A teenage girl comes up to me at the customer service desk.
Customer: “Do you have any phones in the lost and found?”
Me: “Possibly. What kind of phone have you lost?”
Customer: “Oh, just list to me the ones that you do have, and I’ll let you know if I want it or not.”
Me: “…”
I am taking calls for a cable company way back in the day, back when they are billing for satellite on their bills.
Caller: “This is crazy! Why is there an extra $300 on my bill?!”
I take a quick look and it turns out it’s all for pay-per-view adult entertainment. I gently explain this, and then:
Me: “Sir, those charges are registered from your remote, so they are accurate.”
Caller: “No! I must insist that you take them off the bill!”
Me: “I’m sorry, but I’m not authorized to do that. I will need to send a call to our investigations department to test your remote and confirm whether there are any issues. They will make the final determination for credit or not as the charges are all previously generated.”
Caller: “FINE, BUT THEY’D BETTER AGREE TO CREDIT ME, BECAUSE THERE’S NO… one… here… but… my… thirteen-year-old son… Never mind.” *Click*
Several years ago, back when I was a junior in high school — sixteen or seventeen years old — I started dating a guy who was a grade above me. This was a relationship that I really shouldn’t have said yes to in the first place. There wasn’t really anything BAD exactly, but I’ll admit that I mostly said I’d go out with him just to get him to stop asking me to go out with him.
Anyway, we start dating, and about four or five weeks in, he started asking me to go to a family wedding with him.
Guy: “It’s at the end of September, and it’s going to be down in Olympia.”
Me: “I don’t think that’s such a good idea. We haven’t been dating that long, and I don’t really know your family.”
Guy: “Oh, it’s not a problem. They all want to meet you. And I know seating’s going to be short, but if they run out, I’ll give you my seat and just go stand in the back.”
Me: “Okay, first of all, it’s too early for us to be doing something like that. I don’t really want to meet the rest of your family yet. And second, even if I did decide I wanted to go to this, there is no way you’d be leaving my side.”
He still tried to push a little more and get me to go, but I didn’t budge. As I mentioned, I started dating him for a lot of reasons that really didn’t amount to what dating should be about, even in a high-school relationship. But hey, I was a dumb teenager.
I did end up breaking up with him about three weeks later for several reasons. Things got fun six months after that when he started dating a girl from another school and also tried to ask out one from our school and hide it. Then, he tried to blame me when his girlfriend found out.
I’m so glad I dumped his a** and really sorry I went into the relationship in the first place. At least I got a cautionary tale out of it.
I work in an ambulance. I pick up an underage drunk teen. He’s misbehaving and making a mess of my ambulance.
Me: “Knock it off, kid.”
Teen: “I can say whatever I want and do whatever I want. My dad is the police chief, and he can have you fired!”
Me: “Okay, then let’s call your dad and tell him that his underage son was caught with a fake ID, was drunk as h***, pissed all over the inside of my ambulance, and then spit a snot ball at me.”
We took his drunk a** to the hospital and let them call his dad.
I work the audit shift at a motel literally right off the highway; I can count traffic from our front parking lot. Audit shift, for those unaware, is the third shift, or overnight, where we run close-of-day software, prepare breakfast (I know not every place does this, but we do, and it gives a general idea of my duties), and generally make sure there’s at least someone on the property at all times.
I’m literally the only employee here at night, my boss lives on the other side of the bay from the hotel, and our customer support line is about as well-versed in the goings-on of this hotel as an ant in an auto shop. Fortunately, I’m 6’2″, large, and generally don’t f*** around. It’s not that I’m any great shakes in a fight, but I’m the kind of tall, fat-that-looks-like-bulk dude that can bluff my way through most any fight, so nobody ever tries getting physical; they just yell a lot and make stupid demands. You know the type.
On one occasion, I take over for the second shift, and I have settled into my evening routine of Reddit and YouTube when I start getting noise complaints. I almost NEVER get noise complaints like this; mostly it’s just someone’s dog while they’re out shopping at the twenty-four-hour grocery store across the street, or someone hard of hearing has their TV too loud. Easy stuff to deal with.
Not these little s***s. Nope. Around midnight, these teenagers start blasting music like they’re trying to shake the entire western seaboard loose.
I march down the hall, already not happy that they’re interrupting my “Eureka” marathon, and knock on the door.
Me: “I need you to turn the music down, please. We’ve gotten some complaints.”
They give me the “yeah, yeah, we will” bulls***, turn it down, and close the door. I don’t even get back to the staircase THREE DOORS AWAY before the music is turned back up, so I go back and pound on the door again.
Teenager #1: “THE F*** DO YOU WANT?!”
Me: “Dude, at least give it long enough for me to get halfway down the hall before you turn it back up.”
Teenager #2: “Man, we didn’t do nothin’.”
Blah, blah, blah.
Me: “Whatever, just turn it the f*** down.”
Not an hour later, I’m getting more complaints, not to mention that I can hear these guys fighting from halfway down the building and an entire floor away. (They’re on the first, and the front office is on the second.) So, I haul myself back down to their room and knock on the door. One of them answers.
Me: “All right, you guys have got to go. I’m giving you half an hour to pack your s*** and leave before I have the cops escort you out.”
Teenager #1: “Our mom isn’t here, and she’s the one renting the room!”
“Well, s***,” I think. “If they’re all this bad, imagine the mom.”
Me: “Either way, you have half an hour.”
Teenager #3: “Man, you can’t kick us all out. We’re minors!”
I repeat myself one more time and then walk away. I call the cops, saying I need help with an eviction. I explain that they’re loud and refuse to leave, and there’s a lot of fighting. It takes the boys in blue about five minutes to show up, at which point I happily lead them down to the room.
They’ve shown up with two squad cars, two cops each, and thank God, because one of them had the foresight to march around to the back of the hotel. By the time I get the cops to the room, the kids have all bailed. Of course, they get about as far as a fart in a vacuum, thanks to the cops. Not ten minutes later, I see the entire entourage of like five kids being detained (not cuffed or in the cars, but certainly not allowed to leave) by like six cops (more have shown up for the funsies).
A couple of them have the audacity (read: it is someone else’s turn with the community brain cell) to argue with the cops like they were yelling at me earlier. They hang around for about twenty or thirty minutes waiting for the kids’ parent.
One of the cops explains to me that they aren’t looking to press charges on a bunch of kids for being noisy and rude. Honestly, up to this point, that’s all they’ve really been doing; I just want them out of the hotel and knew they weren’t taking me seriously.
Then, one of the teens comes into the lobby.
Teenager #4: “Did you really call the cops on us, man?”
Me: “Yeah, I did.”
Teenager #4: “Dude, we’re all minors.”
Me: “Don’t care.”
Teenager #4: “Man, you’s a punk-a** b***.”
Me: “Still don’t care.”
About half an hour after the cops and the kids part ways, a woman comes up to the front desk.
Woman: “Are you the one who called the cops on my kids?”
Oh, boy, here we go.
Me: “Yes, I am.”
Woman: “I am so sorry about them.”
Wait, what?
Woman: “Honestly, only two of them are mine. My daughter snuck her boyfriend in while I was out grocery shopping, and apparently, he brought his friends, one of whom stole a bottle of booze from the grocery store across the street.”
She’s super apologetic and pays for the room properly, and I let her back in to collect their stuff. She is even super understanding when I tell her:
Me: “Look, I know it’s not your fault, but this does mean I have to add you all to the Do Not Rent list going forward.”
Woman: “It’s no problem. I’m not planning on taking her to a hotel again anyway.”
I never did find out what happened to the group of kids responsible for shoplifting, underage drinking, public disturbance, and trespassing. (If you tell someone to leave your hotel and they don’t, as long as they haven’t been there for more than fifteen days [Governor’s Eviction Moratorium], you can have them hauled off for trespassing.) But I do hope the kids got help, and I feel really bad for the mom.
