Writer, reviewer, and host of the @LowStakesShow, Terence Wiggins, also known as The Black Nerd, went to Twitter to share an interaction with a customer he won’t forget anytime soon because of how haunting it was.
Back when he was working at Starbucks, one day he was cleaning the restrooms and knocked on the women’s restroom door to check if anyone was inside. Lo and behold, there was, but instead of casually saying it’s occupied or something among those lines, he got a very angry “WHO IS IT?”
He also asked folks who worked similar jobs to share their haunting conversations with clients. And boy, did Twitter deliver!
“I usually check my Facebook Memories first thing in the morning and I'm constantly reminded of the years I spent working at Starbucks,” Terence explained the origins of his tweet in an interview with Bored Panda. “I don't remember which memory made me ask the question but I'm sure it was something bad.”
Needless to say, when the tweet started racking up likes left and right, Terence was very surprised when the counter nearly reached 10,000 for both quoted tweets and likes. While he does have a modest follower base, the tweet went beyond the usual metric.
“It just exploded and I started seeing replies and quote-tweets from celebrities,” elaborated Terence.
Stories from workers in retail, restaurants, and the like often circle around customers from hell as most of these places are very accessible to anyone and so the chances of running into a difficult clientele are high. But that’s not the only reason, as explained Terence:
“I think there's a certain type of person who views customer service workers as less-than or someone that they can boss around without any consequences. It's really not most customers, 90% of customers are fine but there's a 10% that have a brain that's a jar full of angry bees and they have to let it out on someone who can't do anything about it.”
As mentioned previously, Terence’s tweet inspired quite a lot of people to share their experiences.
These included everything from exposing mistresses to customers discussing wounds to elderly people shouting gun violence hypotheticals.
And then there was this 6-tweet story by a guy who used to work at a Taco Bell and had a client who was described as a satanic cowboy who took half his order before storming off, then returning after about 20 minutes, getting upset about his other half of the order, which he wrongly remembered, and then chanting in Spanish, while his bodyguard counter-chanted something as well. That one also received over 8,000 likes.
Now, in some cases these difficult customers might just have interesting personality quirks or could just be tired, but in other cases they could also be inherently angry, sad or straight up weird if they act that way in public. So, we asked Terence what his take on this was, and he had this to say:
“I think it could be both. There's harmless people who have weird personality quirks or are tired or some such thing and they will definitely say something weird that'll stick with you. On the other hand, there are people who have some inherent anger or sadness that they've decided to take out on other people and that other person is usually an employee getting paid minimum wage and can't possibly fight back.”