One of the widely-known rules of customer service is that the customer is always right. But if you've ever actually worked customer service, you'll know that sometimes the customer is very, very wrong, but they don't want to hear it.
Here, workers share the time they got fired for setting a customer straight.
(Comments have been edited for clarity.)
Getting Fired Even Though You Give Them What They Ask For
“I worked at a burger restaurant and on a busy night, this one table ordered mashed potatoes. The server tells them that mashed potatoes aren’t on the menu but they have baked potatoes. They keep on insisting that they want mashed potatoes but eventually they seem to agree that a baked potato is fine. So when the order comes out, so does the baked potato that they ordered. He puts it down on the table and the customers go, ‘We wanted mashed potatoes!’ The server has had enough at this point and goes, ‘Mashed?! You want them mashed?!?’ He raises his fist and smashes it down on the baked potato, giving the customer exactly what they asked for, mashed potatoes. The management, however, did not find this dedication to the customer very professional and let him go.”
Customers That Don’t Read The Fine Print
“I worked in the ticket booths at Disneyland. If you’re an annual pass holder, and you’re on the monthly contract, Disney takes automatic payments from your credit card. If your card expires or otherwise has to be changed, and you don’t call to put a new one on file, the auto-payments stop, and your pass freezes. No big deal; Disney doesn’t hit you with fees or penalties. You simply call or come to the booth, we handle it right then and there, and in you go.
One day, I get a middle-aged couple whose passes froze. The man was upset and ready to talk about it. A common question from guests is, ‘Don’t you send out late notices?’ No, Disney doesn’t because they’re not practical. And again, there are no penalties anyway. Just come see us and we’ll straighten you out. The man says to me in a disgusted tone, ‘You don’t send notices when a pass freezes? How does that work?’
I reply, ‘Well, you receive your credit card statement, you see that a recurring charge is not present on it, and you can expect the service related to the recurring charge to be interrupted and that it must be related to your card having been replaced recently.’
The wife smiled, the man’s face reddened, and he leaned in and barked, ‘Get your supervisor. I want to talk to somebody smart.’ To my shame, I said, ‘Of course. Would you like someone smart enough to stay aware of their credit card use, or merely smart enough to read the contracts they sign?’
My booth lead happened to come over as soon as she heard ‘supervisor,’ so she was standing behind me when I said everything. It isn’t how I wanted to go out (I was five days away from leaving for a new job), but I looked at it as a vicariously cathartic mic drop goodbye to my fellow cast members. For them, it was a thrill.”
Fired For Standing Up For Yourself
“My first job when I was 12 was working for a flower shop in town. They used to hire a kid to wear a clown costume and wear a sign that said ‘Roses 9.99/dozen’. All the job entailed was walking back and forth along a 20-foot strip of the sidewalk and waving at cars. I got paid 30 bucks per 2-hour shift, in cash every day. It was awesome. Didn’t work too hard and was allowed to listen to music while I worked. Some people were really nice and occasionally would stop and ask if they could buy me a soda or something from the convenience store beside the flower shop because it was so hot. Other people were rude and would throw stuff at me from their car.
Anyway, one normal Saturday morning about 15 minutes before my shift was over, my dad pulls in to the parking lot to wait for me to finish up. A couple minutes later, some kid about my own age, maybe a little older, walking down the sidewalk, spits in my face as he’s walking past. Well, that completely infuriated me. Like, throw stuff at me, whatever – but spitting in my face was just too gross and I’d had enough. This clown snapped. I ripped off my sandwich board and kicked the guy’s legs out from under him. Jumped into my best MMA mount and start raining fists and elbows as if I’m going for the clown college bantamweight championship. He’s yelling and bleeding and I just keep hammering into him and screaming that he messed with the wrong clown. My dad runs up and pulls me off of him and carries me into the florists. I was promptly fired. My dad took me for ice cream because he said nobody deserves to be treated like that, and I did what he would have done and it was the funniest thing he’s ever seen.”
Being Forced To Defend Yourself
“I was working at Blockbuster (yes I’m old) when I was 17 and in high school. A middle-aged guy came in and instead of using the drop slot to return his movie, he casually tossed it across the counter and it hit a register hard enough to pop the case open. The people working the registers, myself included, kept an eye on him because our store was a hot spot for kids to come in without adult supervision and mess things up. He chose a few movies, and walked up to the front of my line and waited for me to help him.
I got his information up on screen and let him know we couldn’t rent the films he wanted unless he paid his late fee of $6. He flew off the handle, reached over the counter and grabbed my shirt, threatening to have me fired. I punched him in the face trying to protect myself and chased him out into the parking lot. When I came back in, my manager took me into the back room, let me clean myself up and told me they had a zero-tolerance policy for altercations in the store and fired me. On my way out, there were customers that actually shook my hand and told me they would’ve done the same thing. That job was terrible anyway, so I was glad to be gone from there.”
Refusing To Risk Your Health For The Job
“I worked for a small chain of stores selling camping supplies and weapons. Think Bass Pro Shops or Cabela’s, but not nearly as successful. And I had the biggest lunatic for a store manager.
A little context, about 3 months before I got fired, corporate uncovered a massive item insurance fraud happening in our store, which was started by our store manager. Instead of taking the fall for this, he fired 50 store employees a weekend before Black Friday. This was half our staff and meant everyone else spent a solid 3 weeks of 60-70+ hours a week. This was roughly the time I got guardianship of my 17-year-old brother and was living in a terrible apartment with my 5-year-old daughter and then boyfriend (now fiance).
I was in a major car accident a few days before with my brother and daughter, where I walked away with a concussion. My daughter had a broken leg, and my brother had spinal swelling that left him paralyzed for about two months afterward. I was told to come to work or lose my job. I needed the money.
Because of the concussion, I had a limit on how much I could lift. But I had some lady ask me to help her lift a heavy weapons case onto a flat cart. Normally I could have, but there was no chance I was risking my life and health for that job. The lady didn’t like being told no, and soon got pretty verbally violent. A few salesmen stood up for me and I walked away.
About two hours after, I got called into the back office and was fired for what they said was me assaulting a customer. I decided not to fight it, I’ll just go file unemployment. But wow, did that store manager mess up. As I was walking out, I caught the tail end of him calling me a liar.
Ended up taking him to court, and there were too many witnesses to his endless harassment. I got fired but got a seven-figure settlement out of it within a year, paid out for the next 10. That settlement paid for my brother’s college, my daughter has a trust fund, and I am currently starting a small business. Last I heard, he got fired not too long after I was.”
Petty Revenge Can Be Worth It
“My mother was working at an upscale lounge in Arlington, Virginia, just out of college. It was a fancy place and attracted all the fancy DC business people. It was common for large groups of men to come in and get absolutely wasted.
One night, a guy decided, after a few drinks, that it would be hilarious to untie the wrap skirt that was part of my mother’s uniform. Bad idea. My mother was furious and dumped an entire tray of martinis on the guy’s head.
She was promptly fired, but still thinks it was worth it.”
Calling Customers To Continue Arguments
“I used to work with this guy who had just passed his training for our call center. A few days in, he answers the phone and is talking to a customer and they get into an argument. The argument goes on for nearly an hour and then the customer hung up. The new guy called him back to continue the argument.
This guy was in his late 50s and lost his job very quickly after.”
Trying To Put Safety First
“I used to cut hair. I was cutting a lady’s hair when the child of one of the ladies waiting started running around the shop. I told the child several times to go sit with her mother and asked her mother to please keep her child seated next to her. Well, in the middle of cutting around my current client’s ear, the child ran into my work area, ran into me, and almost caused me to cut my client.
I looked at the child and firmly said, ‘You need to go sit down with your mother now.’ Well her mom didn’t like that and came running back to me and yelled, ‘Don’t tell my child what to do, I’m her parent.’ I responded with, ‘Then act like it.’ She glared at me, grabbed her child, and stormed out. Everyone in the shop was relieved the child had left. A few days later the owner came and tried to fire me for it, but luckily there were enough other stylists and clients that came to my defense about the danger of the situation and I only got a write-up.”
When The Customer Doesn’t Accept The Truth
“I was working chat tech support for a web host. Customer chatted in complaining of slowness, claiming our servers were having issues. I do all the standard steps and we determine that his ISP is having issues. He doesn’t believe me and becomes obstinate. So I end the chat by saying, ‘You’re wrong!’ About 10 minutes later I get a new chat. I see the account name and the question. It was the same guy with the same question. Without letting him say anything, I write, ‘You’re still wrong’ and close the chat. If I wasn’t one of the better techs I know I would have been fired.”
Fired For Inappropriate Laughter
“Years ago I had kind of an interesting job working for a big box electronics retailer that you’re probably familiar with. The uniforms are blue, if that’s enough of a hint.
My position was to open new stores, so I’d fly around the country spending around three months with a team of three other people handling things like logistics, accounting, giving a big stupid check to the local charities to get some good press, etc. The three others did “operations” (money stuff), logistics (making sure we were stocked for day one), and then merchandising (layout and tagging etc). I was the ‘sales’ guy, which meant I did the promotional work and also handled all of the interviews for staff, including new management.
My supervisor was a big regional manager in charge of the entire west coast so I think he was even given the title of vice president, and he spent his days golfing and didn’t care what I did as long as the numbers were good.
He was the one who eventually fired me, but it wasn’t because of a customer. I opened a store in Washington State and he had a cousin or nephew or some connection there who he wanted to make a manager. Before the stores opened I had to do SO many interviews, literally hundreds and sometimes upwards of 20 or 30 a day. His interview was my final one on a Friday and I was already exhausted and kind of in a weird mood because most of the people that day had been awful.
Anyway, the regional guy himself came to sit in on the interview, which by policy I always did with one of the other members of the four-person crew. I think it was me, him, and the operations manager. As soon as the guy walked in I knew it was going to be trouble; he was in a full on baseball hat with a flat brim, and was wearing these saggy Jynco jeans – this was a while ago when those were still a thing – and that’s just not how you dress for an interview. One of the standard questions I always asked for high level roles was basically, ‘Tell me about a time that you were in a leadership role and something went very wrong. How did you handle it?’
This guy started to tell an amazing story; I guess he had trained to be a firefighter and one of the things they had to do was run a sort of shadow engine that followed an experienced crew to an actual emergency and had to learn and support them. Apparently the lead engine had some problem and couldn’t make it to the scene, so he had to lead other trainees to a house that was on fire and deal with it independently. At this point I’m like, ‘Wow, maybe I misjudged this guy… this is kind of neat.’ So I asked him what he did.
He said, ‘I didn’t know what to do so I let the house burn down.’
I died. I don’t know if it was just how funny it was, or the fact I was already in a weird mood, or what. But I have never before or since laughed as hard as I did in that moment. I was HOWLING with laughter and it was so loud and ridiculous that there’s no way anyone could even hear each other over it. I think it took me 30 minutes or more to recover; I was still giggling uncontrollably even though the resulting red-faced furious meeting with the regional manager who was firing me. He just kept getting madder and madder and I looked at his stupid face and thought about his stupid relative and couldn’t keep it together. After I got all my stuff I sat in my car for a while and still kept laughing.
No regrets. Never worked in retail again. My job was basically to brainwash a bunch of teenagers into selling extended warranties; I remember telling employees things like, ‘You’re not selling a camera, you’re giving people a way to remember their family.’ Forget that. Never again.
I’m laughing again now just thinking about it.”
Losing Patience With A Needy Customer
“Working at Burger King many years ago. I was working the drive-thru register, which was close enough to the front registers that I could hear conversations. One of my co-workers was taking an order from a lady who kept asking how much her total was, and then canceling her food and changing her mind. I guess she was trying to keep the total under a certain dollar amount?
Well at the Burger King I worked at, any canceled food on an order needed a manager’s password (thanks to one jerk who had stolen money by putting in someone’s order, telling them the total, and then canceling out the order and pocketing the money). So the manager had come by 3 or 4 times at that point. This was during dinner time, so there was a line of customers out the door waiting to order.
Finally, my co-worker pulled out a pad of paper and a calculator. He started writing this woman’s order down and totaling it out by hand. The woman asked him why he was doing that, and he told her, ‘When you make up your mind about what you want, then I’ll put it in the register.’
This upset the lady, so she grabbed the notebook my co-worker was using and tried to hit him with it. He snatched it back from her and told her to get out. My manager was only going to write him up for it (since the manager agreed that the lady absolutely deserved it, but my manager had to follow company policy). Unfortunately, my co-worker already had two write-ups on file so she had to fire him.”
Fired For Defending The Store’s Honor
“Worked at a small Blockbuster location when I was a teenager. We had a guy my manager called ‘The Cougher’. This dude would come in, grab a bunch of DVDs, shove them under his coat, then leave. When he passed through the detectors, of course, the alarm would go off, and this jerk would start coughing his lungs out as if the sound of his hacking would drown out the alarms. Then my manager would shout, ‘SIR? SIR! STOP!’ and The Cougher would take off running. He did this 4-5 times over the course of a year, and somehow we never recognized him when he came in. Now the thing is, we were all explicitly trained not to physically try to stop thieves. We couldn’t grab them, we couldn’t even stand in the doorway to stop them leaving. I guess they’d have grounds to sue Blockbuster or something if we did.
This was my first real job, and after I was promoted to full time, I got really serious about it for some reason. I was only 19, and when someone stole from us, I took it kind of personally. A year after he first shows up, I’m about to move to another state. Have my 2 weeks notice in, and I’m packing my stuff up. Cue The Cougher. He does the same thing he’s done for the last year, grabs 5-6 DVDs and starts coughing as he goes through the detectors. Having a week left with that job, I chased him and dove into his legs in the parking lot. He wrestled with me while I spit a stream of some of the most heinous cursing I’ve ever done. I mean I laid into this dude, saying all kinds of horrible things. After about a minute of wrestling with the guy and my manager screaming at me from the door, he threw me off and ran. My manager ran after him for a block, I guess to see if he would get in a car or something, then came back and fired me on the spot. I left the state the next week, and to this day I don’t know if he sued or not. I never got a call or a letter about it.
I still hate that idiot. Wish I’d gotten a good punch in.”
When Impatient Customers Get Sassy
“I got scolded and written up at a chain hardware store for a customer interaction.
Okay, so imagine we’re at the paint desk. A young couple meets me and asks for a neutral blue color in our most popular paint, eggshell finish. No problem there, I tell them to come back in a little bit. I make it and toss it in the shaker.
Another guy loudly walks up to the other end of the desk and wants two gallons of our paint in some ridiculous beige color in a semigloss finish because his trailer isn’t flossy enough. Whatever. I make it and put it in the shaker. All the while he’s talking to his wife and whoever else was with him.
Remember the blue paint for the young couple? It’s done. So I stick it on the desk (their color card on top of it for identification) near where they were standing. Clearly away from this second guy. Should be fine, right? That’s what I figured. So I go back to whatever I was doing.
Next thing I hear is the obnoxious guy nearly screaming, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa! What are you doing?!’ I glare at him because he’s making a scene and I ask him, still politely, what he’s yelling about.
He says, ever so loudly, ‘This your first day? Get me someone who knows what they’re doing.’
Again, I ask what the problem is since his paint isn’t ready yet. He says to me, ‘You can’t do anything right.’
I snapped and replied matching his tone and volume as people are starting to stare. ‘Oh, this isn’t the color you wanted?’ No. ‘This isn’t the finish you wanted?’ Does this look like semi-gloss to you?! ‘Is it even the type of paint you wanted?’ Nope!
‘THEN I GUESS THIS ISN’T FOR YOU, IS IT?’ and I ripped the paint away from him and gave it to the couple who were patiently waiting behind this lunatic. I told him, ‘Yours will be done in a minute.’
And he, of course, cried to the managers, who of course sided with him and gave him his paint for free and then tried to fire me over something they had zero witnesses to.”
Getting Payback
“I worked as a beach boy for a large beach company. Basically, this woman and her extremely loud, rude, and rich family come out to the beach for a set of chairs. I worked at an upscale hotel so it wasn’t uncommon to see really wealthy people. All she kept talking about was how slow I was moving the 30-pound chairs through the sand for her family of 7. Keep in mind, at this point it’s like 2 PM, and I was 7 hours in on a 12-12.5 hour workday. Days on the beach are rough, and sensing no tip was coming I was not really the most motivated to finish the job for these ungrateful people.
Finally I set them up and got them 14 towels. Normally I offer a waiter because beach boys can’t take food orders, but this time I offered to be their waiter. So there’s like 5 beach boys and 2 beach waiters, and we all wear the same thing, except beach boys set up guests with chairs and waiters take food orders, the roles never change under any circumstances. So I ran into the waiter’s hut while they were both gone, snagged a spare pad and grabbed a few menus. For each one of their orders, I told them there would be an extended wait on basically their entire order. For example, ‘Can I have the filet mignon?’ ‘Excellent choice, Sir, except our kitchen is under renovation so all the steaks are being made on the 3rd-floor restaurant. So expect a 45 minute to 1-hour long wait.’ So I essentially got a bunch of food orders that would never reach the kitchen.
I constantly went back apologizing and offering new choices that might be faster, and obviously, the food would never come. Eventually, my plot was foiled by a waiter who eventually came around to them asking if they’d like to order something at around 4:30 PM, and this is when I heard, and I quote, “THAT LITTLE REDHEADED TWERP NEVER TOOK OUR ORDER?” You can imagine how my meeting with the directors of the company went.”
When Threatening The Customer Works
“I would’ve been fired if my boss found out. I’ve been working the closing shift at a convenience store for about 6 months while I go to school and it’s great.
I’m the only person there, and since most customers are either regulars or inebriated, I can kick people out for whatever reason.
A kid had been stealing from the store for a while. He brings in his bike, walks around, asks for price checks, puts things back, changes his mind, and just generally is doing way too much trying to shoplift. For the most part, I didn’t care to confront him, but he just kept giving me more work to do so I quickly developed a visceral hatred for this little jerk. Eventually, I picked up little bits of information about his life. Like his name. Where he went to high school. Where he worked.
He comes in and tells me it’s his birthday and starts on his regular nonsense. I let him go through all of his speech, and he comes to pay for his one moon pie after being in the store stealing for 10 minutes. He starts trying to talk to me and straight-faced as possible I interrupt him and recite his name, where he works, and where he goes to school. I tell him he’s been bugging me for way too long and we have cameras. Stop treating me like an idiot. I tell him I’ll get him fired from both of his jobs, and send the officer I know to his school.
Little twerp was scared beyond belief. So I said happy birthday and I haven’t seen him since.”