One day, I was picking something up in the grocery area at a big box store for a friend. I was wearing jeans and an anime T-shirt. A woman walked up to me and asked where something was.

Me: “Sorry, I don’t work here.”

Woman: “Why not?”

Me: “Probably the same reason you don’t. I make more money not working here.”

Then, I walked away from her. She was dumbfounded and just stood there in the aisle.

I’m working in a store, and a customer comes up to me with a sweater.

Customer: “I want to return this sweater. It has a run in it that’s four or five lines wide!”

I take the sweater and look at the “run”.

Me: “Ma’am, this isn’t a run; there are no pulled threads. It’s just a crease from the way it was folded.”

But she won’t let up.

Customer: “Well, I bought two other colors of the same sweater, and they didn’t look like this. It’s ugly! I want a refund.”

Me: “Ma’am, this sweater was final sale, and I cannot take it back because it’s not actually damaged. I assure you that this is just a crease. This is a sweater from last season, so it’s just been folded for a while. If you wash or steam it, I promise the crease will come out.”

Customer: “Then why is it only across the back? It looks absolutely awful. Why didn’t the other sweaters look like that?”

Me: “This one was probably folded longer than the others. If you look closely, the front is creased, as well, but the back was on the inside of the fold, so it has a sharper crease. There are no pulled threads like there would be in a run. It will come out if you wash or steam it.”

Customer: “I don’t believe you. It looks terrible! But since you insist on not taking it, I guess if it’s ruined, I’ll just donate it or whatever.”

I left that interaction with one less brain cell than I started with.

Back in 1998, I moved from Michigan to Virginia and took a job as an irrigation tech for a large regional landscape company. Within six months, I learned my mistake: working as an irrigation tech for landscapers sucks. You are treated as a necessary evil and always get the s***ty end of the stick.

I heard through the grapevine that some area managers had screwed up a couple of big maintenance contracts and that, somehow, they were going to try and make me the scapegoat. I promptly went to the second contractor I had interviewed for originally, got a job there, and put in a one-week notice with [Company].

My manager was really pressuring me to give them more notice until I told him:

Me: “If you ask me one more time for more notice, you will notice the following morning that I don’t work here anymore.”

At the end of the week, I turned in my uniforms plus my reimbursement slip for $38 petty cash. I was told that I was getting nothing back on my uniforms and they weren’t going to pay my $38. I was pissed but just moved on.

The following week, I contacted my local labor board and filed a complaint saying that the entire time I had worked for [Company], I was being paid a salary rather than an hourly while I was a non-exempt employee. I asked to be paid all of my overtime.

A few weeks went by, it worked its way through the system, and I got a call from the corporation’s Controller. We had a meeting and went over everything with a bunch of back and forth. He kept trying to justify that I was really exempt and that they didn’t owe me anything until I’d really had enough of his s***.

I told him straight-up that we might disagree on how much they owed me, but I’d guarantee they owed me something. On top of that, I would make a point on every payday going from branch to branch of the company with a sign, standing outside the gate, and telling every single non-exempt employee that they were being screwed out of overtime and how they could sue the company.

I ended up signing an NDA agreeing that I wouldn’t share any of the information on overtime with other employees, and I got a check for $5,000 the following day. Within two months, [Company] and several others in the area began paying with a new overtime method. They took your weekly salary and divided it by forty for an hourly rate, and for every hour of overtime you worked, you got half your rate. If you worked your way through the math and whatnot and how the labor board determined your overtime in this case, it pretty much worked out correctly.

So, in summary, my employer tried to screw me out of $38 and I made them pay me $5,000.

[Company] has long, long, long since been sold out to a national competitor.

I work in a hotel. Whoever does the night audit shift and security is allowed to park their car on the edge inside the wide carport. People can still drive through it. This is a boon for us, because we like to keep an eye on our cars during these hours. Years ago, I had somebody mess with my car twice when I parked further away while doing a shift from 3:00 to 11:00 pm.

Every now and then, the carport will have a guest temporarily park in my spot behind security while they check in. That’s no big deal; I can temporarily park in the loading bay about fifty feet away until it clears out.

One day when this happens, soon after I clock in, an extremely angry lady comes to the front desk.

Lady: “There’s a car in a disability-accessible spot without a sticker! I demand that it be towed!”

She shows me a picture on her phone… and it is my car.

Me: “Ma’am, that’s my car.”

It’s probably a mistake to tell her that.

Me: “But that isn’t an accessible spot. It’s a loading bay typically used for deliveries, like food trucks.”

The loading bay area is next to the accessible spots, but there’s not an accessible sign where I’m parked. It’s about three times the size of a regular parking spot, and it has vertical lines in it from top to bottom.

Lady: “Well, it’s not any kind of parking spot.”

Me: “I agree. If you can acknowledge that, then why are you treating it like it’s a parking spot?”

She doesn’t give an answer, and we repeat this cycle of conversation. She keeps making exaggerated facial expressions that come across as condescending and snooty, as if she doesn’t believe me — the guy working behind the desk at the property.

Then, she turns and walks toward the front door.

Lady: *Loudly, over her shoulder* “I’m going to tell my husband!”

Me: *Calling after her* “Please, do!”

As she is exiting, I hear her yell out to somebody:

Lady: “You’re going to flip your lid! The guy said…”

The “husband” never comes inside or calls me. I see another person on the camera, but it is dark and they quickly walk off to one of our other buildings.

About five minutes later, my security person comes up to me.

Security: “Why are the police here?”

I get a sense of dread and think, “She better have not called the police.”

Yes, yes, she did. The police officer says they got a call from a person not wanting to identify themself about this situation. He is parked on the edge of the carport.

Officer: “There’s not even an accessible sign there!”

We talk about it and kind of find the whole situation funny. The cop is able to tell that I am not in a parking spot, accessible or otherwise, from fifty feet away in the dark. He waves it off.

Officer: “Don’t worry about it. Even if there were a real case, it’s up to the property to have a car towed or removed, not the police.”

The fact that the lady didn’t want to give her identity makes me think she knew she was in the wrong.

I used to work for a furniture store as a delivery driver. Nine times out of ten, if a customer saw something on the display floor that they wanted, we’d just take the item off the floor. That way, the sales staff wouldn’t have to order a new one, they could replace it with something different, and the customer would get their piece of furniture rather quickly. We didn’t have storage, so it was one of those things where if it was on the floor, it was our only one.

One day, a customer bought a couch off the floor and asked for it to be delivered.

Later in the day, a coworker and I prepped the couch, groaning amongst ourselves because it was a sofa bed, and those things are heavy and awkward, especially when you have to get them into houses.

We loaded up, wrapped the couch up, and delivered it. It took us about fifteen minutes to get through the narrow doors and set it in the customer’s living room.

As we unwrapped the couch, checking over everything to make sure everything worked correctly, including the pull-out bed, suddenly, the customer said:

Customer: “That’s not the couch I ordered.”

Coworker: “What do you mean?”

Customer: “I did not order a sofa bed.”

Me: “Ma’am, this is the couch that was on our show floor, which you picked out.”

Customer: “No. It’s the same style, but the one I wanted didn’t have a sofa bed.”

Coworker: “This is the very couch you looked at on the floor. We carried it out of the showroom after you bought it, and there’s a tag on here very clearly saying that it’s a sofa bed.”

Customer: “I don’t want it if it’s a sofa bed!”

Me: “Then you’re going to have to call the associate you bought your couch from.”

She called, and we could hear the conversation.

Customer: “Why did I get a sofa bed? That’s not what I ordered.”

Associate: “Ma’am, the couch my coworkers are delivering is the very same one that you picked. You didn’t mention that you didn’t want a sofa bed; you only saw the couch, sat on it, and said that you wanted to buy it.”

Customer: “It’s no good to me because it has a sofa bed!”

My associate asked to speak to [Coworker] and me and told us to bring the couch back. Then, the customer took the phone back.

Associate: “You’ll be refunded your money for the couch but not the delivery fee.”

The customer was a little annoyed by that; she apparently thought that since she was returning the couch, she should get the delivery fee refunded.

My coworker and I just loaded the couch back up and brought it back to the store.