To ask for your most "You couldn't make this shit up" stories...

[TurtleCavalryIsSeriousShit]

I work for a retail company at our head office. We received a call from a man who wanted to exchange 2 garments as he bought the wrong size.

No problem.

I ask for the product codes on the labels.... took a while but he found them. All the while he is telling me that it is for his customers in Brazil. How he likes to get them presents, etc, etc. So sounds like a competent manager type, possibly business owner.

I ask what sizes does he have and what would he like to swap them for. This is when it got a little odd.

For some reason he just couldn't find the size on the label. Next minute I hear him shout:

"Jessica! Jessica! Susan!! Oi, I need a woman here! You woman know size labels! Susan!"

So 'Jessica' comes running up on the other side and finds the size for him. It's a size 3-4 kids t-shirt.

Then he starts saying to 'Jessica': "This won't fit, will it? Do you think it will fit?" 'Jessica' sounds unsure.

Next minute I hear him shout: "Bring me a child! Get me a 3 year old! Yes, yes, just get me a child! A 3 year old!"

He says: "Turtle, I'll phone you back in a minute" and puts the phone down

Dumbfounded, we're all wondering what the hell kind of business this man is in if he can just conjure up a child of a specific age? My colleagues make me promise to ask him his business, just to put our minds at rest.

He never phoned back! I guess it fit the 3 year old child they found for him?

It was just such a bizarre conversation. Have you had any weird or wonderful stories to tell?

I worked in a nursery years ago. One of the parents asked if we were open Christmas day. When we said no, they asked would we consider opening Christmas morning just for a few hours.

@CorBlimeyGovenor OMG I am so glad I read all 8 pages. Your last post had me in stitches

I went to see my mum, taking my dog with me. For reasons unknown, the dog had a shit in the boot of the car on the way there. The car absolutely stank so when I got to my mums house I took the dog into the house, grabbed some cleaning stuff and went back out to clean the boot.
My mums house is an odd layout - it's one building side on to the road, my mum had 2/3rds of the house furthest from the road, her neighbour has the third closest to the road. Which means we have to pull past the neighbour's house to get to my mums drive (neighbour has a parking spot opposite her front door across the shared driveway)

So I'm out there with the boot open, cleaning the boot and the neighbour comes out, says hello and gets in her car to go out, she starts to reverse back towards the rear of my car, space is tight so I stood to one Side of my car to give her a little more space. She reversed into my car denting the rear bumper. I waited for her to get out and apologise but she just drove off.

I waited at my mums until she came back and she completely denied hitting my car (there's no way she didn't feel it)
It went through the insurers and she refused to admit it until the day she died even though she knew I was there and I watched her do it.
I'm just glad I moved out of the way as I would have been squashed between the cars

@Corblimey

@ihaveagoldenticket it's so frustrating when you KNOW you've seen it and the other person denies it. I will never be that brave to just deny something with a straight face. How do people become like that?

When I was younger me and a couple of friends went on holiday to Ibiza, stayed in a hotel that was very basic. One night I’m sitting on the floor in the kitchen when my friend opens a cupboard door, and when I looked up to her there was multiple used tampons all hanging in a row on a rail. That was hard to try and communicate to reception...

Turtle I know! I was pretty gobsmacked when she lied to my face. And how much she was willing to go through to keep the lie going. She wasn't a very nice person anyway to be honest so I don't know why I was so surprised.

I worked in harvey Nichols over one christmas about 20 years ago.

On christmas eve, we knew lots of people came in and scoped out what they wanted to buy on boxing day.lots of them would move items from one floor to the next so they could come in and pick it up. No one would be looking for a dress on the mens floor.

What they didnt understand is that when we closed Christmas eve we would move stuff to make room and bring old stock out for the sale. We would also tidy up the same as any other day and out things back where they should be.

On boxing day we had a woman, I am guessing around mid 40s, laid on the floor rolling round, screaming and crying because the dress she wanted wasnt where she had hidden it on christmas eve. She did continurd for 12 minutes, everytime a staff member tried to speak to her she screamed louder. All the while her partner is stood near by looking rather unperturbed and bored. Then security appeared and had to convince her husband that if they didnt leave they would end up calling the police because they didnt want to pick her up and carry her out.

The husbands response was 'yeah fair enough. It's ok for you though, I deal with this all the time'.

He told his wife they needed to leave. She instantly stopped crying, stood up dusted herself off and very calmly said 'oh ok then' and walked out like the last 15 minutes hadnt happened.

There were toddlers looking at her in bewilderment. The whole floor had gone silent and no one moved until she disappeared out of sight on the escalator.

My DGD had a new mobile phone, she kept getting the calls which say' we believe you have been in an accident'. In the end the next time, she answered Yes and I died, the reply was that must of been awful for you.

Years ago as a teen I worked as an office clerk for an eftpos machine company.

I worked on reception sometimes in the office, anyway had an elderly man turn up to buy some paper roll (most people rang up and ordered to get it delivered), normal procedure was to put onto customer account and get them to pay by direct debit.

Elderly man wanted to pay by cash but didn't have exact amount, except this is your bog standard office so no petty cash. As an eftpos company, we obviously said he could pay via the reception eftpos machine instead of not putting it on the account.

He went off at me, saying what a useless company blah blah, surely if you rent an eftpos machine you have an eftpos /credit card In the end it went on his account...

I've worked in hospitality all my working life and as a result nothing surprises me any more.

I have so many stories and they nearly all involve shit and vomit. People are grim.

@Theknacktoflying

I once took a call from an irate professor who was convinced that we had stolen his money as he had paid ££££ for some shares and we had only sent him a certicate for 100 shares with a nominal value of 10p.

I don't understand this.

I don't understand this.

10p is the nominal issue value of the shares, it is how much they cost originally, not how much they are worth now.

For example
The current buy price for Next plc (NXT) Ordinary 10p Shares is £56.76 so to buy 100 of them it would cost you £5,672 plus dealing costs.

Using this as an example the professor would have paid over five grand and thought he had been given shared worth £10.

www.hl.co.uk/shares/shares-search-results/n/next-plc-ordinary-10p-shares

I'm a police officer and responded to a call about a domestic, father calling in to say his two adult sons were fighting and smashing the house up, mention of a knife etc etc.
Get there and all seems calm. Dad's on the sofa watching TV. I asked him what had happened and where the sons are. He says, AND. I. QUOTE:

'They're upstairs, they're 6 and 8 and wouldn't go to sleep so thought you could scare them, I made that up cos I knew you wouldn't come otherwise'

Well my response was not the most professional I've been in my career I'm sure you can imagine.

@Magenta82

That makes sense now.
Thanks for explaining.

I used to work in the call centre of a well know credit card company some of the calls I dealt with:

A guy who screamed down the phone at me that I had ruined Christmas because I wouldn’t increase his credit limit. He hadn’t paid a bill on time all year and it was Christmas Eve.
This one may out me, the customer who required their statements to be couriered because her post was been intercepted by high ranking relatives in the Saudi government and they were trying to ruin her credit rating and reputation. A Direct debit wasn’t acceptable. The call went in for over an hour with her story getting more bizarre with what these relatives had done. They had altered her parents marriage certificate so she couldn’t prove she was of Jewish descendant and that they had also had her dentist install a tracking chip in her tooth.

These are brilliant. I may have told this one before, can't remember tbh. Years ago I worked for a distance learning college on the telephone advice lines. Every week same day, same time I'd get a phone call from "Gary".

Gary "afternoon Miss Holiday"

Me " how can I help you today Gary"

Gary "I want to discuss my course options".

Me "not a problem, which course would you like to take next"

Gary "chemistry A Level"

Me "we can't offer you chemistry Gary as you don't have access to a laboratory. What about the other options we discussed last Friday, Getting your Maths GCSE would stand you in good stead".

Gary "If I can find a laboratory, can I take Chemistry then, or I could make a lab easy, I'm sure I could find space".

Me "I'm sorry Gary the Prison you are in does not allow us to offer you Chemistry"

Gary "is that because I may set fire to things, I won't I promise"

Me "let's talk about looking at your Maths GCSE again"

Every week without fail, ever such a polite chap, who desperately wanted to take Chemistry. He was a convicted arsonist doing quite a long stretch, and he knew he was never going to be allowed to set up a lab in his cell (that was one of his suggestions). I think he just liked to chat to me, if his call ever went through to one of the others they knew to transfer him to me.

Some amazing stories here!

Very minor one - husband used to work in Tesco while he was living in the UK - one day this man came in the main door, picked up a tv off the display that was there, took it up the travelator to the top floor where they sold tvs etc. and demanded a refund. At the time, the store wasn't being overly picky about customers having receipts so he got away with it - they soon changed that attitude though!

I worked somewhere where we had standard charges for ‘research’. I rarely used the charging system especially if the research was very fast.

Journalist rang and needed a picture. Emailed it to him immediately.
Several hours later i get hauled into the managers office. There had been formal complaints made about me to him and to further up the chain for ignoring his enquiry. He had made out he had waited days for a reply (we had a 5 day limit for replying).
Anyway I was able to print off the enquiry and the reply 5 minutes later and it was all ignored. Turned out reply had gone into his spam account.

One week later he emails me for more things. I send him the charges for the research (which for him would be hundreds). He asked if I would do it for free...nope

@wheresthewine36
That's got to be CB hasn't it???!! 🧐🧐🧐

Another one: worked many years ago for the civil service. Was running an external recruitment campaign and sat on the interview board. Candidate had an interesting application that included previously working for MI5! Young chap comes in. Bit of a drip. Not particularly bright. So I quizz him about his time working for our country's security services. His answers centered largely around bedrooms. I thought that perhaps he fancied himself as a 007 secret agent involved in seduction and espionage. When asked whether he had really worked for MI5, he became indignant. "Yes, of course I did. MI5! You know, the furniture store! In the bedroom department". He had got confused and meant MFI!

I used to work in a large Central London hotel when I was younger. Lots of stories there, but not just about poop and vomit.
For example, our hotel had a big pest problem. It was not a particularly shit hotel really, it's just that most old buildings in CL have interconnected basements that also connect to The Tube and the sewers, so it is impossible to get rid of all mice and roaches. The hotel policy (unofficial of course) in case of pest complaints was to act surprised, apologize and move the guests to another room. Then send a housekeeper to the original one to change the sheets and generally freshen it up so that we could put the next arrival in there.
Once a guest came down to Reception with a huge live black cockroach on a folded napkin and covered by a glass. We did the usual song and dance with the rooms, took the roach from him and put it on a shelf in the back office. There it stayed until the evening because nobody wanted to touch it. Then the evening receptionist arrived, on crutches because of the recent knee operation. As soon as she saw the roach she started panicking and refused to enter the back office. The Security guy came to check what is happening so we showed him. He scrunched the napkin with the roach in it, threw it in a bin and squashed it with my colleague's crutch. It looked like something Dali would paint - a huge bald man in a plain suite attacking a rubbish bin with a crutch!
My colleague was not happy. She was worried that the roach could still be alive and did not want to touch that crutch any more...

Worked for a train company call centre. A woman rang up shouting all sorts at us because the rail replacement bus hadn’t turned up. She’d been waiting for it on the platform, next to the track. Being a bus, it had stopped outside the station, on the road...

@OhRuddyHell No, not CB. I suppose I shouldn't say really but fuck it, she was a piece of work. It was Lulu

@Thedot90 that is awful! Poor, poor guy :(

Some of the others are just so funny, and I am amazed at what people think they can get away with! However, I agree with @TheInvestigator the one about the dog on the long line being out of control.