Work Experiences with Strange Customers

Folks, tell us all about the craziest experiences you've had at work with customers, or the craziest things you've ever seen them do.I once had a guy ask me if they could burn some of the potatoe chips in the frier 'cause he liked them very crispie .J0N

I work in a grocery store that is located in a wealthy part of town. The wealthy and demanding customers are never without a source of amusement!One lady tries and snags all of our plastic bags every time she comes in. We actually have to hide them from her or she will steal them. She does this because she wants to clean up after her poodle, I believe! Another lady got all irate at me the other day for taking longer than a minute to get her some change. She demanded that the world stop and a manager be summoned. I told her rather bluntly, "M'aam, the world does NOT revolve around you!"You just got me started, Jon---I have so many stories.I find the people who come through the line and ignore me while chatting on their cellphones to be a bit obnoxious. Who here agrees with me that cellphone ignorance is a source of annoyance for a clerk?

Just try bein' on a date with someone like that .J0N

worked at a video store. i've got more than my share of stories.someone peed on our floor once. well, we had a couple of people (and a dog) do it, but only one was an adult. i heard he was retarded (my off day).also, i'm fairly certain that one of our regulars was a paranoid schizophrenic. not, like, in the "i'm making fun of him" kind of way, in the "according to the dsm-iv" kind of way. he was harmless-crazy, but crazy nonetheless. he worked his way through almost every video store, and he was on action when i met him, so i dubbed him "action man" though later it seems he moved on to horror. he always wore the same clothes -- a faded polo shirt with a hawaiian print, a members-only jacket, and this single strand of purple plastic mardi gras beads. never cut his nails. thinning gray hair. and he always had the day's newspaper tucked under his arm. he always rented the dumbest, most awful, old movies possible, and come in talk about how much of a badass whatever 3rd-rate action star from the 80's headlined the movie he was bringing back was, and how they'd kickass and take names later. surely, charles bronson wouldn't stand for these garbage people these days, he'd say. he'd know what to do. he'd ramble and ramble and ramble, talking about seeing monsters and dinosaur-people and such, waving the movie about in his hand, refusing to give it to us so we could ring him up. only one employee was ever able to get through to him. he'd listen for a moment or two, while standing in a kind of macho authoritative stance, and just say "fuckin' a', man." and action man would give him the movie, and pay, and leave the store. i tried it, and it didn't work for me.we also had someone drive through the front of the store and nearly hit an employee. this is within about month of when someone did the same thing at another store in the district, and put one of the (pregnant) employees in the hospital. (i wasn't there for either of these incidents)Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.

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I remember once... when the bathroom overflowed... the one manager ended up being the one to clean it out.Man, that piece of shit was the biggest thing I'd ever seen! She later commented that it was about the size of an ankle... and said she was shocked not to have seen blood with it Not to mention the customers who smoke in the restroom .This was the mens' room nonetheless (known to us as the Cowboys). People overflow that thing way too much .J0N

managers end up cleaning bathrooms because someone has to do it, and they don't have the heart to make their employees do it cause they don't get paid enough. of course, generally the managers don't either.you can tell how good a manager is by whether or not they make you clean toilets.

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I remember also seeing one young disabled dude pull a cowboy picture off the wall and kiss it. We now have that thing really hammered up there in a huge frame about 12 inches thick .J0N

i already mentioned the dog shit on the floor, but we made the customer with the dog clean that up.we had this strange orange substance on floor, in the corner of the new release wall. nobody knew what it was, but by the time we found it, it had been there for a few hours at least. it smelled like something food-like, but we couldn't really place it. after a few days of it setting (no one wanted to touch it), an ex-employee was in the store and we paid him two dollars to taste it. his best guess was that someone threw up tomato soup onto the floor.we sold cotton candy. this doesn't sound gross, but you had to be there. this one haitian lady with three out of control toddlers all whining "mommy i want that!" in creole and writing all over the floor got into a bag. while whining and crying and generally being spoiled brats, they drooled liquid cotton candy spit all over the tile around the front register. and i mean, ALL over. you have no idea how hard that is to clean up.we had this trash can outside the front door. whenever i changed the trash, i always moved it inside, into the back area. why? because people used it, that's why. it's not so much that i was lazy, it's that it was the grossest thing known to man. aside from whatever had solidified in the bottom, people would throw their nearly full drinks in there, their fast food garbage -- and even though it had a top, the rain that did get into it didn't help any. it had this special little lip on the inside, with two flexible semi-circles, joined to the can by two hinges. which stuck out. even though it was designed to make life easier, the knobs on the inside of the can tended to have the effect of ripping the garbage bag. one more than one occasion, the nastiest, smelliest, wettest, grossest refuse known to man has spilled all over an employee. and then they had to clean it up.on another trash related note: i'd quite regularly have to empty the women's restroom trash. we didn't always have a girl working that night, and we liked to change up the jobs that everyone hated. now girls, i realize that sometimes life has its little emergencies, but can't you generally wait to get home to change pads?

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aside from the stray porno we'd get back (it was always the WEIRD stuff, too), we've had a few of our movies come back covered in unidentified substances. yeah, the purple stuff on the land before time 23 is probably grape jelly from a kid's pb+j, but what's that white stuff on ben affleck's latest?Edited by arachnophilia, : not my problem! back on the shelf it goes!

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I have the absolute grossest story ever!Once I worked at 7-11. There was quite a diverse night life population that would frequent the store, as it was downtown. We had ex-Bronco quarterback John Elway come in there, we had local news personalities brushing shoulders with disdainful eclectics, working people, homeless people, you name it.One night a homeless man came in and wanted to purchase something. I don't want to get too graphic here--but he had already eaten the fast food that he purchased and he handed me several one dollar bills which--as it turns out--he had wiped his a** with! They were wet!
Needless to say, I threw them in the sink and had to wash the money and let it dry out before putting it back in the drawer!I couldnt get too angry at the guy, though---not only did he live on the street, but he apparantly was mentally ill.Edited by Phat, : my computer needs a new keyboard.

we had a bum once.we gave him pizza. and maybe a beer, i can't remember.

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Overall I like working with the public! I try and be cordial with everyone who comes through my line. I genuinely want to help people find what they are looking for---not just because I get paid well for doing so (although that is a factor) but because I like people. Even strange ones.

That reminds me of a job I had in a restaurant. This one customer came in and wanted a rare steak. The Greek cooks dutifully cooked him a rare steak and he kept returning it---insisting that it was too cooked.Finally, in exasperation, they threw an uncooked slab of Filet Mignon on the plate and sent it out.It never came back.Edited by Phat, : again with the spelling

jon Easily fixed. Just use your cell phone and call her up and ask her if she would like to talk to you. For maximum effect do it while she is busy chatting while you are together.If she doesn't clue in drop her.

When I was working my way through college, I spent some time working in a hardware store. We had 3 managers, 2 experienced and 1 just became a manager a few days before I started working there. The 2 experienced managers were fair enough to divide the work up with them included among us. In other words, they did all the sh*t that we did, sometimes more. Whenever they wanted us to do something, they'd ask us to do them, not command.The new manager, however, was an arsehole. He was such an ass that we never saw him do any actual work. The only thing we saw him do all day was walking around giving orders. While the other two managers thanked us every time we completed a task, this one never said anything.What pissed me off the most about the asshole manager was how unrealistic his goals were. Carrying around things that weighed 70 to 100 pounds might not be that bad for guys like us. The thing was he always demanded that we worked faster and faster and faster. For those of you who have never worked hard labor before, you might be able to carry around heavy stuff fast the first few time, but you can't keep up that pace the whole freakin' day. You can't expect someone to work in a hurry with heavy objects all day long like that.Even on days when there were a lot of things to do with limited time to do them, the asshole manager would be volunteering to push an empty cart to the front of the store while the other two managers would be pushing large crates around with the rest of us.As a matter of fact, I almost walked out of there without even saying "I quit". What happened was I was given a list of to-do list. I completed all the tasks (took me 3 hours of lots of sweats and heavy liftings in 90's degree heat) and went ahead and take my 10 minutes break. As I was about to take my break, the asshole came and yelled at me something like "you've only done one thing and you're taking a break?" It was his condescending tone that made me almost lose my temper. I just stayed silent and walked to the break area.Here is something I noticed. Everyone that worked there was physically fit except for one person, and guess who that was. The asshole manager wasn't really fat. He was just fat.Anyway, to this day I still don't understand why that asshole got to the manager position, considering he never did his fair share of work and he had a horrible way to communicate with other people. Listening to his condescending tone was fine if I had to listen to it only a few times, but the entire time that I worked there I never once heard him not use his commanding voice.