I am a front end supervisor. I see my next customer before I call the next in line and automatically know this will be a tough one.

Me: “Next customer, please!”

We go on our usual spiel of greetings and small talk.

Customer: “Oh, I don’t want to be a bother, but could you call your closest store and ask if they have that dress in a different size?”

Me: “So sorry, we don’t have means to call another store. You would have to Google their number, call, and ask for customer service.”

The customer’s face turns sour and she starts to explode.

Customer: “This is the worst customer service I have ever experienced!”

Me: “I apologize, ma’am, but that’s why you have the option to call another store and ask for customer service. I apologize that we do not have a direct calling staff.”

Customer: “No! Don’t apologize for being lazy! What’s the number to your closest store? Can you look it up for me?”

We can’t have our phones with us at the registers so I already know how this is going to go.

Me: “I’m sorry, but you’d have to Google the store number for [Location]. I’m not allowed to have my phone on me while I am on the clock.”

Customer: “You are such a lazy b****! Get me a supervisor!”

Me: “Of course. I am the front end supervisor and I am now denying you a sale because of the abusive language you have chosen to use against me. You can Google the address and number of any of our other stores in the perimeter, but as of right now I am refusing a sale.”

I void the transaction and pull her items to my side of the register, including the item she was demanding that I call another store about.

Customer: “Are you freaking serious?! I’ll have your job!”

She stormed out with nothing. Two months later, I still have a job.

When I am sixteen, I get my first job busing tables and washing dishes in a restaurant during summer break. At the beginning of the summer, shortly after I start working, my family plans a week-long vacation later in the summer. I ask my boss if I can have that week off, and he tells me to write my request down on the Requests Calendar. I do so, let him know that I’ve written in the dates, and don’t think anything about it until the next day when my boss tracks me down.

Boss: “Hey, [My Name]. I see you requested [vacation dates] off on the calendar?”

Me: “Yeah, I did. Did I do something wrong?”

Boss: “No, it looks okay. But in the future, you should only use pencil on the calendar; pen ink tends to smear, so it gets hard to read sometimes.”

Me: “Oh, I wasn’t told about that. There wasn’t a pencil or anything by the calendar, so I just grabbed the first thing I could find to write with.”

Boss: “That’s fine. Just make sure you find a pencil next time.”

Fast forward a few weeks. The week before my family vacation, my mom schedules a dentist appointment for me for the week after we get back. Remembering my boss’s instructions, I find a pencil and write in my request for the day of my appointment on the calendar.

My vacation comes and goes, and the day of my dentist appointment arrives. I’m sitting in the dentist chair and my phone starts ringing in my pocket. Obviously, I don’t answer it. Immediately after, it rings again… and then again… and then again. Finally, after the fourth call, it stops ringing.

After my appointment, I check my phone and see that every call was from my boss. I get back to the waiting room, and my mom asks me if I made sure to request the day off work; apparently, my boss had called her, too, trying to find out why I wasn’t at work.

When I get to work the next day, my boss tries to chew me out for skipping work. I insist that I requested the day off and walk over to the calendar to prove it to him. I find the day in question… and see very clear evidence of pencil eraser.

Yep. My boss erased my request. Some of my coworkers later told me he was known for doing that, which was why he insisted that everybody wrote their requests in pencil. Everybody else had learned to take pictures of the calendar as proof, but nobody told me that. Luckily, the new school year started soon after and I was able to leave that job. I found a better job with a much better boss the next summer.

In the early 1980s when my parents are first married, they are staying in the town my dad grew up in. The town has less than 2,500 people. Everyone knows everyone else, and they’re all related in some way. One night, after having dinner with his parents, they return to the place they are staying to find someone has broken in and stolen most of their things, including my mother’s collapsible pool stick, which is her pride and joy.

They report it to the police, tell his parents, and try to find a way to calm down. Dad suggests they go to the local bar, get a couple of drinks, and maybe ask around about it. As they sit there and talk to some people, Mom hears a very familiar noise. It’s the distinctive “clunk” noise that her pool stick makes when it strikes the cue ball. She gets my dad’s attention and points out the pool table to him.

One of his cousins is playing pool, and the stick he’s using is the one making the “clunk” noise.

Mom: “[Dad], that’s my stick!”

Knowing better than to cause a scene in a bar, my dad went to the payphone… and called his aunt. He told her what had happened and that he thought her son was the one who’d broken into the house. His aunt came down immediately and dragged my dad’s cousin out by the collar of his shirt, screaming up one side and cussing down the other. 

Turns out, he HAD been the one to break into the house, figuring my mom, who was from out of state, would have really valuable stuff to sell. Luckily, he hadn’t had a chance to sell anything, and they got everything back.

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My coworker is Hispanic and he goes by both his first and middle names — let’s say Juan Carlos — or by those two initials, so when we call for him we will use both his names. He is working on something across the store when we need him to do something, so my manager yells across the store to him.

Manager: “Hey, Juan Carlos, we need you to make some lemonade.”

There is a customer standing close by who hears the manager say this. She’s a middle-aged white lady, and apparently, she does not like what my manager said.

Customer: “How could you be so racist to this young man?! Just because he’s Hispanic doesn’t mean that’s what his name is! What is wrong with you for calling him that?!”

And so on. The employee himself walks up and hears what is going on.

Customer: “I am so sorry, young man. Your manager should apologize for calling you that.”

Juan Carlos: “But that’s my name, ma’am. That’s what the initials on my name tag stand for. All he did was call me by my name.”

Customer: *Rather flustered* “Oh, I didn’t realize… I’m so sorry.”

And she awkwardly walked away. We all had a good laugh at that and afterward I even translated his name from Spanish to English and started calling him by that as a joke, and this continued until I stopped working there almost two years later.

I am a manager working with some inventory in the back when a coworker walks up and says I need to speak with a customer about an order.

Me: “What seems to be the problem, ma’am?”

Customer: “I came in and ordered food here this morning and they forgot one of my sandwiches.”

Me: “Can I see the receipt, ma’am, and can you tell me what sandwich was missing?”

Customer: “Sure.”

She hands me a receipt that shows she ordered over fifty dollars’ worth of food and they missed one of her seven sandwiches.

Me: “All right, would you like me to replace the sandwich now, refund you for the sandwich, or put you down for a free sandwich some other time convenient for you?”

We keep a book of missing items with customer names and what they were missing, and they can come back later and we’ll replace what is in the book for them.

Customer: “I had to go through a lot of trouble since I was missing a sandwich. I want the whole order replaced and a full refund; plus, I live far away so I expect you to pay for my gas, as well.”

Me: “Ma’am, I can only refund or replace the one sandwich you were missing. At best, I can give you a cookie for your trouble.”

Customer: “That’s unacceptable. I live thirty minutes away and should be compensated for my gas, as well. And I want the idiot girls who handled my order fired and anyone who handled my food fired.”

She goes on to explain to me, a young eighteen-year-old, that every one of the younger generation are idiots and lazy and we MUST fire them all now. This goes on for over ten minutes as I try to talk some sense into this lady.

Eventually, she leaves with a sandwich and a cookie and grumbles that we will hear from corporate about this. Afterward, the coworker who originally came to get me walks up. 

Coworker: “I am honestly impressed that you were able to keep your cool and talk civilly to that lady! I only talked to her for thirty seconds and I wanted to strangle her.”

Me: “Yeah, I kind of wanted to strangle her, too, but unfortunately, that’s not allowed.”

The owner told me that she did file a complaint to corporate, but that she was basically laughed off, especially when they heard she wanted gas money from them.