Our state no longer has a mask mandate, and customers are returning in droves. Since it’s taking us a while to rehire after “The Great Resignation”, our customers are waiting in line for a bit longer than they might have been used to before the lockdowns. An angry customer gets to the front of the line.

Customer: “I have been timing you, and I have been in line for six minutes! Six minutes!“

Me: “Yes, we have been working very hard to keep up with the pent-up customer demand for coffee since fully reopening. We ask our customers to be patient during this time.” 

Customer: “What… That’s it?!”

Me: “What do you mean?”

Customer: “I’m not getting my coffee for free for being made to wait?!”

Not much of a customer if they’re getting coffee for free, but whatever…

Me: “I’m afraid we can’t do that.”

Customer: “Well, you just lost a customer!” 

Me: “Oh, wow! Thank you so much! We have way too many customers lately, and we’ve been barely able to keep up! I really appreciate your sacrifice. Thank you!” 

Customer: “No, wait, I—”

Me: *To my manager* “[Manager], this amazing customer has said she’s not coming back! She’s taking one for the team!” 

Manager: “Really? That’s so kind of you, ma’am. We need all the help we can get since we have so many customers now; we do need to start shedding a few.”

Customer: “No, you’re not getting it! I’m not happy! I’m—”

Manager: “I understand, ma’am. We’re not happy, either. We’ve had months after months of unprecedented customer increases since reopening, and to be honest, losing your custom isn’t really going to make a dent against such staggering growth, but every little helps, so—”

Customer: “Stop it! I am not coming back because you’re not treating me like a loyal customer! I am not doing it as a favor to you!”

Manager: “You had to wait in line for a few minutes longer than usual, and you’ve decided that warrants never coming back? I don’t think that’s a very good definition of ‘loyal’, but either way, we appreciate you choosing a competitor from now on. Thank you, and bye-bye!”

Customer: *Screeching* “You’re all a**holes!” *Storms out*

Manager: “No, we’re all overworked a**holes. Okay, that sounded wrong…” 

Related:
When “Never Coming Back!” Comes Back To Haunt Them

I am sixteen years old and have just gotten my driver’s license. My parents have me run to the store to pick up some groceries. I stop by my friend’s house on the way back home for maybe five minutes to show him that I got my license and am out driving alone. It is a really fun moment in the life of a sixteen-year-old.

My stepmom freaks out.

Stepmom: “We did not give you permission to drive to [Friend #1]’s house! We told you to go to the store and that is all!”

Me: *To her and my dad* “You let me drive to [Friend #2]’s house yesterday, so I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

Stepmom: “You are not allowed to drive anywhere we do not give explicit permission for you to drive to. Period, end of sentence. Just because you were allowed to do it previously, it does not ever give you permission another time. Ever.”

Fast forward three days. My thirteen-year-old stepsister has been a jerk to me all day, and I’m sick of her BS. She goes quiet for about thirty minutes and then comes out all sticky-sweet.

Stepsister: “Hey, [My Name], it’s time to take me to ballet.”

I have taken her to ballet three days a week since I got my license. It’s basically one of my chores. But I see my opportunity to say, “Screw you!” to all three of them at once.

Me: “Sorry, [Stepsister]. I’m not allowed to take you to ballet. The parents didn’t tell me to take you, and I don’t want to get in trouble!”

She screams, she cries, she begs, and she threatens. She calls her mom and leaves a message. She calls my dad and leaves a message. Just like Steve Miller says, “Time keeps on slippin’, into the future.” I’m not sure I’m brave enough to hang on to the bitter end and actually go through with it. I’m shaking, but I know I’ve got them dead to rights. There’s no call back from the parents, and the clock goes on past the start of [Stepsister]’s class.

[Stepmom] comes home, and [Stepsister] runs to meet her.

Stepmom: “[Stepsister], what are you doing here? You’re supposed to be at ballet!”

I hear [Stepsister] tell her rendition of the story, leaving out how miserable she has been all day, and they go back and forth. [Stepmom] comes pounding down the hall and yells (as God is my witness):

Stepmom: “You just wait ’til your father gets home!”

I have to stifle a laugh because I never really believed people actually said that.

An hour later, Dad comes home, and BOTH [Stepmom] and [Stepsister] go running out to meet him and tell him how horrible I was. I wait in my room for the hammer to fall.

About ten minutes later, my dad calls down the hall:

Dad: “[My Name], would you please come here and talk to us?”

I walk out of my room.

Dad: “Well, [My Name], you did it.”

Me: “What do you mean, Dad?”

Dad: “You got us all, and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it. Okay, let’s make this reasonable for everyone.”

And they did. They agreed that they were over the top. They recognized that [Stepsister] wasn’t always very nice to me, and they spoke to her about that. I was allowed to have reasonable freedom if I was driving somewhere since I had good grades and had never been in trouble.

I walked down the hall back to my room, my back to my parents, with the world’s biggest grin on my face.

I worked as a parking lot attendant and cashier when I was sixteen. I pushed plastic carts all day, or I rang up people’s groceries.

I was halfway through my shift out in the sun getting carts when I decided to take a small break under the shade near the bench beside the front entrance of the store. I didn’t pay much attention to the few people in the area, but this very nice older Chinese lady struck up a conversation with me.

I was a bit stunned because it came out of nowhere. She started talking to me in a thick Chinese accent about my job and saying stuff like:

Customer: “You have a good job, and you earn good money.”

This weirded me out at first, but she kept the conversation going and talked about how in China, people would work out in the soybean fields and rice paddies only to get very little money at the end of the day.

I was taken on one amazing trip in this chat with this lady, and I still don’t understand why. To end this conversation, she said:

Customer: “You do a good job. Thank you.”

And with that, she kinda just walked away. I never saw her again, but I wish I had. Those words and that lady have stuck with me ever since. I’m sure I did a better job after that because it was very motivating to hear some positive feedback from customers for once!

My friend works at a call center. Today, she took a call from a manager who was struggling to get the Point Of Sale system connected to the Internet. At one point, the manager had to call an employee for help, and the first thing my friend heard when the three-way call connected was:

Employee: “Hey, since you’ve got me on the phone, I need to tell you that I haven’t been paid in a f*****’ week. I’m taking my check out of the register, and you’re gonna have to deal with that.”

My friend spent the next few minutes listening to a screaming match between them, unable to hang up since she was on a customer call. Eventually, the employee threatened a lawsuit.

Manager: “And how are you going to do that without any proof?”

Friend: “Um, just to remind you, this is a recorded line.”

Suddenly, the manager completely changed his attitude, becoming calm, polite, and apologetic. OF COURSE, the employee could take his paycheck out of the register, don’t even worry about it, nothing to be concerned over. While my friend legally had to tell them they were being recorded (and already had told the manager when he first called), she was glad she was there to butt in at that moment.

In Germany, we have mandatory ESL (English as a second language) classes in school, starting from elementary school. All English classes in German schools are catered toward people who only learn English as a second language and don’t speak it regularly outside of school. Even most English teachers only ever learned it as their second language.

As such, my high school was wholly unprepared for me; having spent almost all of my childhood up to that point abroad and naturally growing up German/English bilingual, I am fluent in both languages.

Sadly, my teacher in my final year of high school was not. In fact, she had only recently started teaching, had very little authority, knowledge, or any idea of what she was doing, and made up for it by being as obnoxiously high and mighty as they come. English was the first language you ever spoke and you were, thus, fluent? Nope, that was a lie, and you could not possibly be more fluent than her. After all, she was the teacher.

She hated the fact that I would just read (English) novels in class but would still always be able to answer her questions and fill out our worksheets flawlessly. After just the first week of classes, she had it out for me. When she handed us back our first graded tests later, it really showed: I — a straight-A student — had gotten a D.

But it wasn’t just me; the entire class got an average of two to three grades below their usual results. And that’s when I noticed something on my test: she had marked countless words and phrases on my test as “wrong” or “misspelled” or “made up” — when they were all perfectly correct — and deducted a full point for every single one. I whipped out a dictionary and Post-its and went to work, proving every single mark-up the teacher had given me wrong. I pointed this out to my friends in class, too, and told them to check their own results, and soon I ended up with the entire class’ stack of graded tests to re-correct them.

It turned out that our teacher had, apparently, never gotten past the cover page of a dictionary, and her “corrections” were all blatantly wrong. The class and I went up to her and tried to point out her wrongful “corrections” to her with the help of a dictionary, the Internet, and common sense, but she was having none of it.

We eventually escalated the matter to the head of the language department at our school who then re-graded all of our tests. The average score went from a D- to a B, and my own grade went back up to an A.

And our class teacher was livid when she was no longer allowed to grade tests. She tried her hardest to make my life in her class miserable for the rest of the year, and she never missed a chance to tell me how full of myself I was and how she’d make me come to my senses once she’d get to fail me in my finals. (Never mind that she wasn’t allowed to grade us anymore, especially not on our finals).

I got through the year with her out of spite alone, but I have to say, when I got to rub my fifteen points (full score, A+, for everyone unfamiliar with the German grading system) in her face during our award ceremony at the end of the year — the only one in the entire school who got full score in the English final exams — and watch her stalk off while barely keeping it together in front of all the other teachers, that was a beautifully cathartic moment!