Posted On March 19, 2015 By In Miscellaneous, Rants

Top Five Worst Customers I’ve Seen So Far

 
 

Okay, I will never be the first person to say that getting a job when you’re allowed to is a bad thing, but I’ll also never be the person to say that getting a job is full of sunshine and rainbows and that it restores your faith in humanity, because it doesn’t– that’s a lie perpetuated by movies and TV and the occasional blogger. Nevertheless, I still have a job, for, y’know, college.

To celebrate almost a full year in this particular job– whose nickname rhymes with Rickey Lee’s– I’ve compiled a list of the top five shittiest customers I’ve ever had to deal with, in the hopes that, if you are them, you’ll stop being an asshole to the people serving you, and if you’re not like them, that you never become them.

 

#5: The Guy Who Threw His Sauce At Me (Or just anyone who honks while in a drive thru): 

If you’ve never worked at a drive thru, you don’t know the horror that is impatient people. Impatient, self-entitled pricks who think they deserve their specific, special made, “fresh” meal within the two minutes it takes to serve anyone else– and they get mad when it’s not ready in time.

Like, excuse me, guy who ordered six orders of forty nuggets freshly made, I am so sorry it’s not ready in time for you to eat them all and die from a heart attack. But please, continue to honk your horn at me, as if anyone in this shitty place could ever forget you were waiting, and then please, by all means, throw the sauce I give you at the window, because I’m not a human being worthy of respect and some goddamn decency. But I digress.

 

#4: The Guy Who Always Wants Pump Cream and Senior Coffees for His Clearly-Not-Old-Enough Son: 

These people are the absolute worst. It’s the same guy, every day, like clockwork, coming in and wanting senior coffees for him, his son, and his son’s girlfriend, when he is the only senior out of the bunch. And not only does he want the cheap coffee price, but he also wants the pump cream. God forbid you give him the little cream cups, even though you have a line of people waiting to order and filling another cup with pump cream is tedious work, no, he needs pump cream.

And then he waits there. He waits until lunch starts, and tries to order double hamburgers– which don’t exist on the menu– and says he only pays 80 cents everywhere else and so clearly I must only charge him eighty cents. When this guy doesn’t get his way, look for some obviously racist insults on his part, such as screaming “DO YOU EVEN SPEAK ENGLISH” to my manager, who was, yes, speaking to him in English.

 

#3: The Lady Who Wanted Everything

There’s this lady who seems really nice, but is, in fact, the devil. She will come to the counter when you’ve just finished taking a long line of people and are running to get the food ready because your manager’s focus is the drive thru, and she’ll stand there for a few seconds, watching you run around, and then clear her throat and say, “EXCUUUUUUSE ME. HELLOOOOOO. IS ANYBODY WORKING HERE?” And I hate her.

Like, hello, lady, yes people are working here, and if you could stop being obnoxious for two seconds, I could get the food out and take your order. But of course, because she’s screamed, managers start to give me dirty looks and I have to go take her order. And then it goes something like this, “Well, I want– Ooh, what do I want… Hmm. Well I know I need a girl’s kids meal with fries, and– what did I want..” And it’s just this garbage for five minutes straight, before she finally picks something really simple like “oh, just a drink”.

And it irks me every time because I could’ve gotten three orders out in the time it took her to decide she just wanted a soda, but she’s so impatient to get her order in that she couldn’t wait to waste my time. And she’s not even done once she orders and has her food, no, because this lady wants everything done fresh. “These cookies are cold.” Yes, because you waited ten minutes before getting up to see if your food was ready, never mind that we’ve been screaming your order number for five minutes already. And then when the cookies are freshly made, she takes forever to get them, and claims they’ve gone cold again. And so on.

 

#2: The Lady Who Mocked Me 

Every so often, I’ll get a customer who complains about everything. And this particular brand of complainer is the one who never learns. She’ll have asked me about the different kinds of coffee we serve at least six times, and still need to ask me again the next time she comes in. She always gets a hot nonfat latte, so why does she need to do this?

That’s not even a big deal, people need clarification and I’m not enough of a prick to hate giving it to them. What I can’t stand is what happens when she pays. She pays with a twenty dollar bill, and, because of a brief scandal where I accepted a counterfeit twenty, I check it by holding it to the light.

Every single time, without fail, she’ll scoff, and say, “Oh yeah, it’s fake.” And when I give her the change, she’ll say, “HOLD ON LET ME CHECK IF THESE ARE REAL” and hold every. single. bill to the light, and check it.

Holy shit, lady, can I just do my job without some mocking? But no, she never understands.

But she still keeps coming.

 

And finally, the shittiest of them all..

 

#1: The Lady Who Is A Tramp

One morning, back when I was still relatively new at this job, a big family came in all at once, and ordered separately. The first order was this blonde woman who was a decent customer until she finished ordering. She went to the pick up counter and waited, and I took the next order.

She comes back to the edge of counter. “Excuse me, can I get my cups?” I smile tightly and hold up a finger so she knows I’ll handle her as soon as I’m done with the order. Suddenly, she comes onto the tile that signals where the customer floor ends and the worker floor begins. While I’m still taking an order, she leans into my face, and says, “CUPS.”

I say okay, that I’m with another person right now, but I’ll get her cups when I’ve finished. She glares at me, annoyed, and says, “Well you should’ve given them to me before you got started with him.”

When I tell her it’s company policy now to wait until the food is ready to give out cups, she walks back to the pick up counter, obviously irritated at having to wait two extra minutes for a cup. She sees my manager at the counter, waltzes up and proceeds to rant about how rude I am to my manager who is clearly taking drive thru orders, and gets more upset when my manager doesn’t say anything, but rather walks away to input the order in the drive thru. I dole her food out, hoping she’ll be pacified but then she yells, “I DON’T KNOW WHY YOU PEOPLE THINK YOU CAN TELL ME WHAT TO DO– THE CUSTOMER TELLS YOU WHAT TO DO.”

The end, right?

I wish.

When she finally leaves, I look over at the table she’d been inhabiting in abject horror. It’s covered in trash. There are wrappers on the table, on the floor, a tray haphazardly tossed in the corner, and the seats covered in some bizarre sauce. And to top it off, she’s plastered stickers, the ones we give to little kids, on the table, stuck on so securely that I need to scrub with a steel wool pad before it comes off.

And this is the part where I lost any hope I had that that job wouldn’t suck– the part where my manager looks at the table, back at me, sighs and hands me a towel and says, “Go clean that up.”

Thanks for being an animal, lady.

 

 

So for the love of God, don’t be any of these people. Please.

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Jackie is a college student trying to get rid of the french fry smell on her clothes and write stories that make people feel the things she's always felt. She hopes to become famous enough so her friend can eat the fancy bread they always have at award dinners. You can follow her daily life on Twitter @atragicthrill.