Workers Reveal Their Worst Customer Horror Stories
"The customer is always right." We've all heard that little nugget of wisdom.
But is it true? Anyone who's spent some time working in the service industry knows that customers can be finicky, snippy, and sometimes even just grade-A jerks.
Sometimes a bad customer lets their kids run around unsupervised wrecking things... and then blames a staff worker for not being a babysitter. Or adults themselves leave a huge mess for the staff to clean up.
More often than not customers are rude and have a tendency to yell when things don’t exactly go their way. It’s like these people don’t seem to have any understanding of that very simple golden rule we all (should’ve) learned as children, “
treat others as you would like to be treated.” Some terrible customer service stories stand out in worker’s minds more than others, and over on Reddit, the users decided to share their worst customer service stories with us.
Here are the worst customer service horror stories.
38. Watch Your Own Kids
Basically, I was working the summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college at a science museum in South Florida. That day I was an operator for the Mars Rover ride.
It's morning and we have a few families and couple of summer camps running around ages 7-12, and so I was pretty busy stopping the ride to tell the kids to sit down and stop hitting each other—the ride had a monitor so I could see inside.
It starts to quiet down as one of the camps goes to lunch so there are not so many people, but since I'm running the only ride in the museum and kids are still flocking to me constantly.
So I'm running the ride and this family of six (mom, dad, aunt or something, teenager, older kid and little kid) come up and wait in line. The little kid is going crazy running around.
NONE of the adults do anything to stop him, and I don't cause I'm busy watching the monitor since the little monsters on board have already gotten up and switched seats mid-ride twice.
I was on the in ride intercom telling them to sit down when I hear a howl-scream from the line area.
The little kid had run into the metal chain (at neck level) that we kept separating the loading area and the line area, and had fallen backward.
The mom marches up to me and starts screaming about how I wasn't paying attention and I let her kid get hurt. I stand there like a dummy ‘cause I can't believe she’s actually mad at me. She makes me get my supervisor to get me fired.
I'm right there and she’s telling the supervisor what an incompetent worker I am and that I have no business working around children. My supervisor, who is awesome, says very calmly, "Miss, this is a museum, not a babysitting service.
You need to keep watch of your children, not the ride operator."
The lady and her family of goons storms out. She called the city for poor safety but the city only told us we had to change the chain separator to plastic or rubber. The maintenance guy did it the next day. He looked at me and said, "
you know things are going downhill when you have to idiot proof a museum."
Did I mention it was my third day on the job?
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37. Top Pocket
I worked in the gaming department of an amusement park. I was working a game near our water park and a very large woman paid me with money she fished out of the top of her bathing suit.
36. Gobble Gobble
Having owned a grocery store for many years I've had some great and some really insane customers. The one that sticks out the most was a lady around Christmas time. She bought a frozen turkey from me and left happy as could be!
A few days later she comes storming back into my store, she proceeded to throw this bag of turkey at me and starts tearing me apart for the subpar turkey. "This turkey was so terrible I couldn't cut it, and when I did it tasted awful,"
this went on for a while, "I had my whole family there for dinner and this turkey ruined the entire meal" blah blah blah...
As I took the turkey out of the bag to check, I noticed that she had managed to cook the thing in the plastic wrap that all frozen turkeys come in. Even after pointing this out to her, I was still the bad guy. I couldn't win...
after that we referred to her as the turkey Nazi!
35. Round and Round It Goes
I worked at an amusement park in the kiddie ride section one summer when I was 16 years old. I was working these little motorcycles that basically just go around in a circle like a merry-go-round.
Well, the seat belt was a chain that you would latch into itself.
Anyways, this kid starts crying ‘cause he wants to get off so I let him off, go around and check all the other chains again (like we were drilled in training to do) and proceed to start the ride.
Well, some dummy decides he wants to unlatch his chain, and then his (I would have to assume) 50-pound head causes him to just tip right off the bike.
Well his parents start screaming at me. And I mean SCREAMING at me...the kid wasn't even crying or anything, and I ended up being told I had to take drug tests and fill out all these reports and stuff so I said screw it.
Not because of the drug tests, rather the hassle of suspension and all that stuff.
So I go in the next day, quit, and just walk in and play in the park all day in uniform.
