”

(She goes off about how her parents’ house burned down and a manager told her they would be able to return the mounts any time. After several managers tell her no and she still won’t give in, the general manager says to do it. The one mount I can’t find will not have tax returned because there is no proof of purchase. She sees this and yells about over $10.)

Me: “You are lucky we even did this; it was purchased a year ago.”

Customer: “I hope your parents’ house burns down.”

(This was after she got her return, and on the day after Thanksgiving. Nice.)

This happened in the 1970s at a well-known hotel chain in Oklahoma. My (now-ex) wife and I stayed there one night because she was having an outpatient procedure at a hospital in the area early the next morning. 

It was a disaster from the beginning. The room was dirty, to the point where I got stabbed in the foot by a straight pin that was in the carpeting. There were cracker crumbs ground into the carpeting. Very little about the room was right.

As there was no alarm clock in the room, I requested a wake-up call for 6:00 am.

We woke up at about 8:00. No call.

I called the desk and angrily asked what had happened to our wake-up call. “I don’t know. I just came on shift.” No apology; no acknowledgement of the problem that they had caused.

I called the hospital, who said they could still get us in as long as we got there as quickly as we could.

We ran down to the desk, rushed through checkout without looking at the bill, made it to the hospital, got the surgery done, and got home safely.

Then, I got the credit card statement. They had charged us for a meal in the restaurant; we had never been in the restaurant at all!

So, I wrote a strongly-worded letter to the hotel manager, with a CC to the chain’s headquarters. The original, sent to the hotel itself, clearly had “CC: [corporate headquarters]” on it.

A short time later, we received a money order from the hotel for the amount we’d been overcharged, along with a handwritten note apologizing. The note was poorly written, with misspellings and other mistakes. It was obvious that someone in the hotel had intercepted the letter and replied in the hope that management would never know.

Okay. We got our money back.

A week or so later, we got a check from corporate for the full amount we’d paid, along with a very nice, typed letter promising that they would investigate the incident.

We ended up with more than we had paid, which I figured came close to compensating us for all the crap we had had to put up with.

(I’m a part-time bookseller at a local book chain. I’ve been working part-time for almost seven years at this store so I’ve heard it all, but this is the first time I’ve ever encountered this kind of stupid. We were told recently that we cannot leave our zones to help customers; instead, we should direct them to a customer service rep. A customer who’s about 18 or 19 walks up to the register where I am.)

Customer: “Hello.”

Me: “Hi there. How can I help you?”

(I notice she doesn’t have anything in her hands, and I think she wants a gift card, which happens a lot.)

Customer: “So, this is my first time here.”

Me: “Awesome! Welcome in. Are you looking for something in particular or a certain book?”

Customer: “So, do I just pick it out and then bring it back?”

Me: “Sorry, what?”

Customer: “Like, do I pick out what I want and you tell me when to bring it back?”

Me: “We’re a bookstore?”

Customer: “Yeah, so when do I bring these back?”

Me: *thinking that maybe she’s high* “Yeah, this is a bookstore. You purchase items here. Every item has a barcode which I scan up here and then you give me something of a monetary value to take home and keep. This isn’t a library.”

Customer: “Oh. I thought you were going out of business, so I thought I should get something free.”

Me: “I assure you that we aren’t going out of business, ma’am. Now, do you need help finding anything?”

Customer: *stomps foot* “WHY ARE YOUR LIGHTS ON IF I CAN’T GET FREE THINGS?!” 

(She then turned and stomped out the door.)

(My boyfriend has gone through some rather radical changes in appearance in the last several years – long hair, short hair, fat, thin, buff – to the point that even the picture on his name badge at work barely resembles him now. He’s showing one of the kids at the center the picture on his college ID. Admittedly, he was rather hungover in it)
Client: Jeez man, were you high in that picture!?
Boyfriend: No, I was probably still a little drunk maybe, but I don’t do drugs.
Client: Right – looking at this picture, I’m pretty sure you do more drugs than I do!
Boyfriend: … you do METH!!