CONTENT WARNING: Dark Humor Involving Animals

For those unfamiliar with Mexican culture, you can find taco stands on pretty much every street corner in densely populated areas. I’m at one of such stands in a city I’ve just moved to, with a colleague I’ve just met.

Me: “It’s kind of weird.”

Colleague: “What’s weird?”

Me: “In my hometown, you’d find stray dogs begging for scraps at every food stand. But I don’t see any here.”

Colleague: *Matter-of-factly* “We have no stray dogs in [City].”

Me: “Yeah, I can tell.”

Colleague: “We do have many places where you can get the cheapest tacos in the state. You do the math.”

Me: “What does that have to do with… Oh… Oh, no…”

I used to work at a big chain pet store. One day, some horrible customer had used the bathroom and smeared their waste ALL OVER the walls, sink, door, and floor. It was everywhere.

I reported it to the manager.

Manager: “Well, go clean it.”

Me: “No. For one, we don’t have any of the OSHA-required safety equipment to clean up human waste. And for another, I’m a dog groomer, not a janitor.”

(OSHA is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.)

My manager blew a gasket and went off on me about being a team player and so forth. I thought he was going to have a heart attack; his face was turning purple! He wasn’t used to being told “no” because he was such a bully that he intimated everyone.

I turned my back on him while he was screaming at me and walked off, which made him even angrier. What he didn’t know was that I had started recording on my phone right before I reported the mess because I knew he’d try to bully me into cleaning it.

I left the store, and [Manager] called and screamed at my voicemail that I was fired.

I sent everything to Human Resources. Then, when they refused to do anything, I reported the company to OSHA.

I heard later from a friend that still worked there that the company totally threw [Manager] under the bus to save themselves, but they still got fined because of the email they’d sent me telling me I should have done what I was told, shouldn’t have just walked out, [Manager] was right, etc.

A male customer comes up to my register and buys a cucumber and a tube of personal lubricant. Then, he heads to the restroom. He exits empty-handed twenty minutes later and goes back to shopping.

A little while later, a maintenance worker stops by my register.

Maintenance: “I just found this cucumber and this empty tube of [lubricant] in the restroom…”

I was part of the closing crew at a fast food chain, and I was cleaning outside in the parking lot. A woman came up to me.

Woman: “Could you let me in to use the restroom?”

Me: “I’m sorry, but that’s not possible.”

She kept begging me, but I knew I would be chewed out by the manager for letting someone in past closing. So, she proceeded to lift her skirt, drop her underpants, and relieve herself right there in the parking lot in front of me.

Then, she walked off with a triumphant, “Hmph!”

I work at a high-end bra store. We tailor the bras we sell to fit our clients as best as possible; any alterations done for the fit of a new bra are free. Clients may also in some cases bring back old bras for us to repair or make tighter or smaller so they can extend the life of their bras for a fee. Old bras that leave our shop must be washed before being dropped off for repair.

A lady came in on a busy Saturday and dropped five old, dirty bras on the counter.

Customer: “I want these altered. I want [massive alterations] done, and I don’t want to have to pay the fee for it. I need this done right now.”

Me: “Ma’am, our seamstress isn’t in on Saturdays, so I can’t have these altered today. Also, we require that bras be washed before we work on them.”

They were dirty and smelled awful, and further conversation revealed that they were twelve years old.

The lady tried to fight us on it, and we went back and forth for a while. When she realized she was about to be banned from the store, she caved. She took the bras home, washed them, brought them back another day, paid the nearly $120 it cost to alter them, and waited a week for them to be completed like everyone else. The alterations took our seamstress about three hours.