I used to work at McDonalds (I know). Opening usually involved me at the front counter with a headset on so I could do drive-through orders and handle making coffee / putting orders together / taking money at the front from the little old people that came in at the crack of dawn every morning. We would also have a manager who was there to be important and one person in the kitchen. We’re a small rural town so usually this is fine but we were on kind of a major highway so sometimes it would get busy out of nowhere.
Depending on the manager the amount of help we had would vary wildly. One morning we got super busy and I started cracking under the pressure. I’m a fantastic multi-tasker but my drive-through line was backing up since I was trying to juggle them and all the walk-in folks from my front registers and when it gets packed…well, it’s fun. I glance around trying to find my manager for help. I see him on one of our cameras – he’s outside smoking a cigarette around the side of the building. Mind you, this is like his third trip out to smoke this morning. I’m absolutely dying trying to get caught up. Customers are being passive aggressive saying they will come behind the counter and get their own coffee and stuff. I have people yelling at me in my headset from the drive through. I end up having to remove the headset just to try to get the frontline sorted. I start making progress with the front but I basically had to sacrifice the drive-through customers for two minutes.
Apparently the cars outside start yelling at my manager and interrupt his smoke break so he comes in, sees me with my headset off and goes berserk. He’s like “WHOS TAKING THE DRIVE-THRU ORDERS?” I’m in the middle of trying to get a fresh pot of coffee going so I sort of auto-respond “No one. Hang on.” as I continue to dash around behind our counter to grab a fruit & yogurt parfait for an order. He basically gets in my way and starts giving me shit. Loudly, talking to me like I’m a dog. I point to the camera and yell, loudly enough to disrupt the entire inside of the restaurant. “I’m these two registers, first window, second window, and I’m bagging. I’m like FOUR PEOPLE and you’re out behind the building not doing SHIT!”
His eyes go wide. I can tell he knows I’m holding on by my last thread. He’s sighs. And he’s like “You’re in a ton of trouble but we can talk about this later.” No. Fuck him. I’m done. I’m all riled up from random customers yelling at me. I toss him the headset. “You want to give me shit for not being able to run like four stations with no support? Run five. I’ll watch.” I remove my name badge.
He went to say something to me. I turn away, facing the one girl working in the kitchen who is watching this all play out. I remember telling her “I’m so sorry.” and then I dropped my name badge, toss my hat on the counter, grab a water cup, put on (and zip) my jacket so my uniform is covered up. I go to the drink fountain, fill my water cup, and then I go sit on the far side of the seating area and watch him go down in flames. He ends up ALSO taking off the headset and picking up the phone so he can spam call the whole workforce one by one trying to call for help. It’s like 5AM so no one is going to accept a call from their work number. About ten minutes into his struggle he ends up very loudly pleading with me to come back from behind the counter. I can’t even see him on the other side of the sea of people swarming the counter at this point.
I call back “I need a smoke first!” and I go outside.
i’m watching an art theft documentary and they’re interviewing this art history professor from new york who was asked to go with the fbi to authenticate a rubens that had been stolen but it was a sting operation so they had to pretend like they weren’t the fbi, that they were some private buyer about to pay $3.5 million for it, and the fbi was like “this is a VERY delicate operation because you never know how they will react to what you have to say so let the agent do all of the talking, don’t say a word to anyone just nod if it’s the rubens, the last operation we did the guy in your position got shot because things went wrong in a second” and then it cuts to the professor’s interview and he says “i wasn’t going to fly down to miami to be a part of an undercover fbi sting operation to handle what could be rubens’s aurora and just NOT say anything. i was gonna have to ad lib a little” and then he tells the interviewer that when he & the fbi agent got to the hotel while he was examining the painting he started lecturing the other people, first on how badly they had wrapped it, and then about like how it had been painted, the history of it, what the subject was and what she was doing, etc etc, and he was like “i hadn’t taught a class on rubens in 15 years, so for me it was like being back in the classroom except my students couldn’t leave”
at one point during the deal the professor turned to the woman selling it and he said “isn’t this just the most beautiful rubens you’ve ever seen outside of a museum?” (because the fbi had told him earlier that this piece had been stolen from a museum) and THEN he said “where on earth did you get it from?” and the group of people the woman had with her was like taxidermy-fox.png but the woman was like “inheritance” can you IMAGINE the fbi agent about to have a fucking aneurysm when this random guy you’ve brought in just to nod if it’s the right painting not only starts giving an impromptu lecture but then he asks how they got it
Reminds me of the time a lady told me whip doesn’t melt. Or a guy yelled at me for not understanding him/hearing him because he kept talking on the phone
Lame
For those in retail.
I worked in a Lil Caesars and a woman came in and wanted a sausage pizza with no sausage, but got mad when she was given a cheese pizza.
So when I worked at fitting room in Old Navy, a woman told me that a medium top was too small, and that the large top was too large. So she asked me to find her an “x-medium”. Old Navy carries x-small, small, medium, large, x-large, 1x, 2x and 3x. There is no “x-medium”. But she insisted, so I went and found her an “x-medium” (which was just a medium in a different color but the same top, same make, same EVERYTHING) and she goes very happily, “THIS! THIS FITS ME PERFECTLY! THANK YOU SO MUCH! See, you can do anything you can set your mind to!”
I’m a waitress at a big fancy resort, and once a woman asked me for a dietwater and when I told her there was no such thing she demanded to see my manager (who then also promptly told her there was no such thing and brought her regular water). Another occasion of stupidity occurred when a woman had been brought a steak cooked too much for her liking. I offered to take it back and bring her out a new one, cooked a little less, and she said “NO this one’s fine I just want you to cook THIS one a little less.” I then had to get the chef and have him explain why you can’t UNCOOK a steak.
When I was working at dunkin donuts there was this woman in the drive-thru who asked for a lightly toasted croissant and then started complaining that the croissant was warm. And wanted her money back, so she gave me the croissant back and I gave her the money and then she tells me “now i want my new croissant” she wanted a new one for free and as she was screaming at me this guy in a biker gang covered in tattoos leans over the counter in the store and yells “ma’am let me just tell you what we’re all thinking. fuck off, you stupid cunt.” I couldn’t stop laughing and she drove away in anger.
Most of the people like in the stories above know that they’re being totally irrational, but also know that if they complain enough they’ll most likely get something free or discounted. So really most of the the nonsensical fucks are actually just cheap fucks with no shame or respect for people.
That last bit of commentary though.
You’d think that but I had once had to explain to a woman that I couldn’t “cut her hair longer.” Some people are actually just stupid.
My boyfriend and I were downtown and he saw fresh sunflowers, which is his best friend’s favorite flower, and he not only bought one for him but had me drive him to his best friends house so he could surprise him with it and I just think this is the type of male friendship that should be normalized
I want a story about a king whose son is prophesied to kill him so the king is like “whatever what am I supposed to do, kill my own kid wtf is wrong with you” so he just raises him as normal, doesn’t even tell him about the prophecy, and instead of some convoluted twist of events that leads to the king’s murder the son grows up and when the king is very old and dying and in excruciating pain the kid is just like alright I’mma put him out of his misery.
The king’s son becomes the new king, and is prophesied to defeat evil and bring an age of prosperity. His generals and knights all crack their knuckles but he pretty much ignores them and focuses on strengthening the infrastructure of his kingdom. Forty years later he is old and sick but still hearing his subjects’ grievances, and a general’s like “how will you defeat the prophesied evil now? You’re old and weak.” Another visitor, a teenager fresh out of the kingdom’s public education system, looks at the general like he is an ignoramus. The king eradicated poverty, housed the homeless, taught the ignorant, ended class exploitation by abolishing the nobility and imprisoning the corrupt, and established a highly respected guild of doctors that recently figured out how to cure the plague. There are no brigands because there is enough wealth for everyone to live comfortably; hiding in the woods and taking trinkets from people simply doesn’t make any sense for anyone but the desperate, and the people are not desperate. Evil is a weed, explains the teenager. It grows in cracked roads and crumbling houses and forgotten corners, rooted in indifference and watered by suffering. But the king demands that broken things be mended and suffering people be made well.
No evil lives in this kingdom, says the teenager. It starved to death before I was born.
Every once in a while, when I’m feeling down, I go and look at the notes on this post and they make me feel a lot better. This is the energy I want to carry into 2018.
Useless 