I was a lifeguard with cleaning duties. Two kids pooped in the boys’ locker room sink.
But they were short, so one of them must have been on the shoulders of the other to actually get the poop into the sink. Either that or they pooped in their hands and put it in the sink.
We used a whole jug of bleach cleaning that mess!
I worked at a department store on the second floor. In most stores in this chain, this is the women’s floor. I worked full-time and took part-time classes. I was always working.
A particular sixty-year-old dude took my customer service friendliness as “flirting” and did not stop bothering me. He would come to my department almost every day. Coworkers said he’d be looking for me. He was so creepy. He kept giving me his phone number; I would fake smile and slip it in the trash.
I told him I had a boyfriend, though I didn’t, but he didn’t care. He wanted to take me out to lunch, discuss my future, etc. I kept telling him I wasn’t interested. He was always buying small things like a belt, tie, or shirt, and then coming to return them the next day, so it’s not like he was helping my sales goals, either.
I told my manager about it, and she told me to call her when I saw him. It’s a big store, though, so by the time she would get there, he would be gone.
One time, I was closing up three departments thanks to callouts and this dude showed up. I just wanted to hurry up and go through with the transaction. I was in such a rush that I forgot to take the sensor off his shirt. He came back.
Man: “You forgot to take this off.”
Me: “Oh, sorry.”
As I was reaching to take the sensor off, he slapped my hand and smiled this creepy-a** grin.
Man: “Naughty girl!”
I was horrified. I went to security.
Me: “Please get rid of that guy. I’m afraid to drive home! I don’t know if this loser is going to follow me.”
So, one day, I was at my register, and I saw him strolling up. I called security and darted to hide. He went up to my coworker and asked where I was; she said I’d be right back. Instead, security showed up and led him away.
Thankfully, I never saw him again. THANK YOU, SECURITY TEAM!
When I worked in retail, a middle-aged man would sometimes drop off his mother to shop. She was a little odd but nothing concerning (or so we thought).
One day, she defecated in the fitting room, and I was the supervisor who got to clean it up. We found the shirt she used to wipe herself in the racks later. She’d put it back herself.
The customer bathroom was barely ten feet away.
Our water main breaks badly enough to where they have to actually dig out the section of pipe that’s broken and replace it, so that means we have no running water in the store at all. The deli and sandwich shop in the store have to be shut down, and management allows us to carry around water bottles to keep hydrated since the water fountains are out, and they provide us with bottled water in the break room.
I am leaving the front checkout area after helping on the registers and heading back to my department when an older lady approaches me, pointing to the bathrooms.
Customer: “Why are the bathrooms taped off?”
Me: “Oh! Hello! I’m sorry, our water main broke, so we have no running water at the moment, so all of the bathrooms are closed right now.”
She points to my water bottle.
Customer: “If y’all don’t have running water, where did that come from?!”
Me: “Oh, I apologize for the confusion. Management provided us bottled waters back in the break room since the fountains are out.”
Customer: “So, does that mean the bathrooms in the back are working?”
Me: “Oh, no, ma’am. The whole store has no water at all. But—”
Customer: “No water? At all?!”
Me: “No, ma’am, I’m sorry.”
Customer: “Why isn’t the water working?!”
Me: “The water main broke.”
Customer: “Well, when will it be fixed?!”
Me: *Getting uncomfortable* “Ah, probably at the end of the week. They had to order new parts and break through the concrete and dig the pipes up.”
Customer: “I don’t care! I gotta go! Can you open the bathrooms up for me?”
Me: “I can’t; we have no water.”
Customer: *Screaming now* “YOU WON’T LET ME USE THE BATHROOM!”
Me: “I’m sorry, our water main is broken! Try going over to [Fast Food Chain]; their bathrooms are open. We aren’t on the same water lines as them, so—”
Customer: “I NEED TO GO TO THE BATHROOM NOW!”
At this point, one of the managers up front mercifully helped me out and politely but firmly told the woman to stop yelling at me for something that I couldn’t control and to either go to one of the other shops nearby or go home. The woman huffed and stomped off, and I thanked my manager for the save and rushed back to my department to finish stocking the cart of merchandise I was working on.
About thirty minutes later, I was called up front to help again with a sudden rush of customers. I was passing the seasonal merchandise at the front of the store when I got a whiff of something absolutely foul. It was like a dirty diaper, which I have found on other occasions, but this was so intense I gagged. I peeked into the aisle, and sure enough, smack in the middle of the aisle was a huge pile of poo.
I flagged down a manager and stopped customers from coming into the entire seasonal area. We had to quarantine the area, disassemble the shelves, and thoroughly scrub down EVERYTHING with bleach.
While the mess was being cleaned, since I was the one who found it, the asset protection guy had to take me to the back to take down my statement of the incident and to see if I may have seen who did it.
We rolled back through the camera footage and found the culprit. I watched in abject horror as the woman I had spoken with earlier stomped into that aisle, dropped her pants, and proceeded to take an angry poop IN BROAD DAYLIGHT at the front of a busy retail store!
Best of all, she was still in the store, shopping! She was immediately detained and arrested for indecent exposure and reckless behavior. She was fined several thousand dollars and received a lifetime ban from this retail establishment because she couldn’t be bothered to walk five minutes to a nearby shop to use the bathroom.
Related:
H2-Woah, Part 7
H2-Woah, Part 6
H2-Woah, Part 5
H2-Woah, Part 4
H2-Woah, Part 3
In my city, there used to be an annual sporting event that developed into a two-day social party at the stadium. Attendees generally went in costume; there could be prizes for best, most original, best group, etc.
There weren’t that many costume shops in the city, and rental places had a heck of a time because of the state things would be returned in. Our department store had cheaply made costumes in our party section. The general policy was that we wouldn’t take returns, refunds, or exchanges on costumes unless they were faulty and had not been worn; tried on should have been fine, except the number of people that returned “faulty” items that had been damaged because people had bought the wrong size caused problems.
Still, people would try to return costumes as “unworn” when they had clearly been through the wash (frayed edges, colour bleed) or, worse still, reeked of spilt alcohol and body odour. People would even wear them just for the first day and bring them back the morning of the second, hoping to exchange it for something new.
Mostly, our manager stood with us on not taking used costumes back, but enough people complained on social media that the head office ruled that any item could be returned if not fit for purpose within a week of purchase.
Then, they couldn’t understand why our store would take a financial hit from returns and faulty goods every February.
