Nightmare customers and general bat shittery - what are your stories?

I'm guessing that staff member wanted it for their own tea.

This is a brilliant thread, I am literally sat here with jaw ache, my mouth won't shut! Just when you think you've heard it all, something else comes along! Astounding!

I was shopping in Morrisons recently and picked up a desert and was asking DS if we should buy it. A staff member came over and took it off me and walked away. I was shocked and tried to ask her what was going on but she went into the back and I was left just sort of a bit stunned. There weren't any others left.

To be fair, if he wanted a Fosters, he should have drunk his own "offering"!!! 🤣

I can understand that, but this was for an ECG, it takes about 10 mins from parking your car to setting off home. I hope you didn't call the staff foolish.

Just remembered another one from when I was a student and had a weekend job as an estate agent. One couple came into the office having seen a property in the window which they wanted to view. I said no problem and pulled out the diary to organise a time. But they wanted to see it 'right now' which was not possible as all the other agents were out on viewings and it was just me in the office. I politely explained this and they suggested I close the office and take them to the house immediately. I refused and then they demanded I give them the keys to the house and that they would pop them back in later. I said absolutely not as all viewings need to be accompanied. At this point they started to get angry that I would not just hand over the keys to an £800k house (1998 prices) with an added 'who do you think we are' to which I replied 'I have absolutely no idea as you have literally just walked in off the street'. At this the bloke exploded with rage calling me a 'jobsworth little prick', he then leaned across the desk and hissed 'I'm going to get you fired' at which point I finally stood up and was about a foot taller then him (blowing my own trumpet here but I was at the time playing county level rugby and was a big fucker) and suddenly he was not so mr hard man and I just calmly told him to 'fuck off.......now" and he slithered out the door. I saw him in the pub randomly a few weeks later as he was ordering a drink at the bar, I walked up to him and said cheerily 'any joy finding a house yet' to which he took a fee sips from his pint and left. Absolute arse of a man.

I was recently in the bank to get £2000 in cash out, rather than spend days getting it from an ATM.
The teller said 'We don't have that sort of money in here. Do you think we print it or something!' 🙄

Blimey, mine seems tame after this lot! However......
A lady came up to me when I was doing the trolleys and said she wanted to buy our toilet rolls, but they are now embossed, not flat and could I do something about it? I'm in the car park, pushing trolleys and besides, I don't manufacture the bloody things! I told her to speak to the customer service desk staff, which she did, but apparently she'd been in several times asking various staff members to " do something". Iron them perhaps?

And don't get me started on behaviour during Covid, I could write a book!

*the not through .

@LoveSandbanks "thanks sugartits" works well in pubs......not sure about other places .
Disclaimer that might just have been through pub I worked at :)

What IS the professional response to a customer calling you a cunt?

Managers should back up their staff whenever possible and there’s no way in hell I’d have let him travel!

A relative of mine was a holiday rep who lived in a resort. The hotel weren’t supposed to tell guests where the rep lived for obvious reasons, so instead a guest followed her back to her apartment then turned up every day at her door to complain about stuff. He would arrive at 6am, 11pm any time of day or night and the hotel refused to do anything about it.

I worked where people did fitness tests to qualify for clinical trials. 1 guy didn't pass the 1st test- height and weight. He tore up the paperwork and started eating it!

I work on the tills at a well known store. The majority of customers are lovely & as I’ve been there quite a few years, I get my regulars. Unfortunately you do get some rude customers. I go by the philosophy of always try to be kind because you don’t know what’s going on for someone but some people are just arseholes! I had a guy ask for change but we’re not allowed to open the till & even if it was open, we couldn’t for example swap a £10 note for 2 fivers. I explained this politely but the guy swore at me & shouted “ Remind me not to shop here again”. Wish I’d thought to reply “ If you’re not coming again then I won’t need to remind you”!
Our policy used to be that we had to honour the price on the shelf, whether it was correct or not, but now we generally go by the price on the till (with some exceptions). Again, most customers are nice about challenging a price but you get the ones that boast how they are in retail management & know the law. Sometimes they will have a go at me, even though I have nothing to do with pricing.
Very glad I don’t work on customer services as the staff there get so much abuse, verbal & even physical. An ex colleague had a boxed hoover thrown at her!

I've worked in customer facing jobs all my life and so often people just beggar belief. I have so many stories I wouldn't know where to start!

I do find it preposterous that customer service advisors are paid so badly. Currently looking for a new role and nothing over £23k. Basically pretty much min wage to put up with abuse and shite all day! Outrageous

I worked for a mobile network in a call centre back role - hardly spoke to customers, only rang them if they had a big issue.

One of my tasks was getting a list of customers who were passed onto debt collectors and claimed that they returned phone within 14 days of signing up/upgrade.

We could check on systems if both SIM and mobile were used and where. Sometimes we checked on eBay and some people have usernames which are their name followed by year of birth, football club etc and I found evidence of these selling their phone - including photos of the box with IMEI number which matched the phone details on the list from debt collectors. Sent screenshots of the auction and say "carry on with claiming debt" etc.

When I worked on cruise ships we had loads of people kick off that the ship wouldn't wait for them in port or that the ship wouldn't 'pop' I to a different port so they could have a look around.

We docked in Civitavecchia and advertised the Rome tour (which required a coach trip to get to) and people went mad that they couldn't see the Colosseum from their stateroom ("but we're in Rome? Why can't we see it?").

I had a gentleman shit himself and shake the turd out of the leg of his shorts and try to walk off as if this was perfectly normal. I had to catch him and ask him to collect his shit from the floor and in future use the toilet.

I used to work for one of the big mobile phone companies. We used to get customers kicking off that their new phone or upgrade hadn’t turned up. And I mean swearing, shouting, the lot.

More often than not said phone was already being used on a pay as you go number, also in their name, and making frequent phones calls to their main number! They didn’t realise we could see all these things!

When l was teaching it students weren’t allowed to wear hats indoors

One kid was a repeat offender. His mother said he couldn’t take it off as he had dyspraxia. The same woman accused one of the members of staff of sitting with her legs open.

Most of the time it is just bullies who are just seeing what freebies they can get if they kick off at someone they perceive as weaker or inferior then them i.e. anyone in a customer service role. I have stepped in on a few occasions when I have seen some poor 18 year old waitress getting picked on by some arse of man or woman. I used to be that teenager being shouted at for no reason so it makes me mad. I had an argument with a woman on the table next to me in a cafe who kicked off that the waitress had got an order wrong when the food arrived. She had not, I had overheard the whole order earlier, it was just that for whatever reason the woman had changed her mind and instead of owning that fact thought she would kick off instead. She absolutely hated being called out in front of her friends.

I worked in an upmarket optical practice in G Street. Several times a week we would get well-heeled women coming in wanting to look at upmarket flooring. The flooring company's showroom was actually in St G's Square. When I suggested they may have misread the address given on the flooring company's advert in the upmarket glossy magazine I was usually told quite rudely not to contradict them...

Dh did a temporary job at the local call centre cleansing department. (Emptying bins)

They used to get one guy ( who lived in our road!) phoning up and telling them they were a useless bunch of cunts every single day. And why wasn’t his bin emptied every day? Because there were useless wankers. Same time every day.

They used to just scroll on their phones till he finished. They weren’t allowed to do this unless this nutter phoned up.

Their manager gave special permission for phones on this occasion.

A patient phoned to cancel his appointment because, "any fool could see that was the day before his birthday".

I hope I get a call for an admission for the morning of the date of death that will appear on my death certificate. That would be super-efficient.

Named changed because this is a bit more specific than normal.

In a previous role, I was the HR rep on the implementation of a procurement system. We had to have all our staff data loaded so people could order stuff for their teams.

Someone mucked up the HR data and I wouldn't approve the data load, but the project manager went ahead with it anyway.

Comms included making sure teams had two weeks stock of urgent / essential stuff. No-one did of course.

When go live went wrong, as I predicted, I was not happy to get a call from a nurse telling me that children might die because she doesn't have enough syringes.

@sashh I had to postpone eye surgery as it was two days before my birthday. After surgery, you cannot tolerate any light and eye was so sore for 5-7 days.

I had blood tests on my birthday before