Dr. Pepper Unlimited said:
Sure, I worked eight years in customer service...People will threaten to kill you over shorting them a $1.00. I've never really had one that seemed to have any weight to it, so the few I've heard weren't anything I'd recommend losing sleep over.
I see your $1.00 and raise you $0.03.
Working in electronics for a Superstore (Like Walmart, but Canadian) we used to get people with smaller orders sent through our tills when the lines up front would get too long, like on Boxing Day, where this took place.
I had roughly 80 people in my line-up, when this middle-aged lady comes up to the till with two shopping carts full of groceries. Being electronics, my counter is way too small to handle an order that size efficiently, so I'm already cursing under my breath because she's gonna hold up the line for ten minutes while I ring every item through individually, and I just -know- someone in the line behind her is gonna get irate at me over it. anyway, I try to persuade her to go through another till, but she is adamant about staying here (I can't really blame her, she was in my line for a while). So I yell down the line that this is gonna take a while if anyone is in a hurry they might try a different line. This irritates her and she asks me if "I had to draw that much attention to her," I retort that I'm just trying to be courteous and let people know this line is gonna be stalled for a while, and begin scanning her items.
Cut to about seven or eight minutes later, I can see the end of this irritatingly long order coming into view, when I scan in a couple of fake flowers. She stops me, and says something like "Hey, those are supposed to be $1.69, how come they're $1.72?" I tell her that they aren't from my department, so I really don't know what price they are, or are even supposed to be, and I offer to lay them aside so she can go to customer service and get them for the proper price. To this day I don't know how this incident escalated out of control as quickly as it did, but it ended with her calling me a "Stupid, lazy **** who gets paid too much for his job, and [she] should come over that counter and slit my f***ing throat."
Now, before I state my reaction, a recap: This is nearly ten minutes into just her order, I still have roughly eighty people behind her who have been waiting, some more patiently than others, for her stupid order to finish so that -they- can leave, I am alone in my department, and she is yelling at, threatening, and insulting me over three goddamned pennies.
As the discipline report my manager filled out on me afterwards, "While he was provoked, he did not handle the situation very well." And that was him cutting me a favour, in -my- words: I f***ing snapped. I have never lost my temper like that before or since, but in my defense, I never touched her, though it's one of the few times where I was so blinded by rage I very nearly did, I merely gave her a very loud, very colourful, verbal smackdown. By the end we were both in tears, though for different reasons.
I've had people threaten my life, jokingly and not, several times over the years, but that remains the most memorable example. And the discipine report was later removed from my file thanks to several customers who were in the line behind her, saw the whole incident, and wrote emails to my store's general manager in my defense. When they came in and told me what they'd done, I bought them each a dvd out of my own pocket in thanks.
