Job Nightmares? Retail Horrors?

I searched and never found a job nightmares thread. I figured I ought to create one, since work horror stories are some of the best funny stories out there. Not to mention a chance to complain about coworkers, bosses, and customers without getting into trouble. I'll start with my experiences from just one of my jobs.


AND THE KIDS.

Retail, especially big company retail, was the worst thing. I hated every day. I dreaded going to work because of the rude customers. The only days I liked were senior discount Tuesdays when the sweet little old ladies and grouchy old men would be bussed down from the senior centers to buy a new nightgown or belt. They were the nice ones. I tried to mostly work Tuesdays, haha. Yeah. Retail is a nightmare under any circumstances. You are exposed to people you would rather not be around and forced to serve them. And when you're put in a lower position, no matter what walk of life they come from, they will invariably treat you like a pile of rotten feces.

Now that I think about it, I have so many horror stories from just one summer that I can write an entire book on it. Expand on every experience, the coworkers, the boss. It sickens me.


Anyone got some more horror stories? I hope you all enjoy the sickening truth of big company retail in mine.

Wow . You should write a book about it and laugh at all the money you get. Then buy more pets

My work experience was rather good. I stayed behind the scenes, bagging horse food and using and price gun etc, until the store closed then I vacuum out front. Except my pay kept decreasing. I even learnt that horses liked garlic. Learned to weight it, bag it and price it. But I did walk home smelling like vampire repellent. You should I seen the faces of the people I walked past and my mum's when I walked through the door. :rofl:

So no, it wasn't a nightmare at all.

I worked at Walmart last winter to hold me through until spring biology started up again. Usually, I would get the "You work in hardware? But you're a girl! Aren't there any guys here?" Trust me, sir, the guys that work here know much less about hardware than I do. I've been helping my parents with their construction business since I could swing a hammer. Sometimes, they would ask for my manager, Alex. Alex was 6 months pregnant... Her manager, Vicki, was everybody's favorite grandmotherly type. Yeah... no guys here!

My VERY first day alone on the floor, this old lady comes up to me, frantic, asking where the bathrooms were. I pointed her to the closest ones, not too far away (it wasn't a big store). I walked away and dropped off the items I was delivering to sporting goods, and walked back to my paint desk. She stops me, literally just a minute after she asked where the bathrooms were, and tells me "Nevermind. I pooped my pants." She then proceeds to ask me if I can smell it. I saw her 45 minutes later at the checkout. I sincerely hope she bought new pants.

Haha Fecal matter seems to be a defining feature in this thread. My first job was at a reptile store, so I loved it, but my manager used to make me clean out all the snake and tegu cages every day. I wouldn't have complained if I had been getting paid, but it was an internship. At first I thought they were hazing me because I was only 14, but I realized after about a month that they just didn't want to deal with the poo. And there were well over 600 snakes because of how many hatchlings they produced. Although, if I had the chance to do it over again, I would. I loved working at that place, even though I did it for free.

My first REAL job was at a pizza place that the owner had recently acquired. The customers were horrible because it was in a small desert town and everyone was cheap. The same customers would come in again and again and complain about the same thing (which wasn't something to complain about in the first place) in order to try and get the owner to give them free stuff. The worst part was the bathrooms. They were horribly disgusting. The men would pee on the floor next to the urinal and somehow get feces on the floor next to the toilet. I never want to know how that happened. There was one time a woman had left a tampon wrapped in toilet paper on the floor behind the toilet, and I picked it up thinking it was just a piece of toilet paper. I gagged for about 5 minutes straight.

There was one time that a family came to the restaurant with their kids and ordered a pizza, then the parents went and sat down at the table, paying no mind to their children, who at this point are already running in circles and digging in the trash, throwing it across the restaurant. I asked the kids to stop and they listened. They didn't seem like they understood that what they had done was bad behavior. They calmed down and I brought out their pizza, then I turned my attention toward cleaning the rest of their mess. When that was finished, I needed a smoke break. So about 5 minutes pass, and I walk back into the restaurant. When I get inside, the kids are running around in the restaurant flinging poop! POOP! And the parents did nothing! Needless to say, they were kicked out and banned from ever coming back.

On top of the many things that made it a horrible job, I was the manager for 6 months and was still being paid minimum wage. I was promised pay raises and never received them. I had employees that had better hourly wages than me but much less responsibility because they had that pay before I got there. Thank you for allowing me to vent! Haha jobs suck. The more I think about it, the more I want to go to college. For the parties, of course. (JK)

Never ever going to Portland, Oregon. :x I came to this thread thinking I could share the less-than-pleasant bathroom habits of my previous coworkers, but I have been 1-billion-upped by you guys'. Talk about mild in comparison!

jasper408 said:

Never ever going to Portland, Oregon. :x I came to this thread thinking I could share the less-than-pleasant bathroom habits of my previous coworkers, but I have been 1-billion-upped by you guys'. Talk about mild in comparison!

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The bathroom issues were almost entirely caused by homeless people and travelers who thought they were too good to respect common courtesy. I know who caused them, I watched their faces as the left. We're required to go in and check the stalls right after someone leaves

Doesn't reflect on the entire city, be sure of that! Just some gross things that happen surprisingly often at busy retail stores. People with IBD end up taking their dumps in the most outrageous places, like pants they're not paying for.

So evidently this is a widespread phenomenon. Why do people poop in retail stores?

jasper408 said:

Never ever going to Portland, Oregon. :x I came to this thread thinking I could share the less-than-pleasant bathroom habits of my previous coworkers, but I have been 1-billion-upped by you guys'. Talk about mild in comparison!

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Haha I should clarify that my stories are from California jobs. I've moved back and forth from Oregon and Southern California a few times, and in my opinion Oregon is cleaner. Not to speak ill of California. :yin-yang: (I thought this was a Gemini symbol, but it says yin-yang.)

~Anthony

esn said:

The bathroom issues were almost entirely caused by homeless people and travelers who thought they were too good to respect common courtesy. I know who caused them, I watched their faces as the left. We're required to go in and check the stalls right after someone leaves

Doesn't reflect on the entire city, be sure of that! Just some gross things that happen surprisingly often at busy retail stores. People with IBD end up taking their dumps in the most outrageous places, like pants they're not paying for.

Click to expand...

Haha I should clarify that my stories are from California jobs. I've moved back and forth from Oregon and Southern California a few times, and in my opinion Oregon is cleaner. Not to speak ill of California. (I thought this was a Gemini symbol, but it says yin-yang.)

~Anthony

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!!! I stand corrected.

I have never laughed so hard in my life. I love this thread, so much.

One of my first jobs I worked at a truckstop. I was a "porter" so basically I cleaned up the restrooms, trucker showers, and parking lot. I could tell you stories from now until Christmas about all of the strange and disturbing things I saw while working there...every day was an adventure, really.

Have you ever heard of a Trojan horse? It's when you pinch a loaf on a toilet seat and proceed to smear it all around, but only on the top of the seat. Then you leave the seat up so the next person who decides to use that toilet will have to touch the dookie to put the seat back down, but they don't know it's covered in feces until they've already touched it. It only happened on my watch twice.

More than once I went to clean a bathroom stall but was horrified to find that someone had painted the walls brown. That takes talent!

One day I was mopping the floor in one of the handicap stalls and saw a grey shoelace type string hanging from the ceiling tile. Being that it was a truckstop I started wondering what it could possibly be and decided that there was a good chance the string was tied to a bag of cash left in the stall for a drug deal. I closed the door, stood on the toilet, pushed up the ceiling tile and gave the string a nice tug. What fell from the ceiling was not a bag of money at all, it was in fact a pair of 2XL ratty sweat pants with very fresh skidmarks and missed hitting my face by what felt like millimeters. It smelled like a buffalo broke into a Chinese buffet.

I never knew what an "upper decker" was until I was busy cleaning a shower getting it ready to be violated by another unlucky traveller. Each shower stall had a toilet and sink. The toilet in this particular stall had some toilet paper and mysterious coarse hairs floating in the water. I flushed the toilet and prepared to sanitize the seat when but was startled when the water running into the toilet looked like Yoohoo. I opened the toilet tank and found that some sneaky customer had dropped a deuce in the fresh water, or the "upper deck". Instead of reaching in halfway to my elbow wearing latex gloves that only went to my wrist to pull the turdletts out of the tank, I slapped an "out of service" sign on the door and walked away. Later the same day someone had blown up another toilet on the second floor but was kind enough to leave me $5 and a pack of cigarettes.

The ladies bathroom was always a disaster. I'm not sure if hovering like that is better than sitting on a strange toilet seat because the higher something falls the higher it'll splash and somebody has to clean it up.

You would think the parking lot at this place would be a piece of cake compared to the horrible restrooms, but no. It must be difficult for people to pull over and take a leak because most of the trash cans had fast food cups and bottles full of urine. It's polite to pour before you toss it in the trash because someone has to take out the trash. I was once splashed in the face by a McDonalds cup full of urine while trying to tie the trash bag. I also found sandwich bags, burger wrappers and one time even a condom filled with human feces.

All in all it was a pretty fun job. I wouldn't have been transferred to that job from my previous job as a dishwasher in the same building if a Colombian transvestite prep cook hadn't fondled me in the kitchen, but I won't hold a grudge.

Ahahahaahahah! Jacob, if this was a contest, you'd win. I worked as a plumber for a little (also in California), but you know what to expect as a plumber. The fact that people take the time to do these things is rediculous! I hope I never face the Trojan horse in my lifetime. Just more reasons to not use public restrooms.

There's a rest stop in Ohio somewhere that's just a pit-toilet stop. I always seemed to hit it at like 2 in the morning. Since it was always horridly dirty, I always went behind the building to take a leak. Once a trucker busted me coming back around the building and laughed. He asked if it was that bad. Oh yeah. Ladies rest rooms are always gross. You'd think women would be cleaner... but you'd be wrong.

You people all win. I though that the bathrooms at school were bad

This topic is hilarious! My gf already told me a lot of grosse stories about feces and such as she worked at "H&M". Unbelievable! Maybe a nice topic for my thesis (psychology). I've worked as a police officer for 10 years, so I've seen my share of filth.

One day people called, because they hadn't seen their neighbour for a couple of days and he didn't react to the doorbell. Luckily he opened up the door after my colleague and I knocked on the windows for a couple of minutes. We were immediately struck by a strong scent of amonia. He asked us what all the fuss was about. We told him why we came and we asked him if he was doing alright.

He asked us inside to take a look. This old man had clearly redecorated his entire house. Through our tearing eyes we saw poop smeared out over the walls. There were jars and vases filled with a yellow fluid, which had to be urine because of the smell, standing on the tables. There were also plates with rotting food throughout his house. He had used the corners of almost all the rooms as a toilet. There was a dirty movie playing on the television and a disturbing amount of crumpled up tissues laying on the floor around the couch. Except for all the human wastes, we saw garbage everywhere. You can imagine how it must have smelled.

We asked him again if everything was okay, since the man obviously had the idea that what he did to his house was completely normal. He frowned and said that he has never been more happy in his entire life. We finished the tour only to find a dead dog in an advanced state of decay on the bed. We were relieved to hear that he didn't sleep on that bed anymore. He slept on the couch, probably using the tissues as a pillow.

He offered us some coffee, which we kindly rejected and we called an ambulance. Turned out this man had developed a disorder in a short period. Probably due to a cerebral hermorrhage. Of course we felt sorry for the old man, but both of us have never seen a house that filthy unto this day and believe me that we're seeing some really dirty houses almost on a weekly basis. This house also made a bigger impression than al the (sorry guys) corpses we had seen. According to the man himself and his neighbours he never had any dog btw......

Niels, we have a television show called 'Hoarders'. I imagine it's quite similar. In the grand American Tradition, we love to see horrific things on the idiot box.

was a waitress once for 3 days. At the Hilton Hotel convention center. Had to wear a penguin outfit (b&w). Found out very soon that I couldn't handle horny business men or food leftovers. Both made me gag. Gagging waitress = no tips. Quit and shoveled hoss shyte at a horse barn instead. Much better.

Kaysie said:

Niels, we have a television show called 'Hoarders'. I imagine it's quite similar. In the grand American Tradition, we love to see horrific things on the idiot box.

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I know the show, but the only thing this man hoarded was his own human waste.... I've been in a house which could only be entered through a window, because of all the rubbish inside. People can be weird...

I don't have any poop stories, but I have a couple good ones. I don't think they'll beat anyone else out of the "top spot" but you guys can decide that.

I work for a parking company in seattle who parks cars at the stadiums, and when I say I park cars I mean I stand there and point in the direction they need to go. I've just started my 3rd year working with this company, and hope to god I can find a new better job soon.

About january of febuary of this year a bad job went to the pit blacker than the blackest void when they started building a 30 story building for condos and parking IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PARKING LOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It was alright at first, but slowly, almost deceptively slowly, the parking got "harder" the complaints got more "legitimant" and exit after a game or event in the lot I work most could be described as your worst nightmare.

On a daily basis I'll tell someone to park in a specific spot and by some miricle they manage to take up 3 or 4 spot instead of the 1 spot I told them to park in. And the standard complaint when they don't want to park in the spot you tell them to park in is "My car's to small to fit in the spot" or "I don't want my car to get dinged or scratched" or "I have mobility problems and can't get out if I have an extra half spot"....The list of excuses can go on. But over the past few weeks I've had to work It's been raining, and by raining I mean it felt like swimming in a freezing lake. But in the lot they bring bins with rain gear, and they don't have anything my size BECAUSE all the younger and SMALLEST team mebers take all the rain gear that's, to them, ten sizes to big when the largest ones they have are one size to small, on me, so basicly I have to stand outside....in the pouring rain......for 10-14 hours a day........with NO rain gear......I've finnaly gotten over the really bad cold I got from the rain we've been having.

Now that I'm done venting my working exsistance to you guys it's time for a couple of stories. We have a bunch of port-a-potties on our lot that I work at for the tail-gaters, and as we get ready for the exit we have to lock them up so people don't do stuff like shoot up or smoke or that kind of stuff. Well one night in June we were to late because we check inside the port-a-potties to make sure we don't lock anyone inside, and we opened up the 4th one down the row of them there were 2 homeless people "making sweet sweet love" in it. We called security and they were arested and taken away. Last story is from the first Huskie home game. We have a lot of tail-gaters on the lot, but one group exploaded to an unparalleled state of chaos. this group was origionally 15-20 people big, but a hour before the game started a bunch of people came off the lot to join the fun and then the tail-gate until it was almost 200 strong...we called the cops and stadium security and we had to shut down the lot for 15-30 minuets until we got the tail-gate settled.

I got more storyies, but they can wait until next time.

I work at Walmart. Enough said XD.

Actually, it hasn't been SO bad. I haven't had many rude customers at all. Mostly just weirdos and such.

There was this time when a couple of girls came through my lane, and said that they were from Montana and didn't need to pay sales tax. I kind of just stared at them blankly because I didn't even know HOW to begin processing that, not to mention that it was 11pm and there were hardly any supervisors around to ask. The supervisor I finally managed to track down was about as confused as I was. It was just odd to me, seeing as how MN doesn't have sales tax on food or clothing in the first place (which a majority of their purchase was) and because I'm on the border of Minnesota and North Dakota and when in ND, I've never seen anyone ask to have their sales tax removed...

I started working in the Tire Lube Express recently, and that's where most of my rude customers have been. I came back from lunch one busy day, and saw a grumpy old man waiting for his car. He kept huffing and sighing as I was trying to get everything organized and figure out which orders were done and what was still in the shop. Finally his paperwork came through the system, and he started cussing at me, saying that he was told 20 minutes and his car would be through (on a busy day? No one would have told him that.) and that our customer service sucked. Of course, then I had to get him to sign a disclaimer, because his tires were bad...that didn't go over well... I guess he flipped us all off as he tore out of the parking lot.

Oh Wally World...