I was jealous of the costs of 70s college when I learned my dad worked summers at a paper mill (nasty, stinky job) and those 3 months of pay paid for the entire school year, tuition, housing, food, beer, etc. He was probably making the current equivalent of $20/hr which wouldn't even pay for community college now

every time my mother used to say something disrespectful to a server, my dad would remind her that he paid for his undergrad tuition working at a pizza place. (GI bill for his graduate studies). it's one of the few things they would argue about in public and i think about 30 years in she stopped automatically thinking…

Remember how they recently started mandating that police officers wear portable cameras to improve both their behavior and the behavior of those they are interacting with? The restaurant industry needs that. I'd pay for it myself, personally. Anything to watch the smug satisfaction on an asshole's face melt away as I…

I'm not super-sensitive at all to stress but when I was waiting tables (and that one month I was telemarketing), I was known to need a moment or two. I kinda punched a wall once.

Oh, man, "I've tried EVERYTHING" was a delight to hear when I was doing tech support. Everything, eh? You mean, you refreshed the page and squirmed a lot and then threw a hissy fit? You really did try everything.

It's usually the scripts. I'm young enough to be annoyed by the first few items on the tech support checklist, and have enough computer knowledge to be annoyed by the next few. I try to actually be nice about it, and at least pretend to do the things I had tried before calling again, or really do them; I've found it…

The people calling me were always sys admins and they would try and bullshit me so much as to what they'd already done so I had to coax them into trying the fix. I once had someone who wasn't at the computer when we spoke email me afterwards to say "my way" worked, it wasn't "my way" it was literally the only way to…

On the other hand, when you're trying to explain that you're 3 years into computer engineering, and that you are quite positive that your laptop is in fact plugged in (because it's giving you a blue screen with the memory address of the failure), sometimes the 'I know exactly what the problem is, and it's not the damn…

And judging by the A&M mention that story was in East Texas, which is the worst part of the state.

It's fast food, but that doesn't mean there's no service involved. If someone's bringing it to your car, they're performing a personal service for you and should be tipped.

It's the cumulative stress. This is a very, very high-stress job. There's constant input from other people, all the time - it's emotionally exhausting.

Sometimes?

I swear my office's IT guy has magical eyes, because the second he comes over to watch me try to recreate a problem I've been having all day, the problem stops happening. I think he thinks I'm a moron

Before their generation (Boomers) got super-selfish and destroyed society.

Not only are these customers horrible. A bunch of them are clueless. Which I just don't get. I grew up fairly solidly upper middle class and almost everyone I know had some kind of customer service job as a teenager, while in school, or as a second job because they needed the money. This is not that unusual.

Whenever someone would try to tell me they're trained in whatever area the problem is I'd always be tempted to reply "so am I but my training is up to date", I never actually did though.

My wife and I both worked at this cheap kid's play place when we were friends in High School. It was supposedly 'educational', but that was really just so they could justify charging people $14 a head to play with blocks. It did have some cool stuff, like an older Fire Truck the kids could play on, but almost…

"Your job is to serve us and do what we say. You're not supposed to talk back."

Apropos of nothing except pure nostalgia... I used to have a job where I had an executive assistant (it was a magical time when venture capital flowed like water and the economy had not yet tanked...). His name was Jason, and his family owned a local small cinema like the one in Callie's story. He would occasionally…

I was actually told, by a customer, that I was a "race traitor."