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

[saywhatnow1]

I have my own business doing dog boarding in my home. It's really successful and I love it. I also used to feed cats when I started, but I stopped that several years ago. Another thread I've been reading today, reminded me about some of my batshit customers, and what it can be like to deal with the public. Would love to hear some stories from others. Here are a few from me to start :

Was looking after a tiny dog, who kept biting me. The customer insisted that the dog must NOT eat from a bowl, but must be hand fed, and wanted it to be fed chocolate buttons! Obviously chocolate is poisonous to dogs, but this dog had been eating them for over 10 years at this point, so was obviouly used to them. Every time I tried to feed the dog it bit me. And proper nasty bites. My hand swelled up so big I couldn't drive, and I had to get a tetanus booster. If you walked past the dog, it would lunge at you and sink it's teeth into your ankles. After about 5 days of this, I e-mailed the customer who was abroad, and they called me that night. When I explained what was happening, and asked whether the dog could perhaps get collected by someone it would be more comfortable with, they said "Oh no. Buddy has been biting everyone for years. It bites my kids and my grandkids. No one will have him, they all hate him. Just go and get him put down please" 😳

Another lady wanted to put her dog in for daycare when she was at work. She wanted to drop her dog off at 5am, and collect it at 11pm! I explained that our opening hours were 7am-7pm, but that she was welcome to board the dog when she had long days at work. She was unhappy with this, and tried over and over again with long rambling texts, to get me to accept the dog from 5am till 11pm, because she "didn't want to pay any extra for boarding". 😵

I have had LOADS of customers pushing me, to let them collect their dog after 7pm. Sometimes wanting to stop by as late as midnight. No! I am not sitting here in my day clothes until that time. I want to get my jammies on at 7pm and have some semblance of a normal life.

I was feeding a lady's cat, and often it wouldn't come back for days on end. She kept texting me at 10pm, asking me to do a free second visit, to see if the cat was home. No! I was in my jammies and enjoying some wine. No, I'm not going back!

Oh, and there was the lady who said she'd be back at 5pm to collect her dog. 5pm came and went. I really needed to go out at 530pm to drop my car in for repairs. Tried calling her. Her phone was off. She didn't come back till 8pm!

Also had a lady come along with a beagle called Lucifer. She explained that he can't be left alone AT ALL. At the last boarder he was at, the boarder had gone out for 15 minutes to get milk from the shop, and when he got back his front door had been half eaten. Then she expected me to say, no problem, when would you like him to stay (what happens when you sleep, or maybe I wasn't meant to sleep?!"

Oh, and the last minute texts before a stay is about to start, with it casually thrown in that the dog isn't house trained. What? And you're telling me this the day before the stay? Well, he can't come then. Now what are you going to do?

These are probably quite minor compared to some examples others have!!

NOT 1111 1234, 3333

Not a retail one but in school the new Head of Department had a keypad fitted to the stockroom door so we weren't having to chase the key all the time, an excellent idea. However the next day he was going crazy at some Year 10s who were standing by the open door, grinning and refusing to tell him how they'd opened it. Eventually we worked it out, it was a cheap, mechanical keypad where the order of the digits didn't matter, he had set it so that we Maths teachers would easily remember it, pi, 3.142 but rearranged to 1234!

One retail one told by one of my Year 11 pupils, in 1996 there was a credible bomb threat and the Manchester Arndale was being very quickly evacuated, she was working in a cafe and they had people queuing to get a refund before they left! Half an hour later a large part of the centre of Manchester was destroyed.

Dentistry is no better than retail
pt emailed to complain we had given them something free - that’s happened a few times it’s weird
another made a formal complaint because the hygienist ‘made her teeth clean’
someone threatened to sue me because I asked him about his medical history- I have to ask It’s for his safety I told him to go right ahead
at some point in the last decade, one woman absolutely refused to let our female dentist do her checkup because ‘you’re a woman - you must be a hygienist’ - she would not have it that women can be dentists too

Sweet?! He waited until 5.30pm on Christmas Eve to get a card for his wife. It's not like Christmas is a movable feast: he had plenty of warning. I think the department manager explained we had none and ushered him out. I can't actually remember - him rolling under the door with a load of bags was quite spectacular and we were a bit taken back!

Same shop, we had a very old school manager whose job was his life. He used to bring his elderly mother to look at his shop during different promotions. In the run to Christmas one year one of my colleagues on the tills got a paper cut from some wrapping paper and rang her bell for a plaster. The manager came storming over, "Don't bleed on the stock!"

I’ve got a few, but my most recent one is a guest who booked to stay in my airbnb, then complained she couldn’t sleep because of the “noise” (we live at the property and manage to sleep with our windows open just fine). Ive had 3 years of 5 reviews but she gave me a 1 and FOUR pages of “advice” to help me improve - irrespective of the fact that she’s the ONLY guest who has been so wholly dissatisfied. This was AFTER I refunded her expecting her to leave - and she kept returning to see her friend, who empathised with some of her complaints but chose to stay rather than be refunded and leave.

She criticised my dogs living at the property (it’s at the family home) and approaching her because she left the gates to her accommodation open. Also she prefers the Cotswolds…. 😂 pets being at the property is on my listing. One is an 11 year old lab who can’t walk 5 metres without wheezing.

I live with two kids at my home and if someone is just going to throw bitchy looks and complain, I’d rather they just left. Rather than stay and make life difficult - she’s the only one I’ve ever had to propose that to!

Oh and at work - someone complaining a tree on a neighbouring property was a health hazard to his kids and that he was going to sue for when the inevitable happened and his kids were killed by debris…

We had said he could access our property to prune the tree but that wasn’t good enough.

I spent a good while in showing it was in fact HIS tree and so totally his responsibility. So if it was a health hazard that was his problem, not mine.

@JudgeJ This doesn't surprise me at all about the cafe customers. I used to work in Manchester right near where the IRA bomb went off. There was a series of different coded warnings for different things - back in the day when bombers used to warn you they were going to bomb you - and there was one that meant you evacuated customers and searched the shop. People would not leave, it was unbelievable. Or they would agree to go, but want to pay for what was in their baskets before they left.

Not retail but as a nurse Ive been sworn at, hit, kicked or spat on plenty of times!

My favourite direct patient quote though was during a cardiac arrest when they kept pushing their buzzer for attention. When told why nobody was available to help them at the moment their response was; 'I dont care if somebody is dying...I want a cup of tea now!'😦

I remember a few years ago, the day of the schools re-opening for the new school year. Parents knew the day about 15-18 months before as term dates for the next academic year are published about halfway through the previous year.

My store opens at 7am and a frantic mother comes in with child wanting to buy school shoes as he didn't have any. She was fuming as we didn't have his size in stock - on shop floor and in the back.

Yet I saw the mum and son looking at the shoes a few days before and they did have his size. WTF she didn't buy them then is another story.

"retailers and their staff are not responsible for people's bad planning"

@AnnieMcFanny- Did you read the post? This woman said her boyfriend would not amount to anything. Pretty nasty comment and also pretty human for the poster to enjoy some karma.

My MIL was one of these types of customer. Relished upsetting and causing trouble for other people, but she was ultimately a very sad, dysfunctional individual. We need far more accountability and consequences for these behaviours in society; nobody should go to work to be abused. Spitting, hitting, punching nurses? They should be barred from using the NHS and if they can't afford an alternative, tough shit.

Dirty Harry was right. Too many arseholes; not enough bullets.

I now work in a superstore that sells everything food, household goods, gardening and everything in between. A few months ago in the same week we had 2 shit related incidents.
First one was a lady asked to use the toilet, we don't have customer toilets, but if asked we will take customers to the disabled staff toilet, anyway someone asked and one of our temp colleagues took a lady except he let her use our actual staff toilet, no one thought anything of it until someone went on break and went in there and there was shit spread all over the toilet and walls.
Second one, there was a woman who was walking around the store using tissue to dab at her legs, I thought she'd cut herself, nope she'd shit herself, she then fished the turd out of her trousers, dumped it on a shelf (i thought it was a half eaten chocolate muffin) and then took herself to the cleaning aisle where she took zoflora cleaning wipes off the shelf to clean up then wandered around the store dumping the shitty wipes on the shelves in multiple aisles. It was disgusting!
That has reminded me of how disgusting people were in the changing rooms of a previous job, used sanitary protection, shit, piss, vomit, nappies, semen we saw it all in there, the worst part was the customer toilets including a baby change was right next door to the changing rooms! People are disgusting!

I have to say that I've worked in supermarket retail for the last ten years and, bar the odd one two misunderstandings, all my customers have been absolutely lovely! Threads like this make me feel so sorry for those who work in more bonkers places...

...you watch, I'll go on shift this afternoon and have people queuing up to yell at me and throw frozen chickens at my head.

Those people who shit all over the floor, smear it everywhere - I would love to see their toilets at home.

If they do their business the correct, hygienic way at home, why do they think its fucking OK to treat customer toilets in shops, leisure places etc to smear shit everywhere?

More needs to be done for retailers, NHS management etc to ban customers/patients from visiting shops and using NHS services.

If they don't have alternatives to go to - tough shit. You decided to be rude and nasty towards staff so you should suffer the consequences, not the staff.

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 and that is why we have a teacher shortage. It is the hostility of teachers who continue astonished at the unreasonable requests made of them. Not the unreasonable requests.

I love this. Making a career of eating chicken aggressively 🤣

No money?

I agree! I hear so many horror stories of the abuse hurled at staff that I always make a big effort to be polite and pleasant to retail staff. And, on a few occasions, I have stuck my oar in and intervened when a member of the public is being rude to staff.

I had surgery on my birthday. I was relieved to be seen rather than to wait even longer.

Thank you for being a great person, i'm sure you bring much joy in an otherwise shitty day.

School one.

'Sam' was a pleasant enough but bone idle 14 year old. I was his form tutor. Where's your work Sam? He'd flash his big brown eyes. This had worked with his Mum since he was 3 but not anymore and not in secondary School.

Every parent's evening his Mum would come in and wring her hands. Dad was 'very important in IT' and 'too busy to come in'

Eventually with my Head of house's assistance we got both to come in. 'Hi there XYZ'. Very familiar for a first meeting!

So his solution..... That I see all of Sam's teachers every day, ask how he'd got on and then send a daily email update to Sam's Dad detailing progress etc.

Forget that for a game of soldiers

Told his Dad that that was quite impossible - I'd have to find 5 different staff at the end of each day and then spend a deal of time writing their thoughts out.

• how about just signing his homework diary and talking to him?

My grandma once broke her hip and said there was a very grouchy old woman in the bed next to her. Once called for a nurse, who said she needed to wash her hands then she'd be over. Apparently said grouch then (quite nastily) said she was 'always washing her hands when she needed something'. I don't remember what my grandma said the nurses response was, but I do remember whatever it was made her chuckle.

I thankfully haven't had to work face to face with the general public for a long time. But I do now work in complaints and I have to say, the general public have got even more batsh*t crazy in the last year than ever. At least over the phone they can't see the faces I'm pulling....

I have said to some people who have hurled abuse and nastiness towards shop staff “you are the type of person/people who cause staff to leave” or “what do you want to achieve in a positive way from being rude?” On the latter, there’s always silence. I then say the reason why you were silent then as you can’t think of anything positive about being rude to others.

Not me but DD 2, worked in a sporting goods store. Tells me she could tell by looking at customers as they walked in the door, who was there to steal.
Often had shitty clothing left in change rooms.
She finally quit after a couple came in, female took clothing the the change room and set fire to the clothing tags to create a distraction while male partner stole a large sporting goods item.
DD2 now works with animals, she says at least she knows she needs to clean up shit in her current job and is prepared

My ex did something like this. We lived on a cul de sac at the end of a green, the green had two exits leading to the main road. Two ambulances and police each blocked the two exits, meaning we couldn’t get out.

My ex got out of the car and asked the police to free up one of the exits as there was plenty of parking outside the relevant property and we had a hospital appt, who promptly refused.

My ex asked again and then got very angry and told them they had no right to block both exits. I told ex that there must be a reason and let’s just wait, as I was worried ex would be arrested and I would rather have missed the hospital appt than impact someone else’s health/safety.

Ex ignored me and kept arguing with the police, who also became very combative, but they did ask the second ambulance to move.

So whilst I was angry at ex I then also was angry at the police as they should have just directed the ambulance to park properly if they were going to give in so easily.

My DS worked in fast food retail
He said people would change babies' nappies on the chair or table and leave the nappy
They let their DC make a mess with food as hey they weren't clearing it up
Fights (inside and outside)
Arguing with DS about prices (he didn;t set the prices)
Eating 90% of the meal before complaining it was inedible

Whatever abuse he got hurled he never said "No I;m not just selling food I;m studying for a degree matey"