People bully down. Middle-aged women aren’t very high up on the social pyramid, and it’s not acceptable to bully children in public, so they bully other middle-aged women and teenage girls.

We’re coming home along the Thruway and decide to stop at McD’s. There’s a woman and smallish kid in front of us getting huffy and I can tell this won’t end well. And in due time she starts yelling at the cashier, “Why is everything more expensive here? This is ridiculous! You’re ripping people off!” and so on, as the…

There are people, more than likely older guys who never got laid in high school, who enjoy making teenage girls cry, more so if attractive...

I used to work in a bank, we had another branch less than a quarter of a mile down the road. Pretty much all banks in the UK are only open 0900-1700 (if you are lucky, a lot of them close at 1600) in order to give the most coverage we opened at 0830 and closed at 1630, the other branch was open 0930-1730 so there was…

Regarding the screaming woman in the pizza place: I did have an occasion once where my then 2.5 year old daughter asked me why some woman was yelling at an employee at my local grocery store. It gave me great pleasure to explain, very loudly, that the yelling woman was mean and nasty and probably very unhappy with her…

There are PLENTY of Starbucks addicts with cuckoo-bananas specific drink orders who never worked there. One semi-regular of mine used to order a 162 degree latte, and he carried around a digital thermometer that he would use to test his finished drink. More than 4 degrees off and he would demand I remake it.

I understand the fact that Starbucks, by nature of serving so many people, is going to have many horrible customers. However, why must the employees deal with so much crap in a magnanimous manner. I just don’t understand why Brad is required to put up with so much crap from an obviously shitty customer. Why can’t…

We had one family friend that I just stopped going to restaurants with because he was such a tool, complaining about every aspect of the meal. (To make matters worse, he was actually a really good cook himself, which meant he could find fault with any damn thing.) My Mother would go with him occasionally, but she…

The second story reminds me of one of my wife’s tales of waiting tables at Dead Lobster while in grad school.

Dear dining public:

For what it’s worth, a friend who has been to Lambert’s insists the rolls are so light that anyone who could injure someone with one “needs to professionally go into either baseball or murder.”

I feel like Lambert’s Café needs to change its name to "Ow Bon Pain" after this incident.

That’s the trouble with pretentious-ass food: Sometimes it’s actually really good.

This is totally the best part of working in human services. One time at our recovery center we threw a Halloween dance party with an actual DJ who volunteered his time. Tons of snacks, everyone dressed up, and our coworker masterminded the decorations like a boss. One of the attendees hugged me afterwards and said…

Many years ago at the group home for developmentally disabled teens where I worked there was a resident who really, really wanted to go to the best steak house in the city for his 18th birthday. He had behavior and anger issues, but was determined to earn that birthday dinner, and he managed it. So another staff…

Weird shit regularly happens to me in Au Bon Pain, AMA.

We’d had a freak storm come through that day...