Sometimes the customer is wrong.
You Just Never Know What People Are Going Through…
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“I used to work for an independent coffee shop, and one Christmas Eve, 15 minutes after we closed, a cantankerous old lady started banging on the door. You see, she needed coffee beans even though we had cashed out, and was being a total brat. I decided, ‘Tis the season,’ and let her in. While I was weighing out the beans, she noticed my sleeve (tattoos) and said, ‘How are you going to explain that to your grandchildren?’ in the most obnoxious way possible.
My reply: ‘Actually I was just diagnosed with cervical cancer, so I’ll never be able to have children.’ The look on her face was AMAZING! I didn’t get an apology, but the shame I saw was enough to make me happy.”
Onion Obsession Backfires At Burger King!
“During high school, I worked at a Burger King. There was this one woman who would always stop by the drive-thru during the afternoon and ask for a whopper junior with extra onions. And I mean, a LOT of extra onions. And no matter how many we put in, she always came into the store and screamed that there weren’t enough. Still, this was in the middle of the afternoon, so we didn’t care.
However, one day, we had four buses full of US Army enlistees at the store at the same time (convoys of chartered buses would go by periodically, and they usually stopped at our store because the bus drivers knew my boss).
Now, these people were always the nicest, most respectful people you can possibly imagine, which was a welcome change after dealing with jerks the whole day. They also always ordered a ton of food (all king size, tons of double and triple whoppers, the whole nine yards). My boss would always have me give them the ‘senior discount’ (15% off), and they enjoyed that immensely because it said that they were getting a senior discount on their receipts.
Anyways, as nice as they were, they strained our store to the limit because they ordered so much food. So we were almost literally going hammer and tongs to keep up, and then the two-faced woman enters the drive-thru. My boss told me to just grab two handfuls of onions and put them on the sandwich because she didn’t need a scene when we were as far behind as we were. I could barely close the sandwich because of the onions, but I managed and we gave it to her.
Now, remember, the store is completely full of US Army enlistees. They probably have not had fast food for weeks (I think they were going from boot camp to get their first assignments), and the line was out the door. So two-faced woman pushes her way past all of these people, rudely shoving them out of her way, and comes up to the counter screaming that she didn’t have enough onions. My boss is livid, so she takes the sandwich, hands it to me, and tells me to do whatever the heck I want with it.
I dumped the ENTIRE FREAKING TUB of onions on it (probably about 1.5 LITERS of onions), wrapped it up really, REALLY tight, and taped it shut (note that the wrappers were somewhat elastic). My boss hands it to the two-faced woman, and she opens it right on the counter to ‘make sure we have enough’ (even though it’s like 6 times bigger than normal).
The thing EXPLODED ALL OVER, which was so freaking awesome. All the troops were trying not to laugh. One of their officers (a pretty quiet young first lieutenant) was waiting by the counter for his food, and finally, he just gave up and started laughing his butt off. The troops took this as a cue, and she had about 250 troops all dying laughing at her. One of the best days of my high school life. She didn’t come back for a month, and she never EVER complained about not having enough onions.”
When You Get Caught In A Lie…
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“I worked at a photo printing lab, and we got people in all the time who claimed we were stupid and had messed up their pictures.
One woman had us print 800 vacation pictures. They were bad quality, dark, and out of focus. When she came to pick them up, she insisted that we had ruined them, that they were perfect on her camera, and that she had a very expensive camera and so there was no way the pictures could be dark or out of focus. We finally gave her her money back, even though we had done nothing wrong and were out a lot of time and paper.
She called us 30 minutes later and told us she was at a store across town, and they had reprinted all of her pictures and they were beautiful, in focus, and bright.
I had to tell her that the same person who owned our store also owned the store across town and that not only would it have taken that store several hours to reprint 800 pictures, but their printer was down that day, so they couldn’t have printed anything. She hung up on me.”
Mustard Man!
“I used to work at an amusement park, and I started in food, which was by far the worst of the 4 details (games, rides, pavilions, food). My stand made funnel cakes and corndogs. The average wait time on a busy day could be upwards of 30 minutes in the sun, which I’ll admit sucks, but it’s not any cooler in the stand slaving over a 450-degree fryer. Anyhow…
This guy comes up and orders 4 corndogs. I ring him up and ask him if he wants any ketchup or mustard brushed on. He declines. I take his money and hand over four corndogs. His little girl bites into one, and then tugs on daddies arm and says she wants mustard. I politely inform him that since she’d already bitten out of her food, we can’t brush it on; however, if he’d head 50 steps to an adjacent building, he could skip the line and just grab some condiment packets. His reaction back was seriously so absurd!