(I work at a big theatre, and since most of the people visiting are rich, they tend to assume all the ushers are stupid. I am working the guest cloakroom this evening, and it is the end-of-the-performance rush to give back all the coats.)

Guest: *with a heavy Italian accent* “These numbers, please.”

(I go to the back, get the coats for those numbers, hand them to him, and start serving someone else.)

Guest: “Excuse me. Something is missing!”

Me: “I’m sorry, sir. What is missing?”

Guest: “My wife’s coat! You didn’t give me my wife’s coat!”

(I go back again and check the numbers. The hooks are all empty. I look around the floor; nothing fell down. Sometimes on busy evenings I put stuff on the wrong number, so I go to the front and ask him.)

Me: “I’m sorry, sir. What does your wife’s coat look like?”

Guest: “I don’t know! But it’s not here!”

Me: “If you could describe it for me, then I could check again to see if I find it.”

Guest: “I don’t know what it looks like! Now give me my wife’s coat!”

Me: “If you can’t describe it, then please wait for two or three minutes; the cloakroom will be emptier and maybe you can identify it then.”

Guest: “NO! I want my wife’s coat now!“

(I have been having this conversation while serving other people, as well, the whole time, because getting the cloakroom empty is literally the quickest way to find a missing coat. Now he is starting a noisy rant about how they put me there and I don’t know how to do my job.)

Me: “Please, sir, could you get your wife so that she could describe her coat for me?”

(He comes back with his wife, who smiles at me and describes her coat. While I go check again and her husband continues ranting, she looks at the coats and starts speaking to him in their language. I don’t speak a word of Italian, but her tone is very clear, so I come back to the front just in time to see the guy’s face lose all color. Turns out, the coat has been in his hand the whole time.)

Me: “Did you find it, ma’am?”

Guest: *pauses, turning slightly green* “I am so sorry.”

(He left, giving me a 5€ tip.)

(I am working the cloakroom at a huge theatre where one of Wagner’s operas is playing. Since Wagner was Hitler’s favourite musician and was kind of antisemitic himself, these performances tend to bring out a lot of racists. I am working the cloakroom with the second-in-command supervisor, who is very obviously not Caucasian and speaks German quite well, though with an accent. It is summer, so there aren’t many coats, and my supervisor has gone dealing with a customer elsewhere when a 75-year-old lady in a fur coat arrives and checks it in with me. A few minutes later she comes back while I am serving another customer and wants to check her vest, as well.)

Me: *to my colleague* “It’s [number]; just put it with the fur coat.”

Colleague: “Could I please just check the number to make sure?”

Customer: *handing her the number* “Well, you can trust your colleague. Even though our country is getting more stupid every day due to immigration.”

(She leaves. We look at each other in a “What’s her problem?” manner and shrug it off. At the end of the performance, the woman is one of the last ones to pick up her coat, so I am already clearing the area, when I see her arguing with my colleague.)

Customer: “You should really be more friendly to Austrian people!”

Colleague: “I’m sorry, what?”

Customer: “You get to stay and eat here, while we each pay hundreds of Euros in taxes every month for you to get everything here for free!“

Colleague: “I pay taxes here, too.”

Customer: *continues her rant* “…and all you people just come here and take everything, and there is nothing left for us!”

(I step in, because even though my colleague speaks German very well, she just can’t defend herself against a rant in a deep Viennese dialect.)

Me: “Madam, she works over two hundred hours a month, and she pays taxes. Please don’t assume—”

Customer: “Now you just shut up! You have no idea what I’m talking about! These foreigners just keep coming here, and they live off of our taxes while we have to work and pay for everything!”

(I’m fuming by now, and I’m not holding back, because the first-in-command is my colleague’s best friend, so I’m not really worried about consequences.)

Me: “I’m sorry, ma’am, but you are clearly retired, so if anything, you are living off of her taxes. Now, please leave, and if you have a problem with me now, you can take it up with my Albanian supervisor, the Columbian theatre supervisor, or the French Head of the House!”

(She left grumbling. Over the next two weeks she came to three more Wagner performances. At the next one, I saw her look at me and walk over to the other cloakroom just to come back and check her coat with me ,anyway; the other cloakroom was worked by two Egyptians. As the person who almost yelled at her for being racist, I still was the most desirable option as the most Aryan-looking of all of the cloakroom people. By the third performance, she just left her coat at home.)

(I am standing in line to get a seat assignment for a flight from Vienna to New York. A young woman in front of me is called to the agent and immediately starts in on a sob story.)

Woman: “I need to be upgraded to first class. I get air-sick if I don’t have enough room.”

Agent: “I’d be happy to upgrade you. The difference in fare is [price]. I can charge that to a credit card if you’d like.”

Woman: “You don’t understand. I cannot pay that. You need to upgrade me at no charge so I don’t get sick.”

Agent: “I understand that, ma’am, but if you want to be upgraded, you need to pay the fare difference.”

Woman: *starts crying* “But I need to be upgraded.”

(This goes back and forth for a while with the agent calmly responding to her demands as she gets more and more agitated. Finally, she starts yelling at him.)

Woman: “I see you don’t care and you want me to be sick! When I’m sick on the plane, it will be your fault because you didn’t upgrade me.”

(The agent has had enough.)

Agent: “Ma’am, the only way I can upgrade you is if you pay the price difference. I’m happy to do that for you, but otherwise I cannot upgrade you. Unless you want to pay that, I’m going to have to insist that you take the seat I’ve assigned you and stop wasting the time of everyone behind you.”

(She stomps off, still crying, and I am called to the counter. The agent greets me with a huge smile and says:)

Agent: “Sir, it’s your lucky day. I’ve got an exit row seat available with no seat in front of it and extra room with priority boarding. Would you like that seat?”

(I gladly accepted it and looked over to see Little Miss Entitled glaring daggers at me and the agent. Unfortunately, I didn’t see any evidence that she had learned that treating people with respect rather than demanding things with patently phony requests might serve her better.)

(At our store, you can look up a customer’s account using their name and some other details to save their purchase or receipt. A woman storms into the shop and up to the counter — I guess already not satisfied by something outside the store — with a grim look on her face, and buys a pack of batteries.)

Customer: “Kneel down!”

Me: “Excuse me?”

Customer: *even louder* “KNEEL DOWN!”

(My coworkers and I look all confused, as we have no idea what to do.)

Customer: *loud and slowly* “MY NAME! KNEEEEEL DOOOOOOWN!”

(Her name… I looked it up for her purchase. Her name was Ms. Kneeldown.)

This story is part of the Struggles With Names roundup!

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In Austria, some professions can only be done by someone who finished a “Lehre,” an apprenticeship that lasts two or three years and includes school. Most people start their Lehre when they’re about 15 or 16, but it’s not unheard of to have people in their 20s do an apprenticeship; surprise, surprise, not everybody knows what they want to be when they’re 15.

When I was 22, I decided I wanted to become a “Konditor” — a pastry chef — a job you can only do with an apprenticeship.

I started late into the application game, so most bakeries had already hired their apprentices for the year. I looked towards supermarket bakeries then — not ideal, but a start.

Things already started out bad, when I had my phone interview and the store manager outright laughed at me for being “old.” But I was desperate to not waste another year, so I took the job.

At first the other workers seemed friendly enough, but on the second day — on which the store manager left on a month-long vacation — everything went to s***.

Let me just list a few of the things that happened:

– My coworkers smoked in the kitchen, including my “teacher” and the bakery manager

– My “teacher” constantly complained that she shouldn’t have to teach me and would switch to talking in Turkish when she’d decided I had asked too many questions.

– I was the only Austrian person there, so my coworkers constantly had conversations in languages I didn’t understand. Judging from the looks they gave me and the way they laughed, I’m guessing some of those conversations were about me.

– They were also the biggest bunch of racists, constantly making fun of Asian shoppers and going as far to say that all Asians should be killed.

– When fruit on cakes started growing mold, my “teacher” would just pick them off, put on fresh fruit, print out a new expiration date, and put it back on the shelves. And if cakes expired, she would make Punschkrapfen out of them — basically you just crumble the cakes, add alcohol, and then glaze.

– I was only allowed to go home after my “teacher,” and after I had cleaned up the entire bakery section by myself. The only problem was that I sometimes only knew that I was allowed to start cleaning, when I saw my “teacher” shopping in the store, out of her uniform. Since she liked randomly disappearing during the day, I never knew if she was taking another break or if she had gone home.

– The dishwasher was broken, even after someone came to fix it. I told the bakery manager how everything in the dishwasher was still dirty, and she told me in the most condescending tone, “Of course everything is still dirty. You need hands to scrub those pans clean; do you think a dishwasher has hands?”

– My “teacher” always complained how I was too lazy for cleaning and that the store had never been this filthy before… which is pretty interesting, because the first time I cleaned, I found a box of opened donuts that had expired a month before I had even started the job, below one of the tables. And a half-empty nail polish bottle, among other things.

– The bakery department was constantly in the red, so my “teacher” decided the best way to fix this was to just not write down all the ingredients she took from other departments, and if it got out, to just blame it on me.

When the store manager came back, he talked to my “teacher” and the bakery manager about my performance, and when he came to talk to me, I was immediately let go. He said I clearly wasn’t cut out for the job, being all antisocial and never joining any conversations — which is quite hard, if you don’t know the language, but okay — always complaining about cleaning — I didn’t — and not wanting to bake. In my month there, I was allowed to actually bake maybe two or three times in total; I would have loved to get to bake.

I was, of course, rather upset about the whole thing, but things were looking up, because another branch of the same store said they’d consider taking me. So, with my hopes up, I went to the other store for an interview… only to be told that while they’d love to take me, they couldn’t, because the person who was in charge of apprenticeship applications for all the stores had refused. In the same conversation, I also found out said person was the boyfriend of my former bakery manager.

But the story has a happy ending… kind of.

I sadly gave up on being a pastry chef, but one day when I was complaining to friends about the whole thing, another friend of theirs was present, who happened to be a health and safety inspector. Now, I do not know if it was his doing, but a short time later, I heard that everybody in the bakery section of that branch had been fired. Serves them right.