Everyone, at some point or another, has had what I call a “basic needs fulfillment” job; that is, a job requiring you to deal with every kind of person under the sun, such as a cashier in a C-store or restaurent, or working an information desk, or nursing. Usually customers are fairly polite. Lots of times, however, you get customers who want to question every single thing you are doing, as if you don’t know your own job. I realize these people have probably run up against their share of incompetence, but in my experience, incompetent cashiers (nurses, whatever) don’t last very long. I work primarily with truck drivers. They’re grouchy. And they keep calling me “doll.” Other than that, they don’t bother me, as long as I know what I’m doing and can give them whatever assistance they require in an efficient and polite manner. They are doing their job and expect me to know how to do mine, and as long as these expectations are met, then all is kosher. It’s the regular people - the gas customers - who bug me. “Where the hell can I buy a tire around here?” “It’s 9:00 on a Sunday night, sir. We have 4 motels withing walking distance.” “I got gas on that pump out there.” (Waving hand vaguely out the window. There’s eight freakin’ pumps “out there”!!!) Or my personal favorite, the guy who stuck the gas nozzle all the way down into the tank on his motorcycle and then got upset when it didn’t kick off and spilled gas all over his shiny Hog. He thought I should drop what I was doing and go wash his bike for him. So let’s hear it folks. What’s your favorite asinine customer story?
Never ever criticise Harley owners or they’ll leave their offices just to drive down in their company cars to find and beat you up with their mobile phones 
I used to deliver pizzas, and the customers who really drove me nuts–well, besides the ones who would hand me a check for the exact amount, no tip, and cheerily wish me a good day–were the ones who would try to help me take the pizzas out of the hot bag. Hey, you’re invading my personal space here! I asked other drivers about this, and it only happened to female drivers, so it appears some people think that women are less capable of removing a pizza from a hot bag and handing it to a customer. Let’s see, what else? Making me stand on the step for 5 minutes while they search all over the house for the money, when they’ve had half an hour to prepare for this. I’ve got other customers waiting, ya know! The ones who ask you to come in while standing in the doorway and holding the storm door open–I can’t come in while you’re blocking the doorway, doofus! Oh, and please, for the love of Ghod, don’t make a big fuss about “It’s the pizza man, oh, wait, it’s the pizza woman” and get all friggin’ cutesy about it. Some people just couldn’t seem to get over the novelty of having a woman delivering their pizza. There are women driving the space shuttle for cripe sake, get over it already.
I used to work at a toy store. The annoying customers generally fell into two categories:
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Housewives with nothing better to do than collect those fuzzy little emissaries of Satan known as Beanie Babies. You could recognize them the minute they walked into the store, because they all wore too much makeup and too much pink, and they were usually talking to other Beanie Baby Ladies at other malls on their cell phones. And when they weren’t fussing about tag condition, they were making me line up two dozen identical bears on the counter so they could pick out the one with the “cutest face.” (They’re MASS-PRODUCED for freak’s sake! They are all exactly alike! They are also toys, designed for kids to play with, and if you were using them for their proper purpose the tags wouldn’t last two minutes.)
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People (adults) who thought it was cute to make the toy store lady play with them:
“Do you sell Rubik’s cubes here?”
“Sure, let me show you where they --”
“No, just tell me if I’m getting warmer or colder.”
(Sigh.) “OK, getting warmer … colder … no, even colder … Really, sir, if you just look over to your left --”
“Na-uh-ah, you’re not allowed to say anything except ‘hotter’ and ‘colder’!”
Heck, I’ll give you a gas station horror story to fit the theme of the OP.
I was working early on a sunday morning, about 9 am. A customer comes in, looks around, looks out the window and approaches the counter. He looks me in the eye and asks:
“Where’s the nearest open gas station?”
Oh but wait, that’s not all. I had a teenage boy come in and look entirely around the store. BTW this is a gas station/convenience store. He looks at all of the coolers full of soda, then turns around and asks me:
“Hey, do you guys sell pop?”
And those are just the gross ignoramuses (144 times worse than a regular ignoramus). I had customers come in and take a pack of cigarettes out of the bin of generics that we kept on the floor, pocket them obviously, and then deny that they had taken any when I could still see them sticking out of their pockets. I had customers try to tell me that they had given me more money than they had. Heck, I had a guy whom I referred to as the Grim Cheerless Guy come in every week. He would actually get upset if I said hello. (I’m not kidding, in fact, he once ranted at me for ten minutes about how I shouldn’t say hello to people)
And here’s the kicker. The stations cash register was a horrible little old machine with some horrifying problems. It broke once and my boss called the technician. When the technician came, he wanted me to take all of the money out of the cash drawer just in case the tech might want to steal it. Not so bad you say, right? Wrong, my boss specifically wanted me to EMPTY THE PENNY JAR OF THE THREE PENNIES INSIDE.
And that’s when I shot him your honor.
Oh excuse me this is the pit…
And that’s when I popped that motherfucker goddamn piece of shit.
I had a winner last night, friends and neighbors! Guy spends 2 hours in the truck stop laundromat. He comes up numerous times for more soap, quarters, etc. Finally he comes up and says, “Where do you keep the stuff that gets bleach out of clothes?” I said, “Excuse me?” “Yeah, I got all these little white spots all over my clothes.” I’m like, “Oh, you mean the magic wand!” Also last night: Phone rings.
Me: “(name of truck stop). Can I help you?”
Dipshit: “Yeah, you got any hookers working the lot tonight?”
Me: “Uhhh…I don’t think so. We run them off when we see them.”
Dipshit: “Oh, well, I was going to send my wife up there to work!”
Me: “Try (name of truck stop across the road).”
I called the place across the road a few minutes later and they said they sent the guy back over to us. God, people scare me sometimes!
Yeah, today I had to sell printers again. Not that I mind, but some people are fucking ignorant to a fault. This couple comes in today, and I ask if I can help them. “Laser printers” the man grunts. I point out the two we have, and ask why he’s interested solely in laser printers. “Work printer. Don’t like ink jets” he grunts. I ask why he doesn’t like the inkjets, and the nature of the printing he’s doing at work, and do you print paychecks, or anything? “I don’t like them damn slow inkjet printers. Too slow, bad print, break down lots. I just print documents, no paychecks.” I try to explain that the problems experienced with older inkjet printers have long since been eradicated, that the quality is actually higher than lasers now, can do color, faster than lasers, double sided printing, etc. “NO INKJETS! I don’t LIKE them.” Alright. So I backoff. “Besides, I gotta print checks.” Um, you said you didn’t have to. “They’re not paychecks. They’re just checks.”
So anyway, I give up on these guys (man and wife), they’re fucking hopeless. I wander off, and they’re over looking at office jet printers. Um, yeah. Those, sir, are inkjets, like I said when you first came in, we only have TWO lasers.
Jesus, man, I’m employed here for a fucking reason. I KNOW what I’m fucking talking about. Dammit. Why the fuck don’t you at least listen? I could have saved you three hundred bucks, gotten you a FASTER printer than the one you picked out, gotten you BEAUTIFUL color, AND double sided print, for like three hundred less. Dick.
THEN, later on, headcase and wife set #2 come in. The guy says he wants a lowend (!!) inkjet, for printing photos. So I start asking questions, do you have a digital camera (no), do you plan on getting one (of course), do you know what type, and as soon as I ask if he knows what type, he looks me in the eye and says in the most condescending tone I’ve heard in months and says “I REALLY don’t see HOW this has anything to do with printers…” Whatever, dick. You think you know more about these than I do. Take your fucking pick. Go ahead and buy some random inkjet, and a few months later when you realize you’re fucked because it does shittier pictures than a drawing by your alzheimer’s ridden grandmother, then see if that condescending fucking tone suits you well. Ass.
–Tim
I was the manager of a video store down in Florida. You should understand that the only reason I was the manager of this store was that the head honchos kept firing everybody because the store wasn’t making a lot of money, ignoring the fact that it really was in a poor location – no visibility from the main road, a dangerous intersection, and a parking lot from hell that would take nerves of steel, fierce determination, and as much as 10 - 12 minutes to escape from. Anyway, I was assistant manager at the time my boss got fired (for no good reason), and not having anything else to do, I became store manager.
It wasn’t a very good scenario, from a company point of view, since by then I was really good friends with all of the other regular employees, and now I was their boss. So, they basically knew that they could get away with a lot, and beyond not always discouraging what the district supervisors might have called “inappropriate behavior”, I often joined in, and occasionally instigated.
We had names for our favorite regulars. There was “stinky man”. He was older, and drove a rattling, smoking, rusting, old grey Cadillac. And he smelled like he hadn’t showered in months. Other customers would complain about him. I actually had to follow him around the store with a can of Lysol, spraying down the sections he had just vacated. He never noticed.
There was the guy we simply called, “The Leper”. Now, I know that isn’t very nice, but this guy would come in about twice a week, and he had some sort of terrible skin disorder which caused him to flake little bits of himself off wherever he walked. One of my employees refused to take money directly from his hands, and always washed up vigorously after serving him.
“Bass Boy” always came pulling up the store in his $500 car with the $5000 sound system, rattling the windows of the entire shop with the THUMPATHUMPATHUMP.
There was this cute little girl named Summer, who the first time she came into the store, ran over to me and asked, “Are you my daddy?” Her mother, quite embarrased, snatched her up and said, “Summer, I thought I told you to stop asking everybody that.”
There were a hundred wackos that came in every week.
I work for a cellular phone company. I also live on the coast. When we have a hurricane, our company gives hundreds of phones (300+) to local emergency personnel for use during evacuations and clean-up. We don’t charge them for equipment or airtime…just long distance if they use it and even then, we rarely bill anyone (unless they use hundreds of dollars worth). This is something we do as a public service and we don’t get anything out of it except the reputation/exposure to some potential large accounts.
During last year’s hurricanes, we actually got screamingly cussed out because we told one group that wanted to borrow phones that they’d have to charge their own batteries. One group bitched us out because we only had numeric pagers to lend them, not alphanumeric. When the phones are returned (and this is a struggle in and of itself), they’re generally just thrown into a box, not packaged like they are when they’re given out. Usually, antennae are broken off and equipment is missing or broken. Some of these peole actually write their names ON THE PHONES THAT THEY BORROW with permanent marker. Last year, I got a call from the airport saying they had found a couple of our phones on a plane.
It seems like people would be appreciative of this FREE service and wouldn’t just trash the things they’ve borrowed. And it would be nice to get through a season without being cussed out by the people receiving this service.
We have a great big sign right over the beer cooler that says “BEER IS SOLD IN ORIGINAL PACKAGING ONLY!” Why oh why do these fucking morons keep coming up to the counter with ONE can of beer and then get pissy when I tell them they have to buy the whole 6-pack? “I only want one!” they’ll say. Fine. Drink one and stick the rest of them in that little red Subaru out back. We have a stinky man, too. He smells like he sleeps in a bed of cat piss. The boss gets mad 'cause we keep charging off Ozium on the store account but if he wants me to work there I have to be able to breathe. Oh, but wait 'til you run into a bull-hauler (or even worse, a hog-hauler) who’s been on the road for two weeks and hasn’t bothered to shower. They’ll spend $15-$20 on air fresheners for their trucks but won’t shell out $5 for our showers (towel, washcloth, and soap included). Is there no sanity left in the world? Did I mention the fraternity pledges who come in once or twice a year with women’s underwear on their heads to buy a Playgirl and harass a truck driver into signing the centerfold’s penis?
My worst customers (drug store):
The old man who complained that he just knew my pharmacist was taking the medication out of his prescription capsules and putting something else in them, and then selling the medicine on the “black market.” He just wasn’t feeling any better taking his pills, so we must be evil.
The woman who tried to return 20 boxes of Monistat, ($10 a box), because her doctor told her not to use it. At the time, this was one of the most shoplifted items in the store (might still be.) Cursed me out big time.
The woman who locked herself in our ladies room and took a whole bottle of Excedrin, saying “my life is shit!” I felt sorry for her at first, but the squad guys who came to get her said she was a regular for them, and knows it won’t kill her, and just does it for the attention.
OMG where do I start? When I worked at a lumber yard I would get customers who had to talk to a man. Thay would actually say “Is there a man I can talk to?” And then here are the construction workers who hand you $ soaking wet from their ass sweat.
One day at a Hallmark I worked at a woman asked me for a “congratulations on becoming a (female) minister” card.Oh yeah, there’s a whole section of those.
At another store a woman returned a t-shirt because it bled. She proceeded to yell at me and tell me that our company should test wash every single item we carried.
Then there is my personaal favorite from working at a record store. “do you have that song they play on the radio?” Which one? “You know, that one they play all the time.” Oh, THAT one.
Now I stay home and hear all day: Juice, mommy. Juice mommy. Juice mommy juice juice juice juice juice. Pleeeeaaase. Juice juice juice. Good thing she’s cute. 
My fave was The Smellinator. The guy was like 400 lb, which is his business I suppose. But apparently his arms weren’t long enough to wash the important parts or something. He had this nasty clinging fermented reeking stench that would gag a dock rat with breath to match. He constantly chewed on a dead cigar and the overflow spit kept most of his chins wet. In the two years I worked there he always wore the same clothes with the same stains.
We knew his car and no matter how cold it was we always opened both doors when we saw him coming, to get a cross wind going. Us guys usually weren’t all that chivalrous, but for this one we let the dames hide in the warehouse while we tag teamed him through the store, and for once they didn’t give us any shit about being chauvenist pigs. He liked to stand too close when he talked, so we ended up backing away from him for laps around the store. I actually had to relieve my partner more than once when I saw him start to heave from the stench. The guy had this unkillable '60’s Dodge van that I got him to chat about because it got us outside where I could stand upwind while we picked his order. We always carried it to his van so he wouldn’t come back inside. I got to deal with him the most because I have a strong stomach.
He never noticed any of this.