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!!

Wow. My ds works for a ferry co and I’m fairly sure he’d have banned. I don’t think the loading staff would have let him on anyway- shocking.

I worked in a cafe when I was 15, (long time ago) and one day we had a customer who was determined to get shirty with us. He sent back his eggs on toast because instead of the standard two eggs on two slices of toast he’d been given.. dun dun duh three eggs! Shock, horror and also what sort of moron turns down extra food?!

I used to work for a small online gift company - flowers, fruit hampers, flowers etc. This was back in the early 2000s when the market wasn't quite so big.

One lady phoned to complain that the flowers we'd sent included "pink flowers".. she'd literally chosen the pink and white boquet but assumed we'd sent all white as it was for a man!

Another ordered a huge hamper of fruit then called to complain that there wasn't a box of chocolate with it - she was extremely rude, threatened my job unless I "got your lazy little arse down to Godiva now and send me the chocolate I expect... it's on your website, I've spent a lot of money, I expect chocolate". She didn't get any!

The man who phoned every day for a week to demand to know where his champagne was. Problem was he hadn't ordered any. Asked him for copy of order confirmation - he didn't have one. Asked him to show us relevant bit of his bank statement with transaction going through... he wouldn't. He simply insisted he'd ordered it and we had to supply it.... a week later he called and said "sorry I ordered it from someone else they've sent me a new one I'll use you in future"

Then there was the famous woman who ordered her friend some liquor chocolates... then phoned to complain that we'd sent her recovering alcoholic friend alcohol... turned out she didn't know what was in liquor chocolates and just thought they looked nice...

How I love working with the public. I was a city councillor for some years as well but that's a whole other post!! As a taster my phone rung at 9pm on Christmas Eve - I assumed it would by my mum but no it was a lady who wanted to talk about chemtrails.. she wanted me to write to the prime minister and take action to get them banned... I did write to the PM and his office wrote back saying they'd referred it to some department or other (probably environment) and it would be answered in due course... still waiting.. only been 15 years!!

@AGodawfulsmallaffair this was about 25 years ago. Working the ferries was like working in the Wild West, some of the stuff that went on was mad, we had a great time though despite the constant batshittery.

Poor Buddy 🥺🥺🥺

That "owner" and friend are awful.

I've been that annoying customer. Shops used to allow exchanges after the refund period had expired, but at some point they stopped allowing it. I hadn't realised, and had travelled really far in the hope of exchanging an item of clothing that was just a few days past refund period (pristine condition/never worn). They refused. I was so annoyed and tired I just said fine, you have it then, and left the item at the till. I still don't fully understand why they can't just exchange something that's still completely saleable, specially considering so many of these companies are pushing for sustainability.

I'll never forget my time there 50 years ago (can't believe I just typed that! when my Asst manager made me give a customer a refund because the wire in her (new)bra had poked through. Reasonable you think? The bra was grey. She had put a sticking plaster over the hole where the wire had come through and it was filthy. The padding was all out of shape where it had been through the washing machine countless times (hand wash only). She was absolutely immaculately dressed! I asked him what he wanted me to do with it and I was told to take it outside and shoot it! In those days the customer was (almost) always right.
We did tend to refuse the unopened underwear from at least 10 years previously that people found when clearing out their nearest and dearests' houses and thought they could bring back. (We didn't have a set time limit back then.)

I worked in Starbucks as a student and a woman came in and asked if we could make her a sandwich without tomatoes I said oh the sandwiches are pre packed so we can only do what's on the shelf so if all the ones left have tomato in them then unfortunately I can't make her something else.
She seemed to understand this and toddled off to have a look in the cooler, then a moment later packs of sandwiches came sailing at my head and she threw them across the counter whole screaming 'these ALL have tomatoes, I'm ALLERGIC to tomatoes, what am I supposed to EAT'.
The branch was in the middle of a shopping mall with at least 10 other food outlets she could have gone to, including a second Starbucks.

I have worked in customer service for 35 years. I could write a book on how vile people can be.

The two that spring to mind...

I was a hotel receptionist when I was 21. We had a rugby club event one night, and I was on the bar. One guy tried to get an extension, but we couldn't do it due to licensing hours. He already had about 5 pints lined up anyway. He told me that his dad earned more in a day than I earned in a year 🙄and shouted at me for ages. When we left, about 2am, after clearing up, he was waiting in the car park, and he came over and knocked on the car window - I thought he was going to apologise. Silly me. What he actually did was spit in my face.

I was a taxi operator for few years, not long ago. One guy, because he couldn't get a taxi, when he hadn't pre-booked one, at about 1am on a Saturday night, said he was coming to the office to cut my throat. I was so angry, I said "come on then, I'll wait for you in the car park"... I don't know why I did that. God only knows what could have happened if he'd turned up 😳

A memorable one was when I worked in a local shop. Two lads came in and went up the meat isle. I was on the tills. Next thing I know the pair of them are legging it towards the front doors. The front doors were those automatic openers but they didn't open and the pair went crashing into the doors. Before they could get up the manager and two police officers had come out of the back office. Manager had clocked them on cctv and locked the front doors remotely and then shouted to the two on the beat officers who were out the back smoking in our yard! 😂

Oh I forgot about the Christmas food. All those times I ‘ruined Christmas’ because their Turkey was off.
What, that massive frozen one you defrosted on the work top/in the garage/in the boot of the car for 3 days, instead of in the fridge as instructed, because there wasn’t enough room in the fridge? Every bloody year. We’d even hear them tell the acquaintance they’d seen whilst they were waiting in the queue that they defrosted it on the worktop ‘but it still shouldn’t have gone off’.

We had a regular that would fly over to Denmark to visit family then bring her receipt in for her expensive Christmas crackers demanding a refund ‘because they didn’t bang’. Well of course not, you can’t fly with the gunpowder coated bang in crackers so she’d have to take them out before flying. Spineless managers would give her a refund and a gift voucher ‘as a gesture of goodwill’. Drove me nuts.

God people are fucking batshit aren’t they. I don’t work in retail but I think you must see all
levels of crazy in this field of work. Hats off to you all

@saywhatnow1
"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". 😵"

My parents owned a Boarding kennels and Cattery and had a long term customer with a jack russel that could not be trusted at home, it would rip everything to pieces. The set up was that we had kennels in a converted stable block so he basically rented one, it was his for exclusive use and he had a combination padlock on it that he and we could open. He'd get to the kennels before we opened, put the dog in and lock the door, when we opened for the day we'd do walks and food and stuff, then he'd come along in the evening and take the dog home.

It worked really well and meant there was a consistent customer even during quieter periods of the year.

We also had the people calling at 3am to say they'd had an emergency or wanting to pick their pets up at stupid o'clock, or calls from social services asking if we could help them find roughly 40ish (they think) cats in the house of a woman they'd just admitted for psychiatric care. Those were always fun and a lot more common than they should have been!

I think customers have always been batshit. I used to work for M&S and we had some horrors. The ones that stand out are;

• the man who's collected his mothers items from the car home after she's died. He brought the suitcase straight to us, included in it were her jewellery and letters - everything she owned. He told me to 'sort out the M&S gear love and then I'm off to Littlewoods'. Dreadful man.
• the man who insisted he's bought the trousers the week before and that I'd served him. I checked the microfiche machine in the office and they were sold in 1976! I wasn't even born!
• lots of people bringing back dirty underwear. Thank God M&S have tightened up the rules now!

i used to work in customer service in quite a ‘posh’ (read entitled) city. The business was a little outside the city centre but still within walking distance. The staff car park was at the back and had the usual card entry barrier system. Chap came in one Saturday to tell us he has parked in front of the barrier but don’t worry, there was enough room for us to ‘squeeze out’. When we pointed out that not only was he illegally blocking us all in but also preventing fire engine access he said he would rather pay the fine as it was ‘cheaper than paying for parking’. He turned out to be very wrong as we called the police who towed his car and charged him a couple of hundred to get it back. Apparently that was our fault as well 🙄

I was a cleaner in a shopping centre when I was a teenager. The mens toilets were always pretty bad but one day I found one of them blocked.

Noticed something checked and pulled out an effing shirt and a pair of boxers covered in sh*t.

I mean how bad was it he had to stuff his clothes down there???

So many stories from retail, pubs and the entertainment business I now work for.

Pubs are the worst. I've had multiple bottles and glasses thrown at me because I've refused someone a drink (got really good at ducking)!
Someone tried to punch me because I asked him to stop fingering his girlfriend in one of our booths.
I was pushed over a table, western film style, because I asked a man to refrain from pissing in a corner of the pub.

These are the worst ones. There are a hundred more over my 25 years of employment. No idea how I am not in prison for nutting someone.

I’ve worked in a vets for 15 years and had daily a abuse for most of that time.

Usually it’s not fair that the costs are so high, if we loved animals we wouldn’t charge. It’s not their fault they don’t have insurance so we should just let them be treated for free. It’s not really their cat they have just been feeding it in the garden for 15 years so we are cruel for not treating strays. Etc etc etc The worst are the people who have bred their animals and then claim to have no money for breeding related complications (usually some type of bulldog) We’ve been slated on Facebook more than once for ‘wanting to kill puppies’ 🙄

Last week though I did get very wrong by a client for feeding a dog a small piece of pork. It was the first thing the dog had eaten in days after major surgery but the owner was furious because the dog is Jewish and can’t eat it for religious reasons. Apparently my mind reading skills weren’t up to scratch.

The dog is Jewish 😂😂😂😂😂😂

I used to work for a senator in California - part of my job was helping people, kind of like customer service.
By the time most people called my office, their problems were complicated and enormous.
One very young couple came in because they had nothing. No food, no housing, no medical care.
I spent several hours connecting them with social services, emergency housing, and the agencies that could provide them with food and medical.
The next day the husband (or whatever he was) arrived back in my office and threatened to kill me because I didn’t get them any “free money.”
He also threatened to kill the staff at the social services office - after he finally left, I called the state police and he was arrested at the SS office, threatening to kill the person who had helped him the day before.

I can't believe some of these.
Wow OP the biting dog owner's response!

This isn't something I've experienced but I read it today and thought wtf. A place on trip advisor had someone write in their review that the forest nearby is haunted and the atmosphere of the place is ruined by what happened in the past. The reply from the hotel was that of laughter. They actually wrote your review made us laugh.

DH has had human shit thrown at him by an angry customer. He's customer facing and thinks most people are cunts.

I worked for a season in the booking office / gift shop for the theatre on the end of the Pier. The booking office / gift shop was at the land end of the pier. The theatre was clearly visible from just outside of the shop, which was literally connected to the theatre by the Pier. On numerous occasions I was asked by people booking their tickets where the theatre was and on more than one occasion was greeted with utter amazement that the Pier Theatre was actually -- you know - on the Pier.....

Part of the gift shop stock included inflatables like paddling pools, dinghies etc. I had a long, awkward exchange with a young chap who wanted to know if his girlfriend would fit in the smallest child sized dinghy. When we reached an impasse regarding her size / height / weight, none of which he knew with any certainty, he asked if I could get one out and inflate it so he could judge it by eye......

When I worked in a gallery / picture framers, I got very used to people coming in and asking if we framed pictures....or even if we were open, despite them having entered the premises through a door with a sign proclaiming "open" in big letters right in front if them.

Our speciality was bespoke framing. You choose from 400 styles of frame in five different price bands. There are maybe 150 shades of mount and several types of glass. Sympathetic framing is about combining them in the most aesthetically pleasing way and helping preserve sometimes valuable artwork to archival standards.

The bane of my life was people ringing up for a "rough quote". Invariably I'd start with asking about the size and invariably they weren't sure. Working from pretty vague dimensions, I'd ask for the sort of artwork it was - oil painting? Print? Original watercolour? Subject matter? Colour palette? Then what sort of frame they were looking for - invariably it was "the cheapest". Pricing was by linear inch and used a formula to calculate with different results if it was "trade" or "public" as both sorts of business were undertaken.

Inevitably I would encourage the customer to bring the artwork in for a more tailored and accurate quote and inevitably I'd be told that their decision to do that would be based on the likely price . It was the most tortuous Catch 22 exercise every time and obviously in the days before technology was in use to provide a virtual service.

I also used to get people coming in, getting me to price things up, and then be told they would come back to see the framer himself despite me having worked there every weekend for 20 years and having an arts based qualification, because he was the expert....

That said, I had alot if regulars who did appreciate my "eye" so I didn't take it too personally..

That happens daily where I work

Boxers shoved down the loo,in the pedal bin or just dumped on the floor

I swear they come in,shit at the table,wander into the gents and dump their pants

If its not shitty boxers,its used pregnancy tests,used tampons/towels,shitty loo roll,vomit and on more than one occasion,people having sex-from teens to older people (what it is about our place turning people on,I do not know-its fast food,not a brothel)

I once walked into the loo,only to find a gent had injected god knows what,somehow burst a vein and was blue on the floor

Teens who are plastered,vomiting all over the floor,we call their parents,who rock up and refuse to deal with their own child-I'm not doing it

99% of the time,they put in a complaint about us not wanting to touch their vomiting,pissed up,often gobby teen

I work a min wage job

Anyone who deals with the public deserves a bloody medal

I worked in childcare. I had many parents who wanted me to help them falsely claim tax credits.
I had one woman text me her notice as I was driving to the airport for my week holiday. Her reasoning was she wanted to get it in quick (holidays are not included in notice periods)
I had a divorced couple, dad turned up despite there being a restraining order against him (I lived on same street) he grabbed the child from my doorstep. When I rang the police they said there was nothing they could do.

A request for a cat sitter on the local Facebook group for a couple of weeks- I like cats but my dogs don’t so I can’t have one. Ok I thought, 2 weeks if cat cuddles yes please.

They arranged for me to meet puss in advance. I felt like I was at an interview.
I had instructions about heating up his various meals and snacks, how to top up his massive automatic litter tray which they then decided was too complicated for me, but most importantly was play time and cuddles - GOOD.

No, not good. Puss hated being touched, picked up, anything. He was not a friendly cat. He’d leave the room as soon as you entered.
Unfortunately the whole house was rigged with CCTV and doorbell cameras so they were watching and messaging me and saying I needed to try x, y, and z.
My hands were shredded by the time they were back. I never offered again. I don’t want a cat anymore.