(I work in a fairly high-end hotel bar and restaurant in a nice part of town. A family with two young daughters comes in and orders a bottle of our most expensive champagne. A coworker takes it over to them. A little while later, the father comes up to the bar, presumably to buy non-alcoholic drinks for his daughters.)

Me: “How can I help you?”

Customer: “Can I borrow a bottle opener?”

Me: “You don’t need a bottle opener for that type of champagne. If you like, I could open it for you, sir.”

Customer: “No, it’s not for the champagne. It’s for the drinks I bought for the girls.”

Me: “Were they not opened when you bought them?”

Customer: “No, we bought them from a supermarket.”

Me: “Unfortunately, sir, you won’t be allowed to drink those in here. You can only consume food and drink purchased on the premises.”

Customer: *getting aggravated* “This is ridiculous. I’ve come here and bought your stupidly expensive champagne, I’m going to eat dinner here later, and I have to waste money on your inflated prices for [Soft Drink], as well?” *storms back to table*

(Later, I saw that another colleague had served him [Soft Drink], and he was now topping up their empty glasses with the drinks he’d brought in with him. I alerted my manager, who confiscated the drinks. Daft that he was happy to spend £100 on champagne, similar on food, but not £2 each on soft drinks.)

(It has gone 9:30 pm. My mum is in hospital and I am at home. I get a call from her asking me to speak to the lady in the next bed who I’ve never spoken to or seen at any point in the past. I work advising people of what social security benefits they can receive. She wants to know what she can get as she is now ill.)

Me: “Do you have a partner?”

Lady: “What’s that got to do with it? I am the one that needs money.”

Me: “What you can get changes depending on whether you have a partner, kids, etc., so I need to know.”

Lady: “Well, what can I get if I have a partner?”

Me: *explains*

Lady: “And if I don’t?”

Me: *explains*

Lady: “What if I have kids?”

Me: “How old are they?”

Lady: “That’s none of your business.”

Me: “Again, what you can get changes on how many and how old they are.”

(She makes me explain what she can get if she doesn’t have kids, has older kids in their teens, has young babies, etc., despite refusing to indicate what info she needs and whether it’s helpful.)

Lady: “What should work give me?”

Me: “Are they paying you statutory sick pay?”

Lady: “If they were?”

(I explained what happens if they are but she made me go on to explain what would happen if they weren’t or were going to or have no intention of paying her. Twenty minutes of being nothing but polite and helpful later, despite her talking to me like something on the bottom of her shoe and being fantastically unhelpful, pedantic, and rude, she slammed down the phone without a word of thanks or acknowledging the inconvenience she had put me through, calling me at home late at night. I went to visit my mum the following day and the woman just glared at me when my mum introduced us! The sad thing is that she wasn’t the most unpleasant person I’d spoken to that day.)

About ten years ago, I got my first job in a local pub right on the seafront. It was — and still is — a beautiful location, and my best friend also worked there behind the bar. I thought I had scored the perfect job, but due to the actions of a few terrible people, it became a living nightmare. There were many things that went on that you probably wouldn’t believe, but today I’m just going to tell you about one of the milder instances.

The big boss, a giant of a man almost as wide as he was tall, wanted to train me up on coffees. Along with the usual instructions, he told me to just put the jugs of hot steamed milk back into the fridge after we were done with them. They were large pitchers, so the same batch of milk would be constantly heated, cooled, and reheated throughout the day. After the boss had walked away, my best friend quietly told me that it wasn’t safe to do that, and we should throw the old milk away as soon as the coast was clear.

Concerned, I did some research that night and found that, yeah, it’s not safe to keep steaming hot liquids in the fridge, as the repeated cooling and heating keeps the milk in the “danger zone” temperature range too often, which could lead to the growth of bacteria, as well as potentially affecting the temperature of everything else in the fridge.

Being young, naive, and on the autistic spectrum, I innocently assumed that my manager was simply unaware of these facts, and that surely he would be glad to know the truth. I printed off my findings and took them to him the next morning.

Spoiler alert: it didn’t go well. 

He shooed me into the kitchen, physically backed me up into a corner, and began threatening me that — in his own words — “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” and that he had been thinking of giving me a promotion but now he “didn’t think he could trust me.”

I had my hours cut, and of course I never got that promotion, which honestly I don’t think ever existed. If we were ever caught throwing the milk away, it was taken out of our pay. It was a good lesson in never trusting the bosses to do the right thing, a lesson that has been backed up time and time again in every place I’ve worked since.

I am working from home and like the rest of the country, I’ve been practicing social distancing. My seven-year-old son’s school is closed so he’s been playing all day – and I see no harm in him playing in the garden. He runs up to me late in the morning.

Son: “Mum, do we have any masks?”

Me: “You mean the masks to stop getting infected like you saw on TV?”

Son: “Yeah!”

Me: “We have some, but why do you need one?”

Son: “To play in the garden!”

There is no one in the garden, but I am loath to stop my son from being enthusiastic about good health practices! I give him one of the masks I received from my office before we were all sent home and send him off to play.

I get stuck in my work and rely on my son to let me know when he’s hungry so we can stop for lunch. After finishing a rather complicated piece of work, I realise it is almost 3:00 pm and there’s no sign of my son! I head out to the garden, and see this:

Our next-door neighbour, an old woman in her late seventies, is sat by the dividing fence of our respective gardens, wearing a mask, sat in front of a chess set. My son is sat in our garden, keeping a distance of six feet from her, wearing his mask, and shouting out orders.

Son: “I’ll move my horse to where your castle is!”

Neighbor: “Well done! But look what you did for my bishop!”

She took away one of his pieces with the bishop my son had inadvertently cleared a route for. My son groaned jokingly and then laughed.

My son did not know how to play chess that morning. Our neighbor had spent four hours teaching him the rules, coming up with interesting alternative names for some of the pieces (King & Queen were Mum & Dad) and all while respecting social distancing!

They’ve been out there playing for three afternoons in a row now and I have to keep reminding him to come in for lunch!

(It was about 1:00 AM on Valentines Day at my job, when a woman in about her early twenties ran up to the register fully naked)

Woman: DO YOU KNOW WEAR THE TAPONS ARE!

Me: Uhh by the medicine.

(The woman ran off and ran out in about two minutes flat but she had left a trail of blood on the floor…)