So I work at a retail store for a shipping company that is pretty much a household name internationally. HINT Brown trucks. Anywho, a customer comes in today and wants to send something out on behalf of her mother. Cool! lets get you a box for that. So as my co-worker walks to the back to find said boxes, the lady looks at me and scoffs.
She looked flustered like she didn’t have her shit together and I had taken notice of that. So when she scoffed, i thought it was about that. I smiled at her and said “some Tuesdays feel like its still Mondays, eh?” Her brow furrowed and she replied “no… why are you wearing a mask? Are they forcing you to?” So I shook my head and said “no, personal choice. I actually look after my 89 y/o grandmother and I would hate to bring covid into the house to her despite both of us being fully vaxxed.” Followed with a shrug.
She looked at me and said “but… the masks don’t work” To which I gave out a very dry sigh. I turned to look at her and said “look, I’ve been here everyday for the past 2 years coming face to face with hundreds of people a day in a well-known hot spot. And I have yet to contract covid. So something is working. Maybe its the masks, maybe its not, heck, maybe covid doesnt even exist” and I walked back to my office so that I could get away from her and check my emails.
A few minutes later I hear her on the phone with her mother bitching about the prices that we had given her for shipping her items and saying she didn’t want to do it. So I come back out to make sure everything is straight. Come to find out that she wanted to pay using a business account. A common misconception that we deal with daily. A business account is only used on the corporate level when processing a shipment online. Not at a storefront.
I politely explain to her that she has things confused and I give her some solutions to her problem and apologized for the confusion. From there she starts staring at the boxes that we have ever-so-neatly packed for her. I knew what was coming. She points at the boxes and says. “If I’m not shipping these out then I dont want the boxes”. I explained that the boxes have already been assembled and cut down to size and taped up. At this point we cannot accept them back as is. Nevermind the fact that we were not gonna charge her for the packing services.
She wants to fight. She asks to speak to the manager. I tell her I am the manager and then she wants to speak to someone above me. I tell her that basically I am the end of the line as far as shes concerned. Before she can begin her rant I say “you know what? Just take the boxes, they are free. Just go.” And mumbled to myself loud enough so that she could hear “grown ass woman acting like a child”. (She had to be at least early 40s) Now she doesn’t even want the free boxes that she wasn’t willing to pay for. She asks us to take her stuff out of the boxes and keep the boxes. I literally told her they are free and to just go. She makes a remark that “she doesn’t want to trash up her car with empty boxes” at this point I let out a little laugh because in my head I am thinking “lady, those boxes aren’t the trashiest thing in your car by far.”
So now she calls her mom back and is instructed to buy the boxes and they will still ship at a later time. As I am walking away she yells to me “did you hear our solution?!” Without looking back I exclaimed “yup!”. She continues to antagonize me with “aren’t you happy we came to a solution?!” i repeated myself with the same, “YUP!” Maybe a little louder this time.
So the bitch pays for her shit and on her way out she makes one more antagonistic move and yells “have a lovely day” before turning to my co-worker who is just as fed up with her as I am and says “I’m being sarcastic, fuck him” and that was where I had it with her. I came out from the back of the store and told her she was banned from the store and that if she came back I would call the police on her ass. She exploded into a bunch of “fuck you” and flipping me off.
I smiled at her and just kept telling her “goodbye, you are banned.” as she continues her rampage out the door, successfully making herself look batshit crazy to all of my customers and people outside the building.
By the end, the biggest surprise to me was that she never called me a “N*****” because I was sure expecting it. If there are any Karens tuned in right now… why are y’all like this?
TL;DR- Just Karens being Karens.