I work as an usher in a football stadium, mostly giving directions to customers. Sometimes they don’t believe me when I tell them where things are, so I have to wonder why they even asked me if they didn’t think I would know.

Customer: “Can you tell me where the [Popular Fast Food Chain] is?”

Me: *Pointing* “It’s down there to the right.”

Customer: “No, it’s not!”

Me: “I can assure you that it is. I can show you on the map if you like.”

Customer: “I’ve just been down there and it’s not there!”

Me: “Perhaps you didn’t walk far enough? It’s about 300 meters—”

Customer: “It’s not there!”

Me: “Um… Well, it was there this morning when I passed it on my way here from the break room.”

He called me some insulting names and stormed off in the wrong direction. The stadium is round, so if he walked far enough, he would eventually get to his destination that way; it would just take him quite a while.

I coach for a major youth sports club. The club sports scene is governed by a National Organization that hosts the National Championship Tournament every summer. There are a bunch of local regions all under the National Organization so that teams can compete locally ahead of the National Tournaments.

Our local region is known for being insanely cheap and cutting corners wherever possible to save themselves a penny. This tournament is being held three hours from my hometown, well off the beaten path, and there are no referees, so coaches for a team that isn’t playing have to ref. My team has just finished reffing when a tournament official approaches me.

Official: “Hi, I need you to do me a favor.”

Me: “What’s that?”

Official: “Your pool of teams has finished rather quickly. I’ve got two more matches still to be played in another pool, so I’m moving one of those matches over to this court, and you’ll be the officials. That way we get done quicker. So, you won’t have any time for lunch, but we’ll leave sooner.”

Me: “Wait a second. You want me to ref an extra match and skip lunch? How much am I getting paid for this?”

Official: “We don’t pay coaches to ref. You know that. You’re doing this as a favor to me.”

Me: “Uh, no. If you want me to skip lunch and do extra work I’m not required to do, I’m going to need to be paid. I’ll do it for $200.”

Official: “Again, we don’t pay coaches to ref. You’re doing it as a volunteer. Think of it as your good deed for the day.”

Me: “Sorry, but I’m not reffing out of the goodness of my heart. $200 or I’m not doing it.”

Official: “You can’t just demand $200 from us. We have a payment system. If you were working for us as an official, you’d get $20 per match. We don’t pay refs more than that, ever. $200 is practically a whole day’s worth of work. I’m only getting paid $150 for today, and I have to be here from 6:00 am until probably 9:00 or 10:00 pm, with no breaks.”

Me: “That really sucks. But I’m hungry, so I’m done here. Goodbye.”

I honestly felt a little bad that she was working a tough and thankless job for under minimum wage.

My amazing wife bought a pass that allows our family of five (sometimes seven) to go to many events on the cheap. Last night, we saw the Rattlers play against the IFL’s (Indoor Football League) newest team, the Frisco Fighters. It was a great game — one that a certain couple didn’t get to see, thanks to some (presumably)-malicious compliance on the part of the ticket scanner.

We were waiting in line, waiting for our tickets to scan, and noticed a couple in front of us getting very fidgety with their middle school twins, yelling at them to pull up the tickets on their phones. They made it a race as if everything was a competition for these girls. [Twin #2] won (I lost that bet with my wife) just in time to get scanned. All that, and the young man scanning didn’t take his magic wand and scan their phone; he just looked and nodded them through, about ready to move on to us.

But alas, it was not to be!

The mother started flipping out.

Mother: “But you didn’t scan us!”

Ticket Scanner: “Ma’am, you’re good to go.”

He then turned back to us to scan our tickets (which were also readied by our kid), saying as he made eye contact with us:

Ticket Scanner: “Hey, man, some people don’t get it; if I say you’re good to go, you are. Got no problem with me, you’re problem-free.”

He said it so rhythmically that nothing I could write could do justice to just how melodically he almost sang this utterance. It was like a catchphrase.

All of a sudden, the mother started whispering-shouting, probably because security was right there:

Mother: “This is America! For all of our safety, I demand that you scan each of our tickets!”

The young man told us, with his eyes more than anything, “Watch this…”

Ticket Scanner: *To the mother* “Are ya sure?”

Mother: “Positive! You know the—”

She was about to ramble on when the scanning machine suddenly made a weird noise — the noise of rejection.

Ticket Scanner: *In an overly-emphatic, sad voice* “Ma’am, I’m so sorry. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but this ticket is for our next home game. See the date?”

Mother: “You’ve gotta be kidding me!”

And she turned with her disappointed-looking family and disappeared into the crowd.

Ticket Scanner: *To us, smiling all the way* “I saw that date, saw that different helmet color… I tried to help them out, man. No one wants to listen. No one cooperates.” *Shrugs*

I used to work at a gymnastics company, and we had a strict thirty-day notice policy.

One day, a customer came in to cancel her membership. She got very upset when I showed her the part of the contract about the thirty-day notice. Her words exactly:

Customer: “You expected me to actually read that before I signed it? How ridiculous. Can I speak to your manager?”

I work at a major college baseball stadium. Parking is a major issue. The premium parking spots cost big bucks and most people opt against it. There is a small business located directly across the street from the stadium that probably makes more profit off of selling season-long gameday parking passes than it does all year on whatever it actually sells.

For some reason, because the business’s lot is slightly less expensive than school-issued premium parking passes, it attracts the locals who think they’re rich.

How it works is that everyone has a pass, and they flash it to the security guard working the gate to enter before the game. Sometime during the game, the guard leaves, and at that point, it’s the honor system. Most of the time, people have enough respect not to park there if they show up late and they aren’t pass holders.

We have a large game with record-breaking crowds. The game has finished, and probably thirty minutes after the final out, I get a call from one of my poor female student employees who is getting the a**-chewing of her life from some parents. They are loudly berating the girl watching over the parking in the SCHOOL-ISSUED PREMIUM PARKING. She has nothing to do with the business’s parking. They are infuriated that someone in the business’s lot doesn’t have a tag and is parking where they paid extreme amounts of money to park.

It’s a good ten-minute walk from the part of the stadium where I am to the actual lot, so I grab my Campus Police Department buddy who is working overtime that night for the game, and we make our way to the situation. By the time we get there, the angry parents have gotten into their 1995 Suburban, attached chains to a brand-new F150, and dragged it out from the lot into the middle of the street, which is full of contraflow cars trying to leave.

The cops are already overwhelmed as it is, so there’s basically nothing to stop them. When we get there, we see the F150 sitting in the middle of the road, and the dumba** Suburban driver is going back into the lot looking for more “violators”. My poor employee is crying and shaking so we send her home for the night.

The cop and I head into the lot looking for the Suburban driver and discover him looking into cars for their passes. We confront him, and my buddy immediately cuffs him and his wife. We question them and figure out why they decided to take it upon themselves to enforce the lot.

This is where the best part of the story comes in… they don’t have a pass themselves!

To this day, I have no idea if they actually bought one and forgot it or not, but they don’t have one and their Suburban is sitting empty on the lot as they are both cuffed on the ground. My buddy (with the biggest smile on his face) calls in the tow company and has the Suburban towed away because of illegal parking.

He then books the two parents for some type of damage to property and theft. (I honestly can’t remember.) Once the owner of the F150 gets to it, he chooses to press charges, and it turns out he actually did have a pass sitting on his floor that had fallen from his mirror at some point.

I’ll never forget watching those two get hauled off in a cop car as their car rode on the back of a tow truck to some yard somewhere.