yams!!, that’s so cute! I have to wonder what the story is behind those people, but at least they are sweetly and entertainingly weird, unlike so many weirdos encountered in the customer service world.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any good stories, though I’ve put in a couple of years all told in retail. Any stories I’d have would be about idiots, not crazy people. And I don’t have any really good ones there either, oddly.
From the first page (dairy allergy guy) :
Grilled Cheese and Cream of Tomato Soup?
We had some weird customers that used to come in Family Christian Stores when I worked there. It was an older gentlemen and his two adult daughters. Whenever they came in, we automatically shifted positions so that there was an employee always keeping them within their vision as much as possible. I was told that the girls had been caught putting cassette tapes in their pocket (the kind you use for back-up music to sing at church).
Then the one time that I actually rang them up at the register, the man hands me his Pastor’s Discount card (we offered all pastors this card, I think it was 15% all purchases. We called it the “Pastor’s Perks”. They didn’t have to prove anything, just write the name of their church down). Then he hands me a Bible to buy. It’s in a box with a $15 or so price tag. Because I’d been warned, I open the box and check the ISBN of the actual Bible against the actual box. They don’t match. Turns out the Bible in the box was supposed to be $80. He mumbled and grumbled slightly about the “mix-up”, and had me find the cheaper Bible for him, but everyone tells me that it seems to happen to him an awful lot. I guess in his mind, he wasn’t exactly stealing the Bible if he paid something for it!
The other funny thing I remember is from my cinema days. A woman walks up towards the box office and I say “May I help you?” She immediately starts screaming and cussing me out, because she’ll tell me what she wants when she’s ready. Then she threatens to climb over the glass and cut off my hair!!! After the other cashier sells her her tickets, and she walks off, I turned to him and said something about her obscenities, and she came back screaming “I’ll use all the obscenities I want” and cussed and threatened quite a bit more. Then she finally went back to the concession stand, told the girl back there she was the nicest person who had ever waited on her – nothing like the girl in the box office. And again reiterated the whole cutting off my hair thing.
After that my manager told us that if anyone ever cusses at us to call him and he will immediately escort them out.
Was his gardener’s name Fernando?
Yup.
I was hired help, the boss lady made the call.
He owned a mansion and a yacht, of course.
I worked in a coffeehouse through college that was located a block away from a mental halfway house. I don’t even know where to start with some of the more interesting customers.
There was Ray, the hockey fanatic with a lazy eye who wore Chicago Wolves memorabilia apparently every day of his life. He would occasionally approach the counter with three or four balloons, and politely ask the staff if we would inflate them for him. He did this with me, and, somewhat puzzled, I agreed. As soon as I went to tie the first balloon, he stopped me, and asked me to just hand him the balloon untied. I finished blowing up the rest of the balloons and he went into the back room (the smoking area). I never did find out what happened to the balloons. I’m wondering if he was breathing my air or something. Nobody else ever did find out what happened, either. He never did end up tying them.
There was “nice jazz” man, who was a cute old man in his 60s, sweet as a button, as long as we were playing some Duke Ellington or Bill Evans or something big bandy. (We had a strict instrumental-only music policy at the cafe, mostly jazz). As soon as we put on Coltrane or Miles Davis, he would go apeshit crazy, ranting about how we should put on some of that “nice jazz” and not this music, because it sounds like the musicians were on drugs. I mean, it was incredible to see the effect the house music would have on this one guy.
There was the arty lady who would come in and do her watercolors at the cafe, except instead of using water, she would wet the brush by sucking on it. When she was done with one color, she would just suck it off before dipping her saliva-soaked brush into another watercolor in her tray.
Another guy would come in, sit down, and write music on a large sheet of manuscript paper. I approached him once, asking him what he was composing. An epic symphony called “Jesus in Hell,” he explained. I then got into a whole conversation where he explained to me that he’s literally been in hell. I asked him what it was like. “A red light. A green light. A yellow light. A blue light. All spaced equidistantly on a three-dimensional grid, going on to infinity. It was absolute torture.” Um, okay. Then I asked him how he got to hell. “I was pushed in.” Who pushed him, I asked. “I can’t tell you that, because you’re a Freudian.” Okay. Meanwhile, I spy the music he’s writing, and while it doesn’t look like complete nonsense, the time signature he has written in the staff does not match up with the music he’s writing.
I wish I had kept a journal during those years, because I know I’m missing some of the better customer stories. But there was always a general sense of craziness around the cafe, customers and staff included, that it’s hard to remember any in particular.
Well, to be fair, a lot of people figure it’s worth a try because most businesses will go against their refund policy if you’re assertive. Assertive, not abusive, but a lot of these dipshits get the two confused.
Having worked at Borders, you and I know that Borders ain’t one of those businesses. But I worked at Spirit Halloween Superstore last year, and they have a no-refund policy–but anyone who was assertive while being polite and decent could get a refund or exchange if they wanted it badly enough. Sometimes when someone really wanted a refund and they were being nice about it, I wanted so badly to tell them to stand up for themselves and ask me to get my manager, but obviously I couldn’t. Oh well.
I bet she didn’t tip, either. They never do. The worst are the people who come in and order 8 different drinks for their coworkers, each of whom want 18 modifications in Starbucksese, which we have to find someone to translate, and then the bitch doesn’t tip after sending back her own drink to be remade “upside-down” or some bullshit.
Our Borders was a favorite hotspot for the local homeless population, most of which were rather nice, but some of whom clearly kept coming back just because it was so hard to get kicked out of our location. It didn’t bother me–they gotta go somewhere, anyway, and it might as well be somewhere safe–except for Captain Jack. The Captain always looked like he came straight from an 18th century story on the high seas and had clearly met his last shower in 1985 at the latest. His BO would give him away before you actually saw him, and he left a cloud of stink at whatever table he chose that lasted until the next day. He would throw a tantrum when we didn’t have free food samples out, which of course resulted in less food samples coming out (we were fairly liberal with them before he started whining and stamping his feet). That would be understandable, but either he had an extremely slow metabolism or he managed to find enough food to sustain himself fairly well–not to mention that he often brought food from other stores, in a possibly pre-millenial pizza box, with a gigantic Arizona iced tea bottle that he asked us to refill with water, and a plastic bag full of condiment packages and napkins he’d collected from various places. We had to keep an eye on him to keep him from hoarding our napkins and plastic utensils.
If he didn’t bring in food from somewhere else, he would lean over the counter (bringing his ungodly stench right up our noses) and dump handfuls of coins on the counter and then make us count out enough to buy a bagel. Once he got his bagel, he would find a book of jokes and then come up to the counter and shove his way in front of other people to show us a joke every few minutes. He also had the less-than-amusing habit of moving over to another table to join a pretty young lady (sometimes one with a small child!) without asking first, and then not saying a word to them, making them wallow in his BO. Once we disabused him of that habit, he started bothering us even more, especially the young and pretty female employees. I had to throw him out once when he read a joke to one such employee and, when she went to the back room to get some dishes or something, he started pounding on the wall next to the door going to the back. The other time I had to throw him out was when he sat himself up against a corner of the magazine section and spread his legs out while he was reading a mag–not a problem except that he had a big hole in his pants in just the right spot to show one single ball to most of the store. A couple of freaked-out teenage girls went to a manager (also young, female and pretty), who begged me to kick him out for her as she now had the image of that stinkball tormenting her. In the Captain’s defense, he was pretty agreeable that time. But he was less agreeable when we committed the horrible crime of asking him to leave at closing time every day.
Good Og, I wish I could forget that smell.
At first I thought they were completely nuts. Once the dinosaur ordered his $110 bottle of wine, I went and told the manager “Umm… Manager, a stuffed dinosaur just ordered a bottle of wine?” Meaning, if these people are crazy and can’t pay for their stuff, I dont want to be responsible for their bill. Manager told me as long as the dinosaurs are over 21, they can drink as much as they want, dont worry about it.
I ended up chatting with the woman a little bit at the end of the night. She was a teacher at one of the local high schools, where all of her students thought she was crazy, but she didnt mind. The gist of things, as I interpreted, was that she knew it was a little weird to bring in a bunch of stuffed dinosaurs, but she didnt really care, because she enjoyed doing it.
A follow up to the story, a couple months later, Friday the 13th rolls around again, and who should return to celebrate Prehistoric Creature’s Day? Not only the original couple, and all their prehistoric friends, but another (human) woman, who had come along to celebrate her first Prehistoric Creature’s Day. I had already been cut, so I didnt get to wait on them, but I had come to work prepared with my stuffed teradactyl. I went to say hi, and then alerted a manager to the fact that the Dinosaur People were back and he should go say hello. When he lamented his own lack of dinosaur, I loaned him mine.
He went to the table and was like “I thought I was the only one who celebrated Prehistoric Creature’s Day” and whipped my dinosaur out from his breast pocket, and the people were like “You cant fool us! That is yams!!'s dinosaur!”
Totally awesome people. Much better than the shriveled old prune who ordered a shrimp cocktail for her entree, then berated me for 5 minutes because we didnt have any cocktail forks she could use to eat it with. Who eats a shrimp cocktail with a cocktail fork? Just because they have a word in common does not mean they actually go together. Would she have wanted a cocktail fork to go along with her Cosmopolitan? (Probably she would have. Thank God she was drinking wine.)
love
yams!!
Hellboy from pulykamell’s story reminds me of The Prophet. The Prophet, upon finding out which of the employees were atheists, would (sometimes literally) corner us one at a time and go on and on and on and on about his religious theories. He was way into numerology and had a bunch of other weird interpretations of Biblical passages–for example, he once argued that ugly people:
Know they’re ugly
Resent beautiful people for it, and
Constantly seek to destroy every beautiful person and thing they come across.
His evidence for this was
and
I love the dinos! I will also now celebrate Prehistoric Creatures Day, but I’ll probably do a take away. (and will have to rummage in the attic for the kids’ dinos).
I can’t think of any customer stories at the moment, but I love the thread. Keep 'em coming!
The next one isn’t until June.
This, by far, is my favourite part of the entire story. I’ve got tears running down my face from laughing so hard.
Good on you and your manager for playing along, yams.
My goodness, me too! I might even wear my dinosaur shirt on Prehistoric Creatures day (yes, I have a dino shirt, and I’m quite proud of it).
The weirdest customer I encounter at work currently is a man who calls the reference desk about once a week. I’m a circulation/reference aide at our little academic library, and got lots of his calls over the summer especially. He was writing a book on god-knows-what, but his questions were always about the bible, Nostradamus, or various other doomsday prophesies. Once I found myself researching lists of potential anti-christs for him. He was an utter nutjob, but we all agreed a harmless nutjob. One day he called asking for info about something or other ridiculous (usually the questions were basically looking up definitions of words, easy), and as he often did, just kept talking.
“I met Jerry Garcia once, you know,” he says. I feign a minimally appropriate interest. “And get this: I met him a diner in Tucson, and told him about a book I was writing.” Poor Jerry, think I. “And the name of the book was Grateful Dead. And, well, you know, the rest is history. He took it right off me.”
“Fascinating,” I say, because it’s all I can say without laughing in his face.
There was also the illiterate ant lady over the summer, and the air-popcorn lady at the movie theater, and Angry Man at the sub shop, but maybe those stories shall wait for later.
This sounds like me ordering bacon. The cooks never believe me … De gustibus non disputandum, right? I like my bacon nice and black and crunchy, doesn’t mean I’m crazy!
Does it? :eek:
I know a guy like this, who insists that every game idea he thinks is cool was stolen from him, and that the fact that he works for $8/hour today is the fault of those bastards he was working with who somehow cut him out of the project. (Not his own, despite the fact that he’s accepted and then stepped down from a raise to $10+, and has never shown any ambition to rise any higher up in the world.)
I once got a guy working at a Dunkin Donuts shop to set the toaster on fire because I asked him to keep toasting my bagel again.
That might be the one time my bagel was over-toasted.
Heh, my MTI was quoted on a T-shirt as saying “Pushing Texas. It never moves, but I keep trying!” 
When I worked as a delivery driver at Wing Zone, I was once persued by a one-legged drunken elderly black man in the Bryan ghetto.
Don’t worry, he didn’t catch me, my Grand Am could go a lot faster than he could. 
In the opposite direction, one of my supervisors was a guy we’ll call M. He drove tanks in the Gulf War, and I don’t know if he had PTSD, Gulf War Syndrome, or maybe he was just always an asshole. He’d be fine to talk to, then he’d get worked up, then he’d go raging asshole mode, then he’d go outside for a smoke and he’d be fine again when he came back. The problem was, if he got worked up and then a customer came in and said something that would trigger him, including the “Maybe you could make just one hot wing so I can see if I’ll like it?” line that we were all tired of. Seems that hot wings are a bit pricy to purchase from Wing Zone if you don’t already know you like them. Moreso once you realize how rediculously cheap and easy they are to make at home.
Oh, and any conversation about crazy customers has to include a link to Shortpacked!.
I think the gardner was Ricardo, though it is possible I got the gardner/lover and the invisible friends names mixed up.
Slee
Do you know whether your encounter with the guy happened before the murder? 'Cause if the name was the same, it sounds to me like you were on the phone with a dead man. Not invisible, but also unable to speak for obvious reasons.