50 Customer Service Workers Share Memorable Interactions That Continue To Haunt Them To This Day

I've told this before, but I once worked at a pizza place and some dude came in and wanted a pizza with every one of our toppings. We had like 12-15 different toppings, and there was no way they were going to properly fit on a medium. We told him he could do it, what the price was, and that it wasn't going to cook properly because pizzas aren't designed to cook with that much s**t on them. He said fine.

So we cooked it and it was all f****d up, and we gave it to him. A few minutes later he comes back and said "Yeah I f****d up. can I just get a meat lovers?" Paid for both, probably threw the first one away. Only time I've really ever talked to someone like that who admitted being the problem.

We was on a big job in a town centre and could hear some woman shouting. She was having a full argument walking towards us but we couldn't see who she was arguing with.

When she saw us looking over confused, without breaking stride, she said "don't mind me lads I'm f*****g mental" and went back to her argument, now obviously, with herself.

I have a million stories but today I'll share this one. It's been posted on social media before but it was a few years ago so let me try and remember how it went:

I was working at a theater one morning and an old man scoots by in a wheelchair. He lingers by the service desk so I ask him politely if I can help him. He responds in spanish, asking if I speak it. I understand it but can't speak it so i shake my head. "Parli Italiano?" I ask. He says no. Asks in French, if I speak French. I say no. We bounce between languages for a minute until finally he asks if I speak English. I sigh, because it was the language I greeted him in, and say yes. He asks if we have a lost and found and I ask him what he's missing. He holds up a hand missing a finger and asks if we've found one. I, unfazed, respond "no sir, not today" . He wheels off.

I’m a nurse practitioner, I have hundreds of stories! My favorite is the old man who we prepped for an endoscopy procedure and part of the bowel prep was giving him apple juice mixed with a laxative. He was old and starting to show signs of dementia but later on he calmly and lucidly said “ma’am if you ever make my butt dribble like that again I will find out where you live and whatever hell juice you gave me and pour it down your throat too” deadpan! No grin no humor, to this day I don’t know if he was mad or kidding! 🤷🏻‍♀️

Worked as a dog bather- and had this corgi named potato. He was friggin adorable. I don’t know what I really expected but when the owner came to pick him up he was this big body builder covered in tattoos and he had this lime green leash and when potato saw him he got excited and this big Greek statue looking guy just yells ‘potato! Stop that!’ And I still think about it.

I was a supervisor at a call center for a major online retailer who was involved in a data breach a few years ago. As usual, we required all of our customers to change their passwords.

I had to take over a call from a lady who was absolutely refusing to change her password. I tried to explain as nicely as possible and she kept me on the phone for an hour insulting me and screaming about how wrong this was.

Ultimately she told me that I, personally, was worse than Hitler and that making her change her password was an offense worse than the Holocaust. No joke. I am not exaggerating at all.

Told before but it is good.

Woman calls pizza restaurant for delivery and requests shortened delivery time. Manager tells her we can't do that. Woman gives up and calls competing pizza place. Woman calls us back and tells us that the other place could do what she wanted. My manager, confused, expresses that he is happy for her. She calls back again and tells the manager that nobody better vandalize her house because she cancelled her order, and if her house gets wrecked she will know it was us. My boss, even more confused, assures her that no one cares enough about her cancelled order to seek retribution, and that lots of people cancel orders. Seemingly satisfied she hangs up and we think that it ends there. About an hour later, 2 police officers show up to talk to the manager. This woman pre-emptively called the cops on a pizza restaurant for a hypothetical crime that hasn't happened and wasn't going to happen.

Once worked at a store and an old man bought a huge bag of carrots, and looked at me and said “these little guys make me real happy”

I work at a pizza delivery business. Had a lady one day call in and order for delivery.

Sure, what’s the address?

“I’m not going to tell you.”

I’m sorry? If you don’t tell me the address, how are we supposed to deliver to you?

“I don’t know what the address is!”

Well, if you don’t know where you’re at, again, how are we supposed to deliver to you?

“So you won’t take my order?”

Not without an address.

“Well! I guess I’ll just order somewhere else, then!”

I guess you will.

Librarian: oh, it looks like you have an overdue book. A biography?

Customer: Oh, yeah. Jesus told me to burn that one.

Librarian: ...

Customer: Will there be a fine?

I've told this story somewhere else, but in a nutshell:

Back when I worked at a hardware store, I had a woman scream and cry at me for using my item scanner on her items because its laser would "make [her] sick" and/or "make [her] sickness worse." Her basket was stacked and she was effectively asking me to hold the line up for a half hour to dial in her product codes manually. She also screamed if I made eye contact.

When she left she told me something to the effect of "I don't want you to get hurt, but if something bad happens to you, it's because I'm thinking about it."

Retail!

I used to work at a store that sold movies, books, music, and video games. There were plenty of interesting characters that came in, but I'll never forget one customer in particular. It was the middle of the summer in Texas and had been raining on and off all day. This old man walked in wearing a trench coat, winter boots, and a trapper hat. He had a long, gray beard and feathers in his hair. He had a walking stick with all sorts of little rocks, beads, and bells tied around it that made noises when we walked.

And he was accompanied by a wolf. An actual wolf. He breifly walked through the store and grabbed a small journal. When he got to the counter to check out, he noticed I was distracted by the wolf that was nearly eye level with me and holding a steady gaze.

"Are you gonna ask if it's a service animal?" he asked, motioning towards his wolf. I shook my head no. "Good. The last person to ask didn't have a good day. It doesn't matter if it's a service animal when it's a f*****g wolf, idiot"

He then tapped his walking stick on the ground several times shaking his head and walked off into a thunderstorm, never to be seen again.

In my first years in the Army I also worked a part-time job as an optician in the local mall.

One day a lady came in with her mother (about age 40 and 60) and they were quite hyper and giggling at each other. I asked if I could help them and they had a prescription for lenses. No problem.

She then asks if she can use her existing frames, and I was like "Sure, we can just do lenses." She proceeds to hand me a pair of extremely cheap sunglasses she got from a dollar store.

I told her that there was no way those glasses would stand up to having lenses changed out. She insisted that I "already said she could." I asked her if she was sure, because it was almost guaranteed they would be destroyed in the process. She still insisted. I pointed out the sign we had up saying we weren't responsible for damages (it was next to the register) and asked her one last time. She said yes again.

Ok, I put them in the hotbox (a box of heated sand you use to loosen up plastic frames to get the lenses out) and they melted into goo pretty much instantly, as expected. She was over my shoulder watching with these wild eyes, and when I pulled them out after a few seconds she started screaming about how we destroyed her glasses and now we owe her free glasses. Her mom got in on the action at that point and started shouting also about how I did it on purpose.

I handed them back to her and said something like "Ma'am, I told you so." They went into even more hysterics and by this time were attracting glances from passersby at the mall. I just walked into the back room to the lab guy and was like, dude, you deal with this, I'm done.

I then watched as he masterfully over-charged her about $100 for a $20 frame (it was on the display rack for $100, but we had a pile of the same frames in the discount drawer for $20), giving her a "20% discount" in the process. I was there when she picked them up in about an hour, acting like she won the lottery at my expense because I was so incompetent.

I was still young and had no idea the insanity people would go through to save a few dollars and "stick it to the man."

At a coffee shop, we had a customer come in one day and tell us in a very awkward and stilted manner that he would like to become a regular, but that he wanted a wordless transaction. He would come every day at the same time and get the same drink, and he wanted us to ring him up and give him the drink without anyone speaking to him. It was definitely weird, but we did it for him, passing the info along to the other staff as a kind of tribal knowledge, and he did come every weekday and buy his latte, without speaking to or looking at anyone. It worked very well until one day I was working with a new girl and I had stepped into the back room to get something, and I suddenly heard him screaming out front. The new girl had said, "Hi, what can I get you?" and he responded by screaming in her face, "What the f**k is wrong with you? I told you f*****g people not to talk to me!" and storming out. We never saw him again.

When I worked in thrift store, it was protocol for the production workers to write a number with a red dry erase marker on all of the electronics, to indicate the date they went out on the floor. This would help determine which items to get off of the shelves if they had been sitting there too long and weren't selling. It was also our policy that electronic items were final sale because people would buy them and break them or remove parts, and then try to return them.

A woman came in one morning trying to return a small flat screen tv. I explained to her that all electronics were final sale, and showed that it was indicated on her receipt. I was feeling generous that day since she was polite, and considered returning it anyway if it wasn't working, so I asked her the reason. She pointed out the little red dry erase number and said "I need to return this because it has the mark of the beast on it." I was taken aback and asked her to explain further. She explained that she took the tv home and when she plugged it in the tv displayed static and a low frequency sound that hypnotized her and her children. She said that Satan was trying to communicate with her through the tv. I didn't know what to say, so I just explained to her that the dry erase is just the date and showed her that it rubs right off with my thumb. The number was not 666 by the way.

I broke policy and allowed her to exchange it for something else, all while having no idea how to react to what she just told me. You bet your a*s as soon as she left I went and plugged that tv in to see what happened and of course it was normal.

I work in the customer service for a hiking association and we had a lady come in, complaining about one of our staffed cabins. Got to the point where we had to call said cabin and inform them.
Started phone call with - "I'm here with a nice lady..."
As she proceeded to yell out - "I AM NOT NICE"

Thanks for stating the obvious.

I used to work at McDonald's. A very well-dressed and well-groomed man asked for a cheeseburger without onions and we gave him one. He came back up a moment later, ranting about how the person who made his burger was trying to kill him.

I started to take it back to the grill area to be remade, but noticed that there weren't actually any onions on it. I gently mentioned that I didn't see any onions but could he point out anything on the burger that he didn't like and I would get him a new one.

He snaps up to his full height and announces, "OF COURSE THERE AREN'T ANYMORE." (I hadn't taken the burger out of his sight.) He told me in detail how the CIA was after him because of his top secret research. They had operatives all over the city to compromise his food and they had probably just switched it back when I wasn't looking. He certainly didn't blame me for the onions.

I got him a new burger, and every time he came in after that, he waited for me specifically because he knew I wasn't a plant.

I work at a paint store. There was a woman who came in several times, and was a massive pain in the a*s every time. The first time, she kept asking for a color called linen. It went something like:

"my son had his house painted in linen and it looks so beautiful, he's got it under the chair rail through the whole house, and a darker color on top and...."

Okay ma'am, do you want a sample of that color?

"yes, I want linen"

(I try to pull up the color) Okay, so Sherwin-Williams doesn't have a color called linen, but I have the formula from a Ben Moore linen, porter paint, and another competitor. Do you know which one it was?

"it's linen"

I understand, ma'am, but these are all different colors, and to make sure you get the right one, I need to know which company he got the paint from.

"I want linen"

Which linen?

"I want linen"

Seeing that this conversation is going absolutely nowhere, I pick one at random and send her away.

A week or two later, I was working late on a Friday, which meant I was the only one working. I have a line out the door, and I pick up the phone while trying to juggle mixing orders and taking care of other customers. Surprise, it's linen lady. She wants an estimate for how much paint she needs. Easy enough, I try to get her to give me some rough measurements of the area to be painted. She starts in on this long rambling diatribe about her two tone color scheme and the chair rail through the house, while I try to interject every few minutes with a "yes but the measurements". After fifteen minutes, I simply cannot stay on the phone any longer because I can't do my job with her yapping in my ear. I tell her to consult her painter and hang up. The first and only time I've ever had to hang up on a customer.

A couple weeks later and she's back in the store. She's unhappy with one of the colors she selected to contrast the linen. But she can't remember which color it is. I look through her order history and find nothing. She then tells me she got it at another store. Okay fine, I go into the online system to pull her orders from the other store. Meanwhile, she calls the other store to pester them about it. Thirty seconds into the call, I find the information, but she cannot be stopped. The other store finds the color eventually, and she picks a color chip off the wall and brings it to me. Says this is the color, and she doesn't like it. I ask if she wants me to adjust the color, or something else, but no, she just wanted to show me the color she didn't like, and went to pick out a completely different color.

I still cannot figure out what the f**k is going through her head. Probably nothing at all.

A woman came in and wanted a morning after pill. While my co-worker was getting it, she told me about the sex which made the pill necessary, with focus on the guy's d**k (it had been a disappointment, and apparently why she decided she didn't want the guy's children after all). Since she didn't speak the language very well this was mostly done with gestures and facial expressions, but I unfortunatly got the gist.

When I worked at Home Depot, a customer tried to return a door that had been installed in their house for 20 years. Literally 20 years. I was only 4 years older than their door back then. I was floored by the situation.

They had the receipt, but the receipt showed they bought it at some mom and pop store. That store had since gone out of business, and the customer argued, "Well, I'm gonna buy the new door here! This place has enough money to refund me and I have the receipt!"

He kept screaming that he had the receipt and did not understand why that receipt being from another store made his point invalid.