Sigmagirl has much better grammar and punctuation than that reviewer. Given the reviewer’s writing skills, I don’t want to imagine what the book being critiqued must be like…
Incoming wall o’ text
Oh boy, you get some real winners when you work in fast food. Being the literal bottom rung of the working world means that every so often you’ll get someone who’s not too far above you on life’s food chain come in and just unload on you over nothing. You get used to it after about two months, but once a guy came in during a weekend breakfast rush and ordered the hotcakes. This was a normal looking middle aged suburban dude, but he leaned over the counter and told me that if the hotcakes weren’t hot, he was going to come over the counter and shove them up my ass. I made sure that the guy got a brand new order, nothing from the bin, and handed them over. 10 seconds later shoved his way back to the front of the line and threw the pancakes at me and literally dove over the counter swinging. Luckily for me I’d taken a second to tell one of the on duty managers what had just happened and this dude had played division 1 football before losing his scolarship due to injury and he literally grabbed the guy out of the air and frog marched him out the door like he was all of about eight years old.
Now if you’ve ever worked for the Clown you know that it was about 10,000 times more likely that I would have been assaulted, fired for it, and the customer given a stack of free meal cards for his inconveniance, so this was damned near a miracle. Wherever you are today Jeff, I hope it’s somewhere good.
More recently during the Absolute Financial Meltdown of 2006-8 I had a mortgage broker come into my office after me when one of his deals fell through. Dude was in the process of going from being a six figure a year man to a living out of a box man thanks to his business literally crumbling in front of him nearly overnight and this deal was the straw that broke the man’s mind. I’ve never seen another person so absolutely seethingly livid in my life, and this was after bending over backwards to try and save this sorry hunk of predatory lending for him. I was absolutely certain that he was going to swing at me, and the only thing I could think of was that I was not only going to be in a fight with a lunatic, but that no matter what thanks to our Zero Tolerance policy on violence I was probably going to get fired over it to boot. I wasn’t as scared of the altercation as I was scared of watching my own career go up in flames in front of me.
I wasn’t physically scared, but mentally I was terrified. My house, my car, everything could be gone in an instant and there was nothing I could do about it. Luckily a Senior VP heard the commotion and was able to get him calm enough that he just burst into tears and ran out, but for the next six months or so I was sure he was going to walk in with a gun at any moment and just blow me away.
I’ve been threatened at work a few times. Once was another staff nurse who told me she wasn’t happy that I had written her up (I had to–the narcotic count was off and she was the last person in the narc box–this was a few years ago) and she was gonna “meet me in the parking lot some fine day and show me who’s boss.” This woman was in her 50s then. She also worked nights and I worked days, so we’d never meet in a parking lot. I documented her remarks, just in case.
The other threat had nothing to do with me at all. Another nurse’s personal life imploded with her husband holding her down with a knife to her throat while her 11 year daughter and the nurse fought him off–he was arrested, and eventually went to prison for this. But in the months just prior to this, she was trying to get him out of her house and away from their kids etc. He was getting more and more unstable. She would tell us these stories (no doubt trying to process them herself and cope), and we all started to wonder–is he going to show up here one day with a gun and kill her and the rest of us? It was truly a tense time.
Continuing the threadjack for a moment: I was curious about the author’s Amazon page and was kind of shocked to see that she’s not a kid! Like I thought she was some fresh-out-of-school would-be writer, but her photo is of a much older person than I expected.
The whining you hear after bad reviews - does it run a broad spectrum of ages and background? (If that’s something you ever know. I don’t suppose authors include the DOB with their biographies or anything.) Like are some genres more prone to upset or anything?
When I worked retail, in my twenties, I once stopped a thief from stealing a camcorder we had placed on a bulkstack at Christmas time. (It was one of those big VHS models.) I saw him pick it up and head for the door, and being 22, large, and stupidly reckless, I walked up to him and took it back. Someone called for security, and off he fucked.
The next day I got a call from him, or someone claiming to be him. He said that he’d waited in the parking lot so he could find out what kind of car I drove, and that he’d followed me home, and that sometime soon he was going to come to my house and kill me.
I was riding the bus then and lived in a security apartment, so I was dubious of his veracity.
When I managed the movie theatre, I got a much needed and long awaited day off. The manager of the theatre a a couple of blocks away took over for me. He told me that while I was away he asked one of my employees to walk a couple of bags of popcorn over to the other theatre. The employee refused, saying that that was not part of his job. The manager told him that it was indeed part of his job. A big fight ensued, and the manager fired the employee.
I heard about all of this the next day. A few minutes later, I heard someone knocking on my office door. It was the employee. He told me that another manager couldn’t fire him since I was the one that hired him. I told him that his firing was valid and I was going to stand by it. I don’t remember everything that happened, but at one point he had me up against the wall, threatening to kill me. I could tell that he had a really violent temper and he might do just that. I stood my ground, though, and somehow calmed him down and got him to leave. I was scared shitless and had to sit for about half an hour after that to stop from shaking.
And of course, I was sure he was going to come back and make good on his threat. He eventually did come back to talk to me, but I wouldn’t let him in my office. An usher stood by in case anything went down. The fired guy thought that was ridiculous and laughed about it.
The kicker is that I got another job a week or two later. The fired guy went to the corporate office and threatened people there – so they gave him his job back.
I had a crappy retail job briefly in my late teens. Some guy with baggy jeans tried on some M.C. Hammer style pants, then left in a hurry. A co-worker checked the dressing room and sure enough the guy was trying to walk out with a pair under his jeans. He ran like the wind, completely wiped out near the mall water fountain, but still managed to get away. A few hours later, he called the store pretending to be a lawyer threatening to sue for beating him up. He just did NOT have the acumen to even come close to faking how a lawyer talked. So he was trying to threaten us, but not very successfully.
However, at the same store, a female employee was fired for stealing from the till. In actual fact, the new manager had a very poor grasp at basic math - I believe someone once said she had the IQ of a speed bump - and did things like process returns as sales. So when the till was short twice, the head office determined that the only thing the two short tills had in common was an innocent employee who had the misfortune of working both of those bad math days. Problem: employee had a temper. She hid around the corner of the nearest mall exit and pounced on the ditzy manager the day after she was fired and an epic catfight ensued, with ditzy coming in tow work with two black eyes the following day.
I don’t recall ever being seriously threatened by a customer, just co-workers.
Oh, the author has several replies to the review, and these replies are also a hoot.
The whole thing with that author is breathtaking. Between where it starts on BigAl’s, to the discussion on Amazon (and 99 reviews taking the book down to less than 2 stars and counting), and 8 pages on Fark.
Astounding. And I hope she never figures out where Big Al lives…