You Should Be Seated Before You Try To Insert Your Foot Into Your Mouth

(I am helping set up a new store that has opened even though we haven’t got everything set up. We sell craft and sewing items. I have been given baskets full of loose embroidery threads; there are literally thousands in the baskets to go onto a few hundred individually numbered hooks that go from above my head to ankle level. As someone who has had back problems I know that constant bending will bring on pain so I grab a chair and dump a pile of threads into my lap. I put up the lower level one while sorting the higher level ones into a basket. A customer walks up the side aisle and sees me seated in the chair.)

Customer: *sarcastically* “Oh, nice and comfortable are we? You young ones are so lazy. Just sitting there in a chair like tha—” *turns corner as I look up showing that I am in fact middle-aged and surrounded by so much stock* “Oh. Perhaps I should have waited before I put my foot in my mouth. I’m so sorry.”

(It always gets me that people think retail workers have no right to sit down. We are expected to be on our feet for 8-10 hours a day.)