Today is Labor Day in the States, so institutions like banks and post offices are closed all day. I have to work, but I’m working from home.

Notably, it’s also the first of the month, so bills are coming due. Around 4 PM, I get a call on my cell phone that goes to voicemail. When I check it, I see the call is from the self-financing dealer from which I bought my car. (Only four payments left!) The voice on the message is a lady who was newly hired to chase after due payment, and has had a history of calling family members who were not co-signatories to the car loan with these reminders without calling me first, or at all, and arguing with me about which number she called.

Dealership Lady: “This is [Name] at [Dealership]. I really need you to call me back, as you are two payments behind.”

Now, this is patently untrue. Not only do I have a signed receipt from my last payment, which was actually overpaid by $40, so my last four payments would be evenly divisible with no remainder, but the current payment is due, not late, it couldn’t possibly be late, seeing as their website doesn’t allow online payment, and they were closed yesterday. But before I can gather my thoughts to call back and argue, it’s literally been about forty seconds since I got the voicemail alert, she CALLS BACK.

Also worth noting, I was already planning to take a payment on the following day anyway, assuming that the dealership was closed for Labor Day.

Me: “Hello?”

Dealership Lady: “Hello, Mr. [My Name]; this is [Name] from [Dealership].”

Me: “Yes, I saw you called. I know that my current payment is due, but I had assumed you were closed today for the holiday. I can bring it later this evening.”

Dealership Lady: “Okay, thank you.” *Hangs up.*

That’s not a summary, simplification, or exaggeration of her demeanor; that’s literally how quickly she hung up on me with so little said.

So as soon as I can sign off work for the day, I hit the ATM and drive promptly to the dealership with an hour to spare before their typical closing time… only to discover the gates are locked and the whole office has, in fact, been closed for Labor Day.

I should be done with this nonsense by November, and it can’t come soon enough.

I work in a midsize call center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A manager from Europe has recently been hired for a year to teach us all the new software and oversee its integration. He’s still adjusting to things like tipping, humidity, and biscuits not being cookies.

European Manager: “Hey, weird question. What train should I take to New Mexico?”

Me: “Train?”

European Manager: “Yeah, just for the weekend. Santa Fe looks nice. I figured I’d take a scenic train or something?”

[Coworker] and I glance at each other.

Me: “There’s… no train.”

European Manager: *Laughs.* “No, seriously. Like Amtrak or a local one?”

Me: “No, like, genuinely. There’s no train from Tulsa. Closest Amtrak station’s in Oklahoma City.”

Coworker: “And that line goes to Fort Worth. Not Santa Fe.”

He stares. Then checks his phone like we’re all on a prank show.

European Manager: “So… what do people do?”

Me: “Fly or drive.”

European Manager: “But it’s hours away!”

Me: “Yup.”

European Manager: *Sighs and opens the rental car app.* “Right. Driving it is.”

Me: “At least now you get to discover what a Buc-ee’s is.”

European Manager: “That sounds like a cryptid.”

Coworker: “Close enough.”

I was a waitress at an international breakfast restaurant once upon a time.

For a long time, we had a kids eat free deal once a week. An accompanying adult had to order an entrée, and then they got one kid’s meal free based on that. Because of this, a woman came in often with her very large family, including five to six kids.

Her kids were always stated as being under the age limit – we didn’t check, since no one wanted to deprive a kid of food, but her kids were clearly not all under ten as required.

In addition, she would order meals and try to substitute the components for non-similar things. For example, we had a side salad that came with a single, small piece of 99-cent garlic toast. She would say to give her an order of fries instead, worth about $5 more. Then she would also ask for the croutons, usually sprinkled on top of the salad, to be removed, and she wanted to receive several fried eggs instead. Again, a notable price difference. Dipping sauce for the chicken strips? Nah, substitute a bowl of $7 soup for that.

She would do this with every meal in their entire order, meaning that the kitchen got bogged down and everyone in the restaurant ended up waiting ten to twenty minutes longer for their food, while they fulfilled all the special requests.

The managers hated this, since they got paid absolute crap if they didn’t make their food efficiency bonuses. The bonuses helped offset their minimum wage (for sixty hours a week) salaries, so this caused them to miss their bonuses and work for less than minimum wage.

As most know, servers make about $2 an hour in the USA. The woman would tip either the change from rounding up to the next dollar or, if you were lucky, $2, on a three-digit tab, after taking up your full section for the entire rush so you couldn’t earn it from other tables. It wasn’t unusual to make less than $10 for your eight-hour shift when she (or another such customer) came in.

It was a significant burden to everyone else in the building that she was doing this weekly, but we assumed she didn’t have the financial resources and was just doing the best she could to feed her kids. We less-than-minimum wage restaurant workers, understood more than most being in a difficult spot, so we did our jobs and gave the best service we could and just saw it as donating to a good cause.

The managers, who cared only about their paychecks, saw their bonuses suffer. One night, upon seeing her come in, our manager stepped in and said that we had to get more realistic about the substitutions. No more changing out 99-cent garlic bread for $7 fries.

As her server, it fell to me to break the unwelcome news. She immediately countered, of course, saying she had done it lots of times before and why was I being a problem server? After a few sharp remarks about how some servers don’t appreciate customers properly and weren’t going to get a tip (my fifty cents on a $160 tab), she demanded a manager.

Having expected this, I said I was happy to in my calmest, most polite tone. The manager came out, and she started talking, and I started getting angry. First, she mentioned the substitutions.

Okay, fair enough.

But then, she started listing off how we had mistreated her. She’s had to wait to be seated (she never waited, she always walked right in and sat herself and her group without consulting us), her server had been rude and disrespectful (I had been nothing but polite and never had a complaint before or since).

She quoted things I’d supposedly said to her that were nowhere close, adding in insults to her, and insinuated it was because I was racist. Her drinks hadn’t been refilled (yes they had; in fact, I’d set pitchers of soda so she could refill without waiting if I was in the back working in her order), her server messed up her order (the kitchen had had to cook one or two dishes after the others but that’s room on the grill, no choice), just a litany of complaints about me, claiming everything under the sun had been wrong and my fault, with the obvious goal of getting her food free.

The manager, of course, caved to her demands, saying he would take off part of her bill and he was sorry the server hadn’t substituted what she asked. He didn’t mention the part where he had told me to do exactly that. He apologized for my “bad behavior” and agreed with her that she always ordered like that, and of course it was okay, and I had been out of line to treat her so badly and do everything she was claiming I had done.

So I’m sitting on the other side of the wall, fuming. I was angry at the manager (we often were; they didn’t care about the workers), but I was more angry that this woman, whom we had catered to for months, giving great service despite the fact that it was unpaid labor from people who could ill afford it.

As I listened to her and my manager agreeing about what poor service I had provided, I knew I had to keep calm, so I started reading her receipt that she had given back to me when she said she wasn’t paying and wanted a manager.

That’s when I noticed that I hadn’t included one of the meals on the ticket. I would end up having to pay for it myself, out of pocket (yes, that’s illegal, and no, I couldn’t afford a lawyer to sue for that, and I needed to keep my job).

I’m sure you can surmise what I did. While the manager was kissing up to her at my expense, I went and added the meal to the larger ticket in the computer system. If she hadn’t badmouthed me, I might have tried to claim it as my employee meal to help her out. After all, I was the one who forgot to put it on the tab, but then I couldn’t have eaten at all for that shift. I felt like it was karma. Take the time to make up complaints and lie to the manager? Give your server time to spot her mistake.

Printing out her new tab, he handed it back to her with a final apology and then went back into his office to hide from her (and me). They did that a lot rather than face us.

I stood behind the wall out of sight and listened to her running through her bill again. She had given me back the receipt before, so she didn’t have it to compare. Instead, she was going through all the meals to try and figure out why her ticket now cost MORE than it had before the discount.

It took her ten minutes to decide there wasn’t a problem she could complain about again and pay the bill. She paid with hundreds; she had quite a wad in her purse.

It was the first time I had ever had a way to react to an abusive customer, and she had lied extensively about me. It felt like I’d struck a blow for justice!

I was waiting in line behind two customers at a coffee shop. This first customer looked at her friend and said:

Customer #1: “Oh my god! I’m so hungry I feel like Helen Keller!”

Customer #2: “Who’s Helen Keller?”

Customer #1: “She’s some Jewish girl that got locked in an attic.”

I laughed so hard they ended up glaring at me.

It was my roommate’s turn to do dishes after dinner, and I noticed, as she was going through, that she was only running things under the hot water, but wasn’t actually using soap.

Me: *Trying for a tactful hint.* “[Roommate], the soap is in the green bottle next to the drying rack.”

Roommate: “Ugh. No, I’m not using soap, not now that I can use water.”

I was never the most assertive person, so I just waited until she’d ‘washed’ everything, put them in the drying rack, and walked off, and then hopped up to wash them properly. I’d gotten out the wash bin and was scrubbing at a plate when she came back.

Roommate: “What did you do?!”

Me: “I’m just giving them an extra scrub with soap. I—”

Roommate: “—Where did all the bubbles come from?”

Me: “Uh… the soap.”

Roommate: “What?! Show me!”

I put a bit of soap on the plate, put it under the water, and scrubbed it around.

Roommate: “Wait, you can do that?”

Me: “Do what?”

Roommate: “Use soap with water.”

I’ll admit, that question sort of broke my brain a bit. I told her yes, finished up the washing, and we sat down to chat a bit.

It got rather personal, so I’m not going to share all of it, but in regards to her question specifically, it turned out that her family ‘didn’t believe in wasting water’, so when her mom would ‘wash the dishes’, she’d do it by putting a drop of soap on them, scrubbing them with a rag, and wiping them off with a different rag, which would, naturally, not really clean it but instead just leave a layer of soap built up on the dish.

My roommate had hated the taste of soap that clung to everything, so the moment she’d gotten to college and away from her parents, she’d shifted over to ‘washing with water rather than soap’ and hadn’t looked back, having never realized that you were supposed to use both.

For a few weeks after that discussion, she insisted on doing all the dishwashing, and would be giggling the entire time as she did it ‘the proper way’.

Related:
A Different Kind Of Soap Opera Drama, Part 2
A Different Kind Of Soap Opera Drama