Oh, Humanity

[23quarius]

Alright, we gon' have a thread for ... Mostly retail situations, I'm sure, but I have faith in humanity to deliver amazing stories for those who don't or haven't worked in retail but in something else.

I'mma lazily post WineWarrior into here as tale #1.

The woman who stole some wine from the fridge in the Cafe display, opened it and bottoms upped while everyone just watched (I mean what are you going to do, tell her to put it back? Backwash Bordeaux) in one go like a professional kegstander as she strutted outside, threw the bottle straight onto pavement as she marched into traffic across the street and went straight into the gym.

[Derp]

YAAAAS. This is the thread we need in these dark times.

[Wizz]

One of my own personal favorite tales is Shameful Shitter Lady.

I was working in the electronics department of a K-Mart (which, o god, perhaps should tell you everything already, it is/was a Cursed Chain) and had a family who came in once a week like clockwork to work out their domestic issues in front of our DVD bargain bin.

I don't really know what the deal was with them, I tried to stay as far outside their orbit as possible, but I am not kidding. Mom, Dad, and Teenage Daughter would come in mid-argument and just stress out for a good thirty minutes or so, and then wander to another department.

That was mildly weird, but the moment I still think about to this day was when Mom came in alone, in such a blind panic that I thought someone was actually chasing her. She ran up to me and I braced myself for trouble, but she just breathlessly asked me where the bathrooms were. A bit flabbergasted -- she'd had to have gone past the cashiers at the front registers and the customer service desk to the far end of the store specifically to ask me -- I pointed out that it was in the opposite corner of the store.

I had never actually seen a fully grown woman run the way she did in the direction I pointed, so I just stared after her for a long moment until my manager called for assistance maybe five minutes later, and asked me to bring a mop to the customer service desk. DUN DUN DUNNN

anyway she had left a trail of little poops, all down the aisle, to the women's clothing department. Totally not where I had told her the bathrooms were, but what took the cake was the FUCKING ENORMOUS pile of shit she'd left us on the carpet. Under a pile of clothes she'd pulled off the rack to cover it up in shame, like she was a fucking cat without a litterbox or something.

Nobody could find her, so I could only assume she had dropped her load and just...left.

We literally never saw that family again.

[il-volpe]

My ex works/ed in insurance. Somewhere out there is a guy who changes his legal name to offensive things and applies for auto insurance and, when he's denied it because his name creates a hostile work environment for the insurance company, tries to sue for discrimination. So they had like three days of really awkward meetings at ex's work about a person legally named "Super N*** N***".

[23quarius]

@il-volpe ...were they Thai?

[il-volpe]

@23quarius I dunno. Ex said it was a thing that insurance companies had warned other companies was happening and he'd had other offensive names.

ETA it was the full-on -er spelling also, not a sound-alike thing.

[23quarius]

@il-volpe Ohhhh. Okay. I just know Superporn is a Thai name. So Super_____ I thought "mmmaybe it's an unfortunate Thai name?"

[Jennkryst]

Customer places an order over the phone: I want to order a Cheesesteak with Everything.

Me: Alright, so when you say everything....

Everything.

Me: Okay, I will read out what everything means. Lettuce? (yes) Tomatoes? (no) Fried Onions? (no) Mushrooms? (no) Banana Peppers? (no) Bell Peppers? (no) Sweet Peppers? (no) Mustard? (no) Mayonnaise? (no) Ketchup? (yes) Oregano? (no) Black Olives? (no) Oil? (no) Vinnegar? (no)

...

TO THIS PERSON. 'Everything' MEANS 'Lettuce and Ketchup'.

They are singlehandedly the reason why I always read off every weird topping when people ask for everything. And I will give some people credit, they do in fact say yes when I get to like... 'Are you SURE you want Ketchup on this Italian sub?' But holy shit are most people dumb.

[il-volpe]

@jennkryst If I say, "Mustard and drag it through the garden, please," about my sandwich, meaning all the veggies but just the one sauce, am I being annoyingly twee or helpfully succinct?

[Too Old For This]

@il-volpe I ask to 'drop the garden' when I don't want the full compliment of veggies on something. Maybe I'm just old, but that's been food service lingo for as long as I can remember.

[Ominous]

@jennkryst said in Oh, Humanity:

Customer places an order over the phone: I want to order a Cheesesteak with Everything.

Me: Alright, so when you say everything....

Everything.

Me: Okay, I will read out what everything means. Lettuce? (yes) Tomatoes? (no) Fried Onions? (no) Mushrooms? (no) Banana Peppers? (no) Bell Peppers? (no) Sweet Peppers? (no) Mustard? (no) Mayonnaise? (no) Ketchup? (yes) Oregano? (no) Black Olives? (no) Oil? (no) Vinnegar? (no)

Who the fuck puts ketchup or lettuce on a cheesesteak? The only acceptable toppings for a cheesesteak are cheese whiz, american cheese, provolone cheese, swiss cheese, cheddar cheese, onions, mushrooms, peppers, mustard, or mayonnaise. Maybe, MAYBE pizza sauce, depending on the location you are purchasing it at.

[Wizz]

The Tale of the Teleporting Creepy Gernan Lady.

So I actually worked at two consecutive K-Mart electronic departments in two different states, the first in Virginia and then in Utah.

One day in Virginia, this elderly woman came in to the department looking for something, and stayed to make me incredibly uncomfortable by flirting with me. I am sure she was just having a laugh and teasing, but I remember being really unsettled because it lasted FOREVER and she had this cataract in one eye and a strong German accent and I don't know, the combo wigged me out for some reason. One phrase she kept using over and over again was, "boy, you're a sweet Spring chicken, eh?" And then she'd wink and cluck her tongue.

Anyway, this wouldn't have even made my top twenty Weird Shit moments in my life, except that within a few months for Reasons, I moved out to Utah and started working at the K-Mart there.

The second week after I began, I shit you not, the same fucking lady came in. And she absolutely remembered me, because she began flirting and repeating the same phrase. "Boy, you're a sweet Spring chicken, eh?" Wink, klk-klk. Didn't say a thing about having met me before.

I fucking thought I was hallucinating, so I just stared at her and said nothing, and after a minute she left. Would have been appropriate for her to cackle like a witch and disappear in a cloud of smoke or something but like, she just gave me a little frown and walked away without another word.

Utah is a popular destination spot in the winter, we get a lot of international tourism, and the store was near a major highway, so this German lady on holiday stopping for supplies or whatever made sense in retrospect, but...man. I have never had an ASTRONOMICAL coincidence like that before or since.

[Derp]

@ominous said in Oh, Humanity:

Who the fuck puts ketchup or lettuce on a cheesesteak?

WHO THE FUCK PUTS KETCHUP OR LETTUCE ON A CHEESESTEAK?!

[GreenFlashlight]

Once, more than a year ago, I was in line at a drive-thru. When I got to the window, the teller told me the person in line ahead of me had paid for my order.

Now I do it all the time. I want other people to have that surprise.

[Derp]

@greenflashlight said in Oh, Humanity:

Once, more than a year ago, I was in line at a drive-thru. When I got to the window, the teller told me the person in line ahead of me had paid for my order.

Now I do it all the time. I want other people to have that surprise.

Someone did this for me a few weeks ago and I was so weirded out by it.

[23quarius]

@wizz said in Oh, Humanity:

The second week after I began, I shit you not, the same fucking lady came in.

The fear.
Like, the "I need to burn all my IDs, cancel all my credit cards, and buy an emergency supply of amazon gift cards so I can have all my personal belongings strategically mailed on a round robin rotation 10 to separate 7-11s" delete-your-whole-life adrenaline spine drop fear
Of seeing some lady follow you not only out of a state

but to UTAH

[MisterBoring]

Oooh. My turn.

Here is the tale of "Why You Shouldn't Do A Shitload of Meth Before You Attempt To Shoplift".

As a younger internet miscreant, back in the days when some areas of the country were still having to make long distance phone calls to get dial-up internet, I worked at a store that was a sort of a weird combination of Blockbuster Video and a Tower Records, but without any sort of corporate oversight.

At the front of said store, in our meager music section, we had a music demo kiosk, where we had the new releases we were pushing as well as a few albums selected by the employees as a poor attempt to humanize the store. You could walk up, put on headphones, and waste time listening to a full album without paying for it. The empty cases for the CDs being displayed were there as well as copies to buy.

One evening, about an hour before closing, around the time we lock one of the two double doors to sort of indicate we're about to close (this fact is important later on), a guy and his girlfriend entered the store doing their best impressions of this famous Monty Python sketch:

The entire time they were doing this, their eyes were glazed and they would lose their balance every thirty seconds or so and have to catch themselves on whatever was nearby, be it the candy rack, a rack of rental movies, or the magazine rack. Each time, they'd knock stuff in the floor, making a mess for us to clean up, and immediately look at the nearest person and laugh when they righted themselves.

Eventually they worked their way all the way around the store and ended back at the CD preview kiosk thing at the front of the store, where they tried to look cute by listening to CDs together, by holding the headphones between them. As they were looking at the CDs, they kept looking back at the cash register area, and laughing. Eventually they silly walked over to the cash register, and set a bunch of the empty CD cases from the kiosk on the counter, as though they were going to buy them.

I look down at the cases, and as I'm about to say something, the girl laughs obnoxiously, grabs the empty cases, and both run for the door. The guy makes it through the unlocked door without issue, but the girl slips, and smashes her face into the pushbar on the door, crashing into the floor. As she picks herself up and pushes herself out the unlocked door, he's made it through the outer door of the store, and realizes that she's not keeping up with him. He turns around and because he doesn't have good control of his own equilibrium from whatever drugs he was likely on, he continues wobbling off the sidewalk and into the parking lot, just in time to get hit by a Volkswagen Beetle. The older kind, that was basically made of old APC metal and never dented. He gets knocked down and skids about 10 feet away as she gets out the door and screams bloody murder before picking him up and they both just laugh and continue running off into the night.

The entire time I'm just standing there watching this in bewilderment, because well, it was store policy to let the shoplifters run off to avoid possible violence, and also because the store manager was there and said to just let it go because it was empty demo cases.

TLDR: Two meth heads attempt to steal empty boxes and then perform a Buster Keaton routine attempting to flee the scene.

[23quarius]

Holy shit that's some uh, internal injuries

[mietze]

I had a fraud check cashing person literally take off running from my teller station once when I told her it would take a moment to validate the check, even left a flip flop behind, and as she bolted out the door she got run over by the bicycle cop who liked to cut through our parking lot.

[Ominous]

@mietze said in Oh, Humanity:

I had a fraud check cashing person literally take off running from my teller station once when I told her it would take a moment to validate the check, even left a flip flop behind, and as she bolted out the door she got run over by the bicycle cop who liked to cut through our parking lot.

Bad boys, bad boys, whatchya gonna dooooo? Whatchya gonna do when we fail to yield to you?