It is Christmas, and I am restocking some items in our seasonal aisle. A little boy, maybe around five or so, has seen one of the chocolate Advent calendars — twenty-four little Cadbury chocolates behind little doors counting down to Christmas Day. I turn away to stock something, and then I turn back to see one of the display calendars on the floor and the boy furiously chewing something in his mouth.

Me: “Excuse me, did you just take a chocolate from one of those Advent calendars?”

The boy simply gives me the middle finger and laughs with his mouth wide open. He has chocolate in there, all right.

Me: “Where are your parents?”

Boy: “F*** you!”

Me: “Right, that’s it.”

I shout out to the adults in the aisle, asking if anyone is his parent or guardian. As I am doing so, the boy starts pulling down more merchandise.

Me: “Stop that! I am calling security!”

Suddenly, an adult customer appears, and she is scowling at me.

Customer: “Don’t shout at my son!”

Me: “Then your son shouldn’t be swearing at staff and destroying merchandise.”

Customer: “He’s a child! He’s just venting energy!”

Me: “He can vent it outside where he isn’t damaging stock.”

Son: “But I want my toys!”

Customer: *To her son* “Soon, poppet. Mummy just needs to speak to the manager.”

I happily call over the manager, who arrives just in time to see this little jerk giving me the finger yet again.

Manager: “Ma’am, please control your child, or we will need to escort both of you out.”

Customer: “You can’t do that! He’s just being a little boy!”

Son: “Mum! I want my toys! Santa only brings me one toy, and I want more!”

Me: “Santa isn’t real!”

Everyone stops for a second. Maybe the adults are silenced by my lack of decorum, but the boy has stopped because his little worldview just took a hit.

Son: “You’re a liar!”

Me: “Santa is a lie parents tell their kids to force them to be good, not that it’s working on you.”

My manager gives me the unspoken gesture to walk away and calm down. I do so, but slowly, so I can still hear the customer.

Customer: “What are you going to do about her?! She’s causing my son distress!”

Manager: “Ma’am, let’s face it. If Santa was real, would your son be anywhere near his ‘nice’ list?”

Many years ago, as a teenager, I worked at a chain Mexican place. Like most fast food places, there are several trash cans conveniently placed with counters attached, so people can clean up their own messes.

There are always those special folks, though, who leave their trash on the table for the employees to clean up. Usually, it’s just trash, but there is this group of four young guys who always aim to outdo themselves. They don’t just eat and leave the trash, like normal jerks. They pour queso on the seats and smear it across the table, crunch chips onto the floor and into the spaces behind the seats, smear beans into the salt shakers, and empty sugar packets all over the place. Their plates and wrappers are stacked in heaps.

After I have just spent a while cleaning up this mess, the manager takes a customer call.

Caller: “Yeah, I left my Oakley sunglasses on the table.”

Manager: “I’ll check. What table was it?”

Caller: “It was the table at the back, left of the checkouts.”

Manager: “Oh, that table was trashed. We had to close that off until we had time to clean it.”

Silence. The caller doesn’t want to admit they’re one of the turds who trashed the table. My manager calls out to me all the same, making sure the caller can hear.

Manager: “Hey, [My Name], did you find a pair of sunglasses on [table]?”

I turn and face the phone and speak loudly so that the caller can hear me.

Me: “Oh, the one that we had to deep-clean? Yeah, we just threw everything in the trash. I sure hope I didn’t accidentally throw them away with all that trash!”

My manager relayed this information to the caller. An hour later, this person was back, and I definitely recognized them as one of the jerks who had trashed the table. The same information was relayed to him, and he stormed out, burned by the Karma.

On a side note, the pleasant homeless guy who came in the early morning every day for a free breakfast suddenly had a very stylish pair of sunglasses this summer… I wonder how that happened?

A woman comes in with THAT stereotypical haircut. I have to hold back laughter when she also says:

Customer: “I want to speak to the manager!”

I fetch her, and this woman slams a pregnancy test onto the counter. A USED pregnancy test.

Customer: “You sold this to my daughter! My sixteen-year-old daughter!”

An agonizing amount of silence follows.

Manager: “Okay, ma’am. Is there a question, or a request?”

Customer: “Well… what do you have to say for yourself?!”

Manager: *Looking at the result of the pregnancy test* “First, I want to say congratulations! Secondly, I want to say don’t put objects that have come into contact with urine onto our work counters.”

Customer: “That’s not the f****** point! You shouldn’t be selling these things to minors! They’ll think they can go out and do whatever they want and then they can come here to fix the consequences of their actions!”

Manager: “So… your daughter doesn’t deserve to know if she’s pregnant or not?”

Customer: “My daughter wouldn’t have got herself pregnant in the first place if she knew she could just come here and pee on a stick!”

Manager: “Ma’am, I am sorry if I am misunderstanding, but what exactly are you asking of me here?”

Customer: “Don’t sell these things to my daughter! She’s pregnant now because of you!”

Manager: “Ma’am, did no one tell you? It’s something else entirely that made her pregnant; I can explain if you l—”

Customer: “F*** you! F*** all of you!”

She screams and storms out.

Manager: *To me, in a sing-song voice* “Looks like Mommy is gonna put a restraining order on Grandmaaaaa!”

We had a contract to supply three techs plus a supervisor onsite at the headquarters of a large international corporation. I was one of the techs. It wasn’t a bad gig, except for that one attorney who insisted we fix an HP LaserJet (this was before personal laser printers; pretty sure it was an LJ III) that had been dropped and had bent everything. I turned him over to the supervisor, and that’s pretty much that story, except for the part that, no, we didn’t fix that printer.

I should also mention that this supervisor was hired for this position, and as part of the deal to hire him, he was being given formal CNE training. Ain’t gonna lie: this rubbed us three techs, who were doing the training on our own, pretty bad, but he really wasn’t a bad guy. It did take us a bit to warm up to him, and the story I’m about to tell helped.

This story involves a user who needed a new mouse about every five or six weeks. It would just stop working, and of course, she had no idea what was happening to it. This was back in the mid-1990s, folks, and mice (mice with a ball and other moving parts and stuff) weren’t as cheap as they are now.

One day, I was helping a user near her, and every so often, I’d hear a bang or a thud or a smash coming from Mouse Lady’s desk. This was an open-floor plan department, and I saw what was happening. Every so often, she’d pick up the mouse and pound it on her pad. The look on my face must have said something.

Person I’m Helping: “She does that all day.”

I went back to our little corner of HQ and told the guys about it.

Supervisor: “Let us know the next time she needs a new mouse. I’ll take care of it.”

And he did. He took her a new mouse one day and returned with a disassembled mouse, saying something like, “We shouldn’t be hearing from her for a while.” Of course, we asked what he had done, and he showed us.

He pointed at the logic board for the mouse and pointed at some random component, grinning.

Supervisor: “See the value on that impact capacitor? You only see something that high on something that has had a couple of bricks dropped on it.”

I’ve been dying to try that on someone since, but alas. No one else is in the habit of slamming their mouse on their desk anymore.

CONTENT WARNING: Child Abuse

Several years ago, I visited Germany with some friends to see a band on tour. I’m American, so that involved a lengthy transcontinental flight over the ocean. This happened on my flight home.

It was the dead of night, and we were somewhere over the middle of the ocean. We flew into some sort of weather or pressure pocket, and I could feel my ears go all funny for a couple of moments.

A little girl, maybe four or five, was half asleep a few rows up, but this apparently startled her awake, and she started crying. And you can’t really blame her. We’d been on that plane for quite some time, she had probably got a confused sleep schedule, it was an unfamiliar environment, and now something startling had happened.

Instead of comforting her, which would likely have solved the problem and left me with no story to tell, the mother took a different approach.

Mother: *Sharply* “Girl! Stop crying. You’re waking people up.”

The little girl continued crying. And again, can you really blame her? She was reasonably upset, and now it seemed as if her mother was yelling at her.

Mother: *Sharply. “If you can’t be quiet, I’m going to put you outside the plane until you can calm down.”

Me: *Mouthing to my best friend* “What the effing eff?”

Now, I’m pretty sure all of us, when we were the little girl’s age, had some understanding of the concept that planes fly very high up, and if you go outside the plane, you will fall. That, of course, terrified the little girl more.

Little Girl: *Sobbing* “Mommy, please don’t. Please don’t send me outside. Please don’t, Mommy, please, please, please.”

Mother: “Be quiet, or you’re going outside.”

At this point, a middle-aged woman two rows up had had enough — not with the child but with the mother.

Woman #1: “Mein Gott im Himmel. You’re frightening her! Stop screaming and comfort her.”

Mother: “Don’t tell me how to raise my child.”

Woman #1: “Raise? This is not how you raise a child. This is how you ruin a child.”

Another woman motioned to the mother. She spoke with a heavy German accent, but her English was good.

Woman #2: “Here, she can sit with me. I will calm her.”

Mother: “She wouldn’t be able to understand you. I am perfectly capable of raising my daughter.”

At that point, the flight attendant arrived. She had a look on her face that I’ve not seen since my days in Catholic school when one of the nuns was about to mete out serious punishment. The look alone could wither most problems, but the mother was of a special breed.

Flight Attendant: “Please attend to your child. Passengers are trying to sleep.”

Mother: “I told her to stop crying. I can’t do anything if she refuses to listen. You’re clearly not parents, or you would know that.”

Some cheeky young man piped up.

Young Man: “You’re clearly not, either, or you’d be parenting right now.”

The flight attendant shot him a look. Then, she returned her attention to the mother.

Flight Attendant: “Your daughter is clearly distressed. We cannot land should she require medical attention. You need to attend to her.”

Mother: “She will stop crying when she stops crying.”

The flight attendant began to head to the front of the plane — maybe to speak to the pilot or something? I don’t know, honestly.

The mother, dozens of sets of eyes glaring at her, turned to the little girl and hissed.

Mother: “Shut up, girl! You’re going to get in trouble. The pilot is going to kick you off the plane, and then you’ll never get home!”

Brilliant thing to say to a frightened child. A man behind me snapped.

Man: “Shut your mouth, lady. The kid’s only crying because you’re a psycho. If you’d sit down and shut up, the kid would probably calm down in no time.”

Mother: “Don’t you take that tone with me!”

Man: “I’ll take any tone I like — especially with a psycho, child-abusing b****.”

The mother got up out of her seat and got in the man’s face. She was standing right beside me, screaming at him. It was terrifying, and I don’t know how he kept calm.

Then, she slapped him. Big mistake. BIG MISTAKE.

The flight attendant, returning from the front, saw this.

Flight Attendant: “I recommend you sit down and remain seated and quiet for the rest of the flight. Authorities will escort you off the plane when we land.”

The mother sputtered and attempted to protest. The flight attendant would have none of it.

Flight Attendant: “You committed an assault, and things are now out of my hands. Any further issues will likely compound your charges.”

The mother got up, stomped down the aisle to the bathroom, and shut herself in.

Immediately, the German-speaking woman sat in her seat and started comforting the little girl. She soon calmed and ceased crying.

The mother stayed in the bathroom for the rest of the flight, until it was time to land and she was ordered out. True to the attendant’s words, we were told to remain seated while she was escorted off the plane. The man who she’d slapped followed shortly after.

I have no idea what transpired after that, as I had to catch a connecting flight to my hometown airport. But hopefully, she faced some serious charges and that poor kid got someone better to care for her.

I’m planning on going back to Germany for the band’s next tour. Hopefully, this flight will be a lot more peaceful.