The customer is always right, right? Well, maybe not in these instances.
She Got What She Wanted
“I run a business teaching creative writing classes for kids. I just made a HUGE move to grow my business – I got a new, much bigger classroom in a great location. I’m super happy, but it was a lot of work. I wanted to celebrate with my students, so I decided to throw a reception for them. I made sure every student had a piece on display on my gallery wall, and I invited every kid and their families. We had a good turnout and I was feeling great. It was a success!
Then that night I got an email from a mom of two sisters that attend my classes. She said she was sorry to have missed the reception, and that she was disappointed because she didn’t realize it was scheduled. She then said her girls were excited about signing up for classes next year. I responded that I was sorry that she missed the emails and paper invitations I sent home, but that we missed the girls at the party and that everyone loved their work that was on display.
That’s where it devolved. She started sending long, ranting emails about how I violated her children by showing their work to strangers and that she knew I had personally excluded them. Legal threats ensued. I remained calm and responded each time with an apology and an acknowledgment that I could have communicated better. She kept writing though, each email longer and weirder and more accusatory than the last. I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone.
Finally, I just responded to the craziest of the emails inviting the girls to a mini reception, just me and them, and at the end, I said, ‘It’ll be fun! I have cookies!’ She responded with, ‘Great! What day and time?’ So weird. And, I guess soon I will have to hang out with these kids and feed them cookies because their mom is unhinged and apparently can’t read multiple invitations and I’m wondering if she’s going to chop my head off when they show up. In my 18 years of teaching, dealing with stupid parents have consistently been the worst part of my job.”
More Mismanaged Promises
“I work at a Cadillac dealer. A guy rides up on his bike. We ignore bums unless they’re a problem. If they just wander in and take a pack of pretzels and a water bottle… whatever. So when he wanders in we let him do his homeless deal for a minute. Then he wanders straight up to our manager who pulls himself up. ‘Can I help you?’
The homeless guy was twitchy. ‘Yeah, so, Donald Trump is the president and I was talking to him. He wants me to have a nice car.’
The manager nods, serious. ‘Did the president give you money for a new car? Do you have a way to purchase one?’
The homeless guy is undeterred. Now a few other younger sales guys are trying to look tall and buff and they start circling Homeless Guy in case he gets violent on our 65-year-old manager. ‘No, no, he says I should just get one. Trump wants me to have nice things.’
The manager is again nodding seriously. ‘And I understand that but I’m just the manager. I can’t give out cars for free. I don’t own the cars, sir. I have to sell them.’
The homeless guy was still determined. ‘Okay, okay, but let me put it this way: are you a father?’
Now, I don’t know what argument he was going to make about free Cadillacs and fatherhood but with a swarm of macho salesmen, they hustled the guy back to the bike he probably stole from the Walmart down the block. ‘Do you think the owner is over there?’ The guy asks, pointing across the street to the Ford/ Lincoln dealer across the way.
Our manager frowns, thinking. ‘I’m not sure. But you can go ask.'”
The Real Reason She Was Babysitting A 16-Year-Old
“It was a kid I was babysitting. I thought it was pretty weird to be babysitting a 16-year-old at 18. But after a while we became friends and he started to open up to me. For god knows what reason he decided to tell me he took intimately violated a 9-year-old. I then realized I was there because his mom didn’t want him alone with his 11-year-old sister.
I had no idea what to say other than asking why he told me. He said he didn’t know but it seemed like he was asking for forgiveness? It got to the point where he was straight up threatening to kill himself if I rejected him as a friend and unfortunately I was very easily guilt tripped. So he went to bed and I watch TV till it was time to go home because I didn’t want to leave his sister. When the mom came home I told her exactly what he told me but she already knew because he told his favorite teacher at the school and of course she reported it. I’ve just never picked up their phone calls or text messages. I will say though while he was asleep the thought of smothering him did cross my mind.”
A Real Winner
“Started volunteering at a women’s shelter. The first night at the check-in desk for the clients I was talking with a very well-put-together lady who had traveled all over the world, we spoke of very specific site seeing we had both seen in Egypt, etc. She is obviously highly educated, wearing fine clothing so I finally ask how she came to be at a homeless shelter.
She says, ‘I left my CFO position at a huge company in Seattle to take care of my dad who had Alzheimer’s. His care cost a lot, I got depressed after he passed away, and here I am. But don’t worry, I have a daycare up the hill with 25 children who watch TV all day in a storage shed. All I have to do is feed them one meal and one snack.’ My jaw hit the floor. Yeah, she had paranoid schizophrenia and she was delusional. The other volunteers were trying to hide their laughter from my reaction. Talk about a 180.”
Catch Me If You Can
“Everybody has met her: that loud, apprehensive person with a cracking voice possibly due to being in a constant state of self-inflicted crisis. She says more inappropriate things than appropriate things and her personal life somehow always finds itself leaking into her professional environment. The type of person who will leave mid-meeting with a client to go to Starbucks. Her.
Anyway, like two months after hiring her, she informs us she needs to see a person in Miami (we live in LA) due to some undisclosed arm pain issues. She didn’t give us a time frame of return but said it may be months to recover. During this conversation, we found that this was not a doctor (or at least not a licensed medical practitioner) but somebody that her friend recommended. In Miami. For ‘months.’ Also, she threatened to sue our insurance company because it didn’t cover whatever she was doing and she just assumed it would.
We never saw her again, but she seems to keep bouncing back on her feet in pretty solid positions based on Linkedin.”
You Do Not Want To Get Her Started
“I have a coworker who’s a real chatterbox. It starts innocuously enough; what she had for dinner, how her husband is doing after his car wreck, what happened at church this past Sunday. She’ll ramble on and on and on about this for as long as you’ll stand there, only barely giving you a chance to say you’ve got to go do something else and politely end the conversation.
The best way we at work have found to get away is to signal someone over and turn her attention on to the new victim. The funny thing is that no one, not even me, has caught on to this, and we’ll always happily trot over to see what the conversation is about only to get caught in the ‘death chatter’.
However, if she ever starts talking about the news, run for your sanity. I don’t know what news channel she watches, but every day it seems she finds a new story about someone somewhere abusing an infant. And it’s not something she mentions once and moves away from. She dwells on such things, rambling on about them for as much as half an hour at a go if you stand there and let her mouth run. I’m starting to think she has a fetish.”
Monkey See, Monkey Reroute All Critical Servers To Only Invest In Banana Farms
“I was sent to a client’s office overseas to help them get our product set up. At first, I thought I had a problem with our translator because he told me that their database server was ‘in the monkey room’. I asked for clarification several times. Always it’s in ‘the monkey room’. Decided to just ignore it, asked IT for their credentials, and figured I’d check out their server at the end of my week.
On my last day of support there, I went to configure their server. The CEO had a pet monkey that lived in the room with their database server.
I had to ask the guy I was working with why on Earth this was the case. Apparently, it’s the only room with AC strong enough for the monkey to be comfortable, and the CEO didn’t have A/C at his house, so, obviously…. stick it with your business-critical server.
I mean, I don’t see the animal doing any damage to the server, but it was the single weirdest thing I’ve encountered in my life.”
This Is A Santa Hat Area People!
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“Back when my mom owned a bookstore there was a woman, Serena, who was morbidly obese, smelled terrible, and always wore a dirty Santa hat. Normal enough woman just clearly had some maintenance issues. So for years she would come into the store and spend like 1000s of dollars on books. Customers complained every once in a while but the majority knew her pretty well.
One day my mother asks her about the hat. Apparently, when she was in 2nd or 3rd grade her class was being led to the auditorium by their teacher. It was around Christmas time so Santa hats abound. Her teacher wasn’t so much in the spirit and was lacking a hat.
Her teacher tripped on the stairs, falling and just destroying her head on the way down. Apparently, an EMT was saying that she would have lived if she had just been wearing a little padding up top….like a Santa hat.
And so Serena refuses to remove her Santa hat, for fear she will trip and die for lack of padding.
Really sweet woman, wonder how she’s doing.”
A Man In Transition
“Worked at a retail store while in college. Hottest guy I have ever seen came in and was, of course, taking his little sister shopping (marry me?!?!) I struck up a conversation with him and after about ten minutes he neighed like a horse very loudly. I was like what…, but didn’t say anything. Happened again a few minutes later and I felt terrible for him thinking he had Tourette’s.
No, he was just crazy. Started talking about how he can communicate with horses and how he was in the process of becoming one. I just said I had to get back to work. Kept neighing the whole time he was in the store and all the way through checking out. To this day I like to tell myself he was just messing with me and somewhere out there he’s telling his buddies about the time he made this random chick think he could communicate with horses.”
Captain Sargent Tom Reporting For Duty
“Work at the IT Help Desk at a small community college. People pretty frequently come by for directions to other parts of the college so when this guy was asking for ‘where they train the police’ it seemed normal enough.
We have a police academy as part of the college so I started giving him directions there but he kind of just started talking over me and telling me he trained all the police here and he used to be an instructor but they moved. I was trying to give him directions but he started telling me I needed to look him up on my computer. Around this time my former Marine coworker heard what was going on and came in to assist. The strange guy asked my coworker if he was in the military (he was wearing a USMC shirt) and then proceeded to tell him how he was an ‘Army-Navy Ranger’ and he trained all my coworker’s superiors. At this point, we realized he was totally out of it and I told the strange guy I was going to grab another coworker who knew the area better to get him better directions and hit the Campus Security silent alarm button in the next office over.
Security came, he acted like he recognized the officer and asked him what took him so long, and said he came here to see him. The officer didn’t know him. All security was really allowed to do was take him off campus and hope he didn’t come back so I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t pretty terrified walking to my car when I left that day.”
It’s Always The Inexplicable Man
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“I was on a business trip where we had three cars to share amongst twelve people. One of my passengers, a co-worker, tried very valiantly to convince the rest of us that things like GPS and cell phones have been in existence for well over 100 years and that the government has been keeping these items from us. When I asked where the technology came from way back then? He said aliens had come to earth and deposited these items and taught high-up United States government officials how to create and use these things. He never did tell me what caused the government to out the secrets and let us all have said tech items.
He also told me I have nice feet.”
Less Insane, More Misguided
“I was at work the other day, I’m a CNA by the way, and we CNA’S were working in the dining room feeding residents. Girl from a CNA agency was there helping. We got to talking religion and politics, found out she was Pentecostal, no big deal.
Until she started talking about how she was a prophet in training, and somehow she brought up that the world is going to purgatory because Obama spoke evil spirits into existence ‘with the whole gays having rights’… I could not believe what she was saying. I just stood there wide-eyed with my mouth open. I finally looked at her and said oh I think someone’s calling me and walked off.
And I think that the thing that floored me the most was she was a young black girl. I just can’t believe that thought process has infected people my age, millennials.”
The Heartbreaking Reason K Asked Her Strange Question Again And Again
“My first job was at Target. I was in the food avenue section which is where you would buy popcorn, nachos or soft pretzels (most have been converted to Starbucks by now).
Anyways, there was this lady K who would come in quite often. She had a little cart with 2 wheels that she pulled behind her, full of stuff. She would wear baggy dresses and hacked the hair up front in jagged pieces to the scalp like a mangy Benjamin Franklin. K would wander around for awhile and then come to food ave and buy a sandwich.
Whenever we exchanged money she would ask me if she swallowed or was choking on any change. I would calmly look at her and say ‘Nope K, you’re just fine,’ sometimes repeating myself 4 or 5 times.
One day she looked at me and said, ‘Thank you for being so kind and not treating me like I’m crazy. Everyone else does. When I was a little girl I saw my Grandmother choke to death.’
Can you IMAGINE? This was 15 years ago. I hope K has found peace and contentment wherever she is.”
The Insider On Batman
“I worked as a cab driver and picked this neckbeard up from the bar.
He starts talking about a Batman movie, I thought he was talking about justice league and I’m like no I haven’t seen it, looks neat blah blah blah.
But no he was talking about the Batman movie he starred in which the Chinese government won’t allow the release of for 300 million years. The movie really took a toll on him as he had to do 400 fight scenes a day, including one against a 10-foot tall plan who he ultimately defeated.
Then it comes out that he wasn’t just playing Batman, he is the real Batman. When he was 8 years old he made some wise real estate investments and became a billionaire. He called himself Bruce Wayne.
He could have actually been convincing if he wasn’t 1) Obese or 2) Didn’t throw out such insane numbers describing his stats, like fighting an army of millions, having a 100 million-year-old sword, and getting into literal 100’s of fights a day.
Just the more he talked the more I realized how delusional he was. Really wished I’d recorded him.”
Late Night Drama
“A few years back I worked night shift in an adult store. We were the only 24-hour place around for the majority of my time there, so I became accustomed to helping people who were in distress or stranded (like most adult stores, we were located on a busy highway).
One day a guy came stumbling in, soaked with sweat. In January. In Wisconsin. So this was an uncommon sight. I greeted him, and he said hello to me then set his bag behind the counter without me asking so he’d obviously been in the store before (we didn’t allow large purses or backpacks in the store) and proceeded to stand on his side of counter breathing heavily for a moment. Finally, I asked how he was. He said he’d been running. …kay… Anything I can do for you? He says yeah, you can call the police, he’d been chased by guys in a van.
I kicked right into rescue mode. I got the guy the phone and ran to get him a cup of water to help him calm down. When I got back, he was shaking too much to make the call, so he handed the phone back to me. It was covered in sweat.
I call 911, tell them what he told me. But then his story started growing as I’m on the phone with dispatch. Suddenly there were a bunch of guys, and they had hammers, and they were trying to get into the store. I had a camera feed for the whole building. Not only was there no one trying to get into the building, there was no one but me and this guy period.
So then I realize I’m by myself in a store in the middle of the night with a crazy person. Dispatch asked me if I could see the guys. I could not, and I told her as much. Then dude started to get upset with me.
Great, I’m by myself in a store with a crazy person in the middle of the night, and now he’s mad at me.
Luckily I managed to calm him down and explained that I was only answering the dispatch person’s questions. This was good enough for him. I managed to ‘stay on his good side’ until the police arrived. They took him away, I have no idea where to. I never heard more about it.
He came back a while later to shop and seemed fine.”
A Justified Enabler
“Got called to an old lady’s condo about her hearing noises in her attic. I went up and looked and it was all good. Went back 3 more times. Finally, I told her that it might be an animal getting in from somewhere that I couldn’t see, but that there was absolutely no one up there (It was a wide open, flat space.) Then she told me that she believed it was the government sending agents to spy on her because she had very valuable information inside her head. She was worried that they were planting mind-reading devices in her home.
So after some amusement, I told her ‘Look, we’re not really supposed to do this, but…’ and then called my Sergeant. ‘Hey, Sarge, is Mrs. Larsen on the list? …yes, yes, THE list…..Oh, really? That’s a mistake, she’s not supposed to be on it. Cancel the operation for her immediately, please. Sure, I’ll wait…oh really? That was fast. Great, I’ll tell her, thanks!’ and hung up. I told her, ‘Ma’am, you WERE on the list, but it was obviously an accident. You’ve been removed, and I promise you nobody else will bother you. You’re all good now.’ Never heard from her again.
The funny part was that I did actually call my Sergeant out of the blue, and while he knew I was on a call at this lady’s place, he had NO idea what I was talking about because I was just talking over him. The whole time I’m spewing my script for this lady to hear, Sarge is on the other end of the phone ‘What are you talking about? …Are you having a stroke or something?….. I don’t understand this at all….'”
In Hindsight, We Should Have Done It Differently
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“I had to go into work on my off day to terminate someone. I had fired people before on the past, no big deal. Just like with all the others, this person had gotten themselves fired. Never really had any ‘crazy’ issues with them before.
So I go in about an hour before our location opens. The plan is to terminate the person quickly, then work their scheduled shift. In hindsight, I should not have been alone with them.
I inform them why they are being terminated. They sign the necessary forms and head for the door. Then the crazy starts.
First, there were the fits of maniacal laughter, interspersed with shouts of rage. They were pacing back and forth, occasionally grabbing things I feared would be thrown at me.
Outwardly, I maintained my calm, managerial composure. I calmly repeated they needed to leave the premises before I called the authorities. They went to begging for their job, then laughing about how stupid they were, then raging at the supposed lies that were told about them (cameras showed they weren’t lies), then giggling sadly.
I reiterated they needed to leave. After a half hour of coercing and having a phone in hand to dial 911, they left. I immediately called my supervisor and informed them.
I was nervous the whole day that they’d come back in and do something.”