16. She Flipped
Working the seafood counter at the grocery store is a bitch. SOOO many huge orders for the holidays (apparently it is/was a tradition for Italian families?)
One older lady comes in, wearing her fur coat, dripping in shit perfume, and all sorts of jewellery pushing to the front of the line and start yelling her name to get her order.
As soon as I heard the name and saw the lady, I knew it would be a problem. She had placed the order for live Dungeness crabs to be picked up on Monday (I’m forgetting the actual days of the week, but you get the point)
They arrive, then she says she will pick them up Tuesday, then Wednesday. I guess her holiday gathering was moving dates or something. Eventually, she says she will get them on Friday. By the time Friday rolls around, they died. So we cooked them up to at least keep them edible.
So now she barges her way in, expecting live crabs that we already cooked, and I tried to explain it. But she flipped her sh*t, saying we f*cked up, she never changed the date, etc. I showed her the log book (we took orders by hand back then) and I showed her all the pickup dates that were crossed off and the time of the change noted on each.
She continues to freak out. Starts demanding free sh*t to compensate.
The manager walks over to me and says (not so quietly) “Just give her whatever the f*ck she wants and get her out of here.
She blows her top and screams, actually SCREAMS “You don’t F*CK with a 54-year-old woman!!”
Me: “What’s your daughter have to do with this?”