Tag: asshole customers

Inside is Closed.

We just closed, and I’m waiting for two customers to finish up and leave before I start cleaning the dining room, so I sneak out for a quick cigarette. A few puffs in, I look up from my phone and see an old guy walking towards the building from the sidewalk. I’ve seen him once before. He was nice enough. He talks to himself, though, and either has a speech impediment or he’s drunk all the time. Both, for all I know.

So that he doesn’t waste time and energy coming any closer, I yell out to him, “Sorry, man, just drive thru.”

He dismissively waves his hand with an, “eh,” as if he didn’t believe me, or was pissed off about us being closed. I shrug it off and look back down at my phone. When I look up again, he’s still approaching.

I give him the benefit of the doubt. I mean, sometimes people develop a speech impediment due to poor hearing, so maybe he legitimately didn’t hear me despite the fact that I had yelled it to him, so I say it again. “Sorry, man, inside’s closed.”

“I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”

Arby’s is right across the street, inside still open. Just saying.

I shrug and shake my head sympathetically. “The inside is closed.”

“What do you mean the inside’s closed? I come here all the time.”

As I struggle to see the relevance, he adds, pointing through the windows, “They’re in there.”

“They ordered their food before we closed.”

Then he steps forward and gets in my face, chest out and arms back, all ape-like. I do not back up. I don’t size him up. I’m not going to escalate. I refuse to give this childish twat what he wants, just like assholes who ride my ass on the road: I refuse to go faster. If the mood strikes me, I may let my foot up off the gas, go slower.

No, he cannot affect me. My inside is closed.

And I’m certainly not going to throw the first punch, either.

Having said that, Please.

I’ve never been in a real fight and I’ll probably walk away physically damaged if it happens, but I’ll fight tooth and nail, right on down to the ground. And hell, maybe I need it. There’s nearly four-and-a-half decades of pure rage bottled up in here, just itching for a justified outlet. Hungry for a reason. Oh-so patient for the right opportunity to discharge.

In my head, I hear Tyler Durden from Fight Club: “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.”

“I’m sorry, man,” is what I actually say, tone not changing in the slightest, not entirely ignorant of the fact that revealing he’s not getting a rise out if me will probably enrage him further. “I can’t let you in.”

“Well,” he says, “I’m going in anyway.”

Here we go.

“No,” I calmly tell him. “You’re not.”

So then he tries to pass by me and go towards the door, which I have propped open. I step in front of him and the door, and he steps back immedeately.

Huh. Interesting.

In my efforts to get inside the door quickly, I drop what was propping the door open — a roll of trash bags — so I bend down slowly to pick it up. I could’ve kicked it inside, but I decided not to. I knew he could’ve kneed me right in the face as I bent down. Somehow, I felt he wouldn’t. And he didn’t.

I stand up, flick my cigarette to the ground, and say, with a smile, “Have a nice day, sir.”

After shutting the door as he’s still scream-mumbling bullshit my way through the window, I go take a piss with my adrenaline-shaky hands, laughing to myself.

Have I mentioned how much I hate this town?

Of Jabba the Hutt & McGruff the Crime Dog.

It’s roughly ten in the eve and I slip out the door for a smoke, having just gotten done mopping the dining room. I hear a noise in the parking lot. Looking up, over by the drive-thru I see a half-naked guy staring at the ground. Jabba the Hutt in human flesh. He’s kind of wobbling, unbalanced, undoubtedly fucked up on something.

I smoke faster.

By the time I get inside, Natalie, the manager, informs me that Jabba is reportedly making the woman who just pulled into drive-thru uncomfortable. I don’t see him out the window anymore, but one of the girls tell me he’s on the other side of the store.

I unlock the back drive-thru window and stick my head out. And standing in between cars, there he is: dirty man boobs, jiggly beer belly, and all. He’s wearing two different kind of shoes and has a cigarette butt burning passed the filter hanging out the side of his super-slug mouth.

“Hey man,” I ask him, “what are you doing?”

This seemed like a reasonable opener.

“I wanted some food,” he says, holding up his baggy, stained shorts with one hand.

“Well, the inside is closed and you need a car to go through drive-thru.”

On a side note, I hate that I’m forced to point this fact out so often. The very presence of the word “drive” in “drive-thru,” I feel, should make this a no-brainer, but alas…

“Can I talk to the manager?”

“She’s busy right now. Just give us a call.”

“I don’t have a phone.”

I shrug. “Sorry man.”

This, of course, is not the end of it. He keeps pressing to talk to the manager, so I ask him kindly to step aside, out of the line of cars, and I’d let her know. I close and lock the window, go back up to the active drive-thru window and give Natalie the run-down.

We look out the window and Jabba is now sitting on the curb, leaning, splaying his filthy tummy to the growing line of increasingly uncomfortable customers. She confesses to me that she hopes that if she only ignores him he’ll go away, but I just stare her dead in the eyes as I slowly shake my head from side to side for dramatic effect.

I’ve seen Return of the Jedi countless times since I was a kid. I know all to well that he is immune to our Jedi mind tricks.

A few cars pass and he approaches the window, evidently having grown impatient. Natalie approaches and I hang close by, trying to find out where the broom is so I have some object to use as a weapon, just in case shit goes south. I find one. He asks her for food, free food, and she apologizes, informing him that we can’t do that. She then politely asks him to back up so the next customer can pull up and slowly closes the window.

I’m sure this comes as a surprise, but he does not back up. He merely crouches down, picks up an old nugget off the ground, stands back up, pops it in his mouth without a moment’s hesitation, and starts chew-chew-chewing away at it like a cow to cud.

Natalie’s anger finally overcomes her uneasiness. She opens up the window again, and this time firmly says, “You’re in the way. If you don’t move, I’m going to have to call the cops.”

“Call them then!”

And with Jabba’s blessing, she does, and she asks me to lock the drive-thru window as she holds the land line to her ear. Broom close by, I latch and lock the window, avoiding eye contact with the angry, bloated slug-man as I do so. He backs up to let the next car pull up, but stares back at me from beyond the car, yelling shit at me that I couldn’t hear. The guy in the car looks nervous but understanding and says he’ll pull around the building for his food.

After that, Jabba seems to vanish. Once I see the three police cruisers pull in from the other side of the store, I feel it’s safe to take the trash out the stock room door, and so promptly do so.

Back in the dark corral that houses the dumpsters, I hear defiant though indecipherable yelling through shaky, rhythmic gurgling. I imagine this is him getting tazed. Once back inside, I learn I’m right. At some point he was evidently also lying flat on the ground. The cops tried to pick him up by his hands and feet, at which point he bit one of the officers.

Sometimes, McGruff, crime takes a bite out of you.

I mean, I guess it makes sense. He did say he was hungry, after all, and almost anything — even raw bacon — had to taste better than that fucking filthy ground-nugget.

Have I mentioned lately how much I hate this town?