CONTENT WARNING: Dark Humor

I have a five-foot-zero coworker. She is obviously pregnant, but this seems to make customers think they can just waltz up to her and place their hands on her belly.

She’s scolded the customers about this, who have in turn complained to managers, who have in turn told her to just deal with it. 

Coworker: “Fine… I will deal with it.”

One shift, I notice this exchange. A customer once again touches [Coworker]’s belly. 

Customer: “Oh, congratulations!”

Coworker: *Backing away* “Please don’t touch me.”

Customer: “Oh, I’m a mother, so it’s okay. How far along are you?”

Coworker: *Holding her belly* “This is a tumor.” 

Customer: *Horrified* “Oh… I… Oh…”

Coworker: “Are you asking how long I have left? About six months.”

Customer: *Possibly traumatized, tearing up, backing away* “I… I’m so sorry, I…”

The customer rushes out of the store.

Me: *Trying not to laugh* “I think you just traumatized that woman.”

Coworker: “Maybe next time she’ll think twice before walking up to a total stranger and placing her uninvited hands on their bodily protrusions!” 

[Coworker] gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. When she brought him into the store for us to coo over, she said to me, “Here’s my little tumor!”

The electronics store where I work has one particular worker who seems like a bit of a contradiction. He’s EXCELLENT at solving problems that other workers are having, but he makes some VERY dumb decisions.

As an example, our video games section has empty cases on the shelf. You bring a case to the front counter, and they ring you out with an unopened case that has a game in it taken from a storage locker of sorts. [Worker] single-handedly keeps the locker sorted so that the most popular games are in the most convenient place for a worker to grab them. And yet, if he happens to be the one who sells a customer the last copy of a certain game that is in the locker, he’ll grab a giant stack of games from the back room, refill the locker, return the remaining games to the back room, and then resume checking out the customer.

One day, I overheard two of my coworkers talking about him.

Coworker #1: “I don’t get [Worker]. How can someone be so smart and so stupid at the same time?”

Coworker #2: “Well, you have to remember that ‘stupid’ can mean both ‘lack of intelligence’ and ‘lack of wisdom’.”

Coworker #1: “What’s the difference?”

Coworker #2: “Intelligence is being able to pop the hood of a car, look at the engine running, and tell what’s wrong with it. Wisdom is knowing better than to pop the hood of a car and look at the engine running while it’s in motion. [Worker] has the first one; he doesn’t have the second one.”

Ever since, whenever I run into a stupid customer, I keep this conversation in my mind.

I worked in a vitamin store while I was in college. This was a pretty boring store for kids; they never came in without their parents.

Kids wandering a mall only really go to fun stores at that age, right? But two girls came into our vitamin store, no adult with them. They were the age where kids are just old enough to be walking around a mall without their parents — maybe eleven or twelve at the absolute oldest.

Girl: “Excuse me, where are the chewable vitamins? It’s usually [Brand].”

I was surprised she knew the name of it. My colleague handed her the bottle, and the girls said thank you. The first girl showed the vitamins to her friend. They handed the bottle back to my colleague, said thank you again, and left.

They came back probably fifteen minutes later with their moms, went right to the spot, and showed it to one of the moms. They then picked out the same brand bottle but for older people. Then, I saw that they had come in with an older lady who was walking very slowly, probably a grandma or even a great-grandma. The girls had run ahead to minimize the time it took for her to be standing or walking around the store looking for vitamins.

I told the other mom how the girls were the politest kids we had ever met, and her eyes got kind of big, but she looked pleased and said thank you. The mom bought the vitamins. The girls said thank you to us (my coworker and me), and that was it.

A simple and not a crazy story, but when you work in retail, having customers so well-behaved is actually kinda crazy.

I have just dealt with a customer who caused a scene and called us all communists for not honoring his out-of-date coupon. Wouldn’t that make us capitalist? But anyway… After he has been loudly escorted out by security, one of our regulars who likes to crack jokes starts speaking to my coworker who is serving him.

Regular: “I once dated a girl who was a communist. Didn’t work out. I should’ve seen the red flags.”

Coworker: *Without skipping a beat* “A communism joke isn’t funny unless everyone gets it.”

That almost made it worth dealing with the bad customer… Almost.

This is back in the days when to get Internet at home, you had to get a landline installed. This meant I had a phone that only rang when my parents called or it was a telemarketer, most of whom left me alone when I told them I was renting. Except for this one guy. He was persistent. I could get up to three calls a day from him on my days off.

I was also going through a terrible time. I was divorcing my ex thanks to an affair, I’d been made redundant from the job I adored, and the replacement position they’d found me because “we don’t want to lose you” was doing none of the work I enjoyed while being surrounded by the nastiest clique of overgrown Mean Girls I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet.

But the straw that broke the camel’s back was when I got home from a day of work, which I’d done on very little sleep because my sister, brother-in-law, and six-week-old nephew had been T-boned by a drunk driver the night before. (They were all fine — the worst injuries were whiplash to my sister and horrific bruising to my brother-in-law — but I didn’t know that at the time.)

I heard the phone ringing as I was heading up to my door, so I raced inside, thinking it might be my parents with an update.

Telemarketer: “Hello! This is [Telemarketer] from [Company]. Is this [My Name]?”

I just broke and burst into tears.

Telemarketer: “Hello?”

Me: *Still sobbing* “I’m sorry, did you not hear? She was hit by a drunk driver last night.”

Telemarketer: *Click*

I never heard from him or his company again. And my sister thought it was hilarious when I told her.