The Best Time To Play The Grandma Card

I want to earn my own money, so during summer vacations in high school, I work at a small coffee shop which also sells tokens for all kinds of attractions, like trampoline jumping, mini-golf, etc., in the area.

In my final year there, another young man joins our shop. He is barely fourteen years old, but being the manager’s best friend’s son grants him his permission — or so he thinks — to act like the manager himself at times.

Although he helps us out in one tight spot or another with a lot of customers, most of the time he is annoying, loud, and all in all more of a hindrance than a help.

Around this time, news around the world reports certain groups being involved in terrorist attacks, so the boy thinks it’s HILARIOUS to greet people with certain hand gestures, greetings from different languages, and jokes heard from the news or read on the Internet.

It’s pretty tasteless. Some parents with their (rather young) children complain about him, but they are always laughed off by the manager.

Manager: “Oh, boys his age, you know?”

Having had enough, I tell him to stop multiple times, which only leads him to sulk somewhere for a few minutes and start again when none of us can hear him.

The manager’s response?

Manager: “Figure it out between the two of you! I can’t just keep holding your hand, you know!”

So, I look up the boy’s last name in the local phonebook, call the first person I find… and get his grandmother on the line.

After I describe his behaviour, she goes quiet on the other end of the line, but she ends the call with:

Grandmother: “Thank you. You can be sure that I’ll have a word with him.”

The next week, the boy is in a foul mood, a mix between angry and sad, but rather quiet without any more of his jokes. The manager, though, takes me to the side.

Manager: “Did you seriously call his relatives? How could you?! Don’t you know that he has a hard time with his parents and their current situation?”

Me: “You told me to figure it out between the two of us, so I did just that!”

I got a pretty nice tan from all that work under the summer sun, but that was about the only nice thing I took with me from that job.