Turning Jesus Into A Complaint

(I work as a cake decorator in a supermarket bakery. We receive pre-made frozen cakes to put out. These are usually more expensive, but arguably more decadent… covered in caramel and cookie crumbles, etc. When an item hits its sell-by date we mark it down to half price. A woman comes up to me carrying a large, expensive, pre-made carrot cake that’s been marked down. It’s covered in chopped nuts, mounds of cream-cheese icing, and tons of little icing carrot decorations. Getting one of these on markdown is a very good deal, both in terms of quality, and the fact that they’re big enough to feed 20 people or more.)

Customer: “I need something written on top of this. It’s for a church. I need you to write, ‘Celebrate Jesus, He is Risen, He is the Way’ on top.”

Me: “Okay! I’ll do what I can. We don’t typically write on these cakes because there is so little space with all the decorations.”

Customer: *looking affronted, even though this is policy* “Well, you can just move them around, can’t you?”

(Normally, I would say no since it’s not worth my time as an employee to do something so fiddly when I have so much other work to be done, which again is company policy unless a customer really presses it. But this happens to be the last half hour of my shift, and I’m already done cleaning and just helping the other staff assist customers. And hey, I actually DO enjoy my job and a challenge.)

Me: “If you don’t mind waiting, then yes, I will do what I can for you.”

(I break out my tools and some wax paper and begin to carefully lift off the little icing carrots all over the top, which she very sharply informs me she wants in a separate little plastic container for herself. I scrape and smooth off the little bits of coloured icing that remain, rearrange the large swirls of icing, carefully push back the border of chopped nuts, and smooth it all down so it looks freshly iced. Through it all she stares me down, and at one point asks if her watching me makes me nervous, and looks disappointed when I say no.)

Customer: “I suppose you need me to spell ‘Jesus’ for you?”

Me: “I think I can handle that one, but thank you, ma’am.”

(Again, she looks disappointed, and watches almost angrily as I carefully write on the cake. Her attitude perplexes me more than anything else, but I can tell she’s trying to make me screw up or catch me doing so in order to get a bigger discount, since customers are rarely content with what they’ve got.)

Customer: “Well… I guess this will do.”

(She snatches the cake when I put the top back on, and storms off with her little container of icing carrots, not so much as a thank you. My coworker comes over and comments how impressed she is that I kept my cool. I go upstairs to finish up some paperwork for the next week’s sales before I leave, and a few minutes later, my coworker sticks her head into the room.)

Coworker: “That woman is back! She says you misspelled Jesus and she wants a discount!”

(I have no idea what expression I made, but my coworker immediately started laughing and said she’s just joking and ran off. I later found out she wasn’t kidding, but thought I looked so shocked and angry she decided to deal with it herself and went to the store manager instead. I had not, as it turned out, misspelled Jesus, and the woman’s scheme for a greater discount probably would have worked had she not accounted for everyone being able to see and read that for themselves when she showed the cake off to management. That, or maybe I should have been the one to spell it out for her.)