On an autumn day in 1991, I left the counter of a Murfreesboro record store, punched my time card for the last time, and swore, à la Scarlett O’Hara: “As God is my witness, I’ll never work retail again.”

I can’t remember exactly what I was making when I left the record store, and I’m a bit fuzzy about the hours. Even the bright green golf-shirt uniforms have dimmed a bit with time. But I do remember one thing vividly: the worst customer I ever had.

He came in one swamped Saturday afternoon with his wife and two small children, who immediately started using their lollipop sticks to rake sand out of the ashtrays and onto the floor. I was frantically ringing up customers when the man walked up and demanded, “Where’s your Charlie Daniels? Don’t you all have any Charlie Daniels?”

“He’s over in country,” I said.

“Country?” the customer snorted. “That’s dumb. He’s rock ’n’ roll.”

I said, “I’ll be with you shortly.”

“Well, maybe you oughta put things in the right place,” the customer said, looking down at his kids, who beamed back proudly. Flushed with victory, he drifted off toward rock, only to reappear just when I was in in the middle of another transaction.

“Where’s your Lynyrd Skynyrd?” he asked, and before I could answer, he said, “I guess you got them over in country too.” He looked around to see if anyone caught his clever riposte. I was getting fed up. “I’ve got a few people here,” I told him, “and I’ll be with you in just a second.”

He heaved a sigh and rolled his eyes and muttered something to his kids. He turned his back and walked away, and I looked at the other clerk. Then I did something stupid, unprofessional, and human: I rolled my eyes.

At that instant, I caught the glance of his wife, who had been watching me the whole time. She marched across the store and whispered angrily to her husband, who stormed up and started shouting, “Were you makin’ monkey faces at me?” I tried to calm him down. He shouted, “You better not be makin’ monkey faces at me!” Even as the assistant manager escorted him out the door, he continued to point at me and yell, “You’re the one with the monkey face! You’re the monkey face!”

The story did not have a happy ending. It rarely does in retail. The customer ended up with $25 in gift certificates, and I ended up with a warning from the district manager.

There are, of course, two sides to every transaction. Just as servers and salespeople are hassled every business day of the year, so too are buyers confronted with surly staffers, snotty clerks, and unreasonable managers who fail to recognize that every potential customer is, after all, a working stiff just like them.

The stories we tell here, however, are tales from the other side of the counter, stories and legends of The Customer From Hell. We spoke to waiters. We spoke to bridal shops. We spoke to florists, and mechanics, and hotel staffers.

Their stories are part of the secret mythology of the workplace—a body of folklore in which the bad customer becomes the monster, the clerk or server assumes heroic stature, and the transaction becomes a struggle between forces of darkness and light. Like all other myths, these have been retold to restore the balance of power—to protect one’s dignity or pride. Only first names have been used, because in the world of retail and restaurants, service providers do not have last names.

Thank you for reading. Please enjoy your stay.

Squeaky Wheels

“The big problem,” says the mechanic at the downtown auto shop near Eighth Avenue, “is that people don’t know anything about cars. It’s like people who don’t know anything about computers—they’re afraid if they touch a key it’ll explode.”

That, however, doesn’t stop people from complaining about the mechanic’s job. It’s even more insulting for this woman mechanic. When she answers the phone and asks a customer to describe a problem, guys will sometimes say, “No, wait, I need to talk to a mechanic.” Her usual response: “Try me.”

Mechanics get such a lousy rap, she argues, that people come in expecting to be ripped off. To illustrate her point, she relates the tale of a young couple who pulled up 15 minutes before closing time. Steam poured from the hood of their Volkswagen Rabbit convertible. The man walked into the front office and said, “My car’s overheating.” Eyeing the clock, the mechanic agreed to take a look.

When she got the hood open, she discovered that the oil was boiling inside the engine. “How long’ve you been driving it since it overheated?” the mechanic asked. “Oh, a couple of miles,” the customer replied. With the garage now officially closed—and the car too hot to examine—the mechanic told the man that he might have serious engine damage; he could leave the car overnight if he wanted. Instead, he told her just to put some water in it and he’d drive it off. She did, and the couple drove away.

The next morning, the mechanic received a phone call. It was the man from the night before, and he was livid. “I’m calling to say I’m suing you,” he screamed. What for? the mechanic asked. That morning, he had taken the now-cooled engine to another garage, where he’d been told that all he needed was a hose and an oil change. So why are you suing me? the mechanic asked. The man explained that if he had left his car with her overnight, he would’ve been ripped off. The mechanic suggested that, if he had auto trouble in the future, he could take his business somewhere else.

Most of the time, the mechanic explains, people don’t want to say what’s really wrong with their cars. “It’s like going to the doctor and not telling him what’s really hurting, because you’re afraid he’ll find cancer,” she says. There was, for instance, the man who brought in a car for a tune-up and an oil change before going on vacation. A repairman started the car, and suddenly the brakes failed, sending the car crashing through the shop. “You didn’t tell me the brakes were out!” the repairman cried. “I can’t afford to get them fixed,” came the reply.

The true customer from hell compounds ignorance with deviousness. There was the man who poured motor oil into his engine after letting it run dry—thinking he would convince the mechanic that her engine work was to blame. There was the woman who begged the shop to leave her car outside for the weekend, contrary to the shop’s practice of locking up cars until Monday. “I told her we were in a bad section of town,” the mechanic warned, but the customer wouldn’t listen. As a result, the radio was stolen from the car while it sat outside—and the customer sued for $250.

“Most of our customers are great,” the mechanic says. Those few that aren’t, she says, forget one of the cardinal rules of life: “You don’t mess around with somebody who knows how to fix your car.”

Dressed Down

Desperate situations lead to desperate measures—like stuffing wedding dresses down the front of your pants. (One Rivergate bridal shop owner says she caught a woman waddling out her door with seven wedding dresses stuffed in the crotch of her balloon pants.) At his boutique near Belle Meade, Mark says he gets the most trouble from people who simply don’t understand formal-wear terminology—hence the exasperated calls from people demanding a “cucumber” to match their tuxedo. “Once someone called and said he needed a ‘concubine,’ ” Mark recalls. “I suggested he look on Lower Broad.”

Tony, who runs a Madison formal-wear shop, recalls a woman who arrived in a white stretch limo, screeching to a halt and blocking five parking spaces. She flounced across the parking lot to Tony’s store and insisted she had to have an expensive wedding dress immediately. “That girl needed a Prozac pill the size of a tennis ball,” Tony remembers. After much squealing, the girl found a dress worth several thousand dollars and wrote a check on the spot. Days later, the check bounced. Tony tried unsuccessfully to locate the woman, who had dropped counterfeit checks all over town. Eventually, he gave up the search.

Three months later, however, he received a call from the Smith County jail, where deputies were wrestling with a suspect they’d picked up on a fraud charge. The suspect was clutching a wedding dress. The address of Tony’s shop was printed on the label, an officer said, and she fought off the deputies every time they tried to take the dress away. Did they want their merchandise back?

“I think my wife just laughed,” Tony recalls. “She said, ‘If that girl needs that dress that bad, take it.’ ”

Razor Burned

Asked to remember any customer-from-hell stories, Fred, who runs an East Nashville barber shop, thinks for a moment, then says, “There was the time I had to hit a customer in the head with a hammer. Is that what you’re looking for?”

According to Fred, the guy “just went nuts. He’d been drinking tequila, and all of a sudden he turned into a crazy man. Broke my guitar, pushed some women around, threw my chairs into the wall. I told him, ‘That’s enough.’ He was scaring me. He said to me, ‘You’re the one I want anyway.’ He started coming toward me, and I had a hammer up under the counter. He still wouldn’t stop. So I hit him once with the side of the hammer. I didn’t want to kill him or anything, ’cause I might go to jail. But the first blow just kind of slowed him down.

“I hit him again, and the second blow laid him out. I was ready to hit him again, but he just put up his hands and said, ‘Don’t hit me no more, Fred, you knocked some sense into me.’ From that day on, he just followed me around like a Shetland pony. We got to be pretty good friends after that.”

Turning the Tables

Of all the terrorized service providers in the world, waiters, waitresses, and bartenders have the most colorful collection of lousy customers. There is no real consensus as to the profile of the customer from hell. “Women in groups smaller than six,” says Kevin, who waits tables at a Second Avenue nightspot. “More than six, that estrogen cattiness kicks in, and they start fighting amongst themselves instead of picking on you.” A former server concurs. “Women are terrible,” she observes. “They grow up in the South, where they’re totally dependent on men, and they have no idea how you’re supposed to tip.”

“Guys are the worst,” says Susie, who worked mostly in hotel restaurants and lounges. “A lot of times they just want to bully a woman. One night, this guy sat there holding his wife’s hand with one hand and grabbing my ass with the other. And I was trying to hold a tray of drinks!” Dan, floor manager at a Hillsboro Village restaurant, agrees. “It’s that whole sexism thing,” he says. “Men think waitresses will put up with more because they’re women—they won’t fight back or stand up for themselves.” He chuckles. “ ’Course, we have four waitresses here who’d as soon castrate you as look at you.”

Rudeness, apparently, is not a sex-linked characteristic. Some examples:

Women. “Get your goddamn hands off me!” screamed the well-to-do businesswoman, as Tad, the server at a Nashville theme restaurant, leaned in to take her lunch order and brushed against her shoulder. As he stammered an apology, she berated him at the top of her lungs: “You need to learn how to serve food!” When he asked her to calm down, she shouted, “You don’t need to worry about me—you need to worry about getting my food out here!”

Men. “Is there a problem?” Susie asked the man at the bar in the downtown Nashville hotel lounge. He wouldn’t speak to her. Instead, he would stare at her angrily, then turn away from her and bark out his drink order. A manager finally asked the man what was wrong. “I’ll tell you,” said the man, glowering at Susie. “I can’t stand the way she looks. Her face is disgusting.”

Women. “How’s everything?” Kelly asked the elderly woman at O’Charley’s. “Perfect,” the woman replied. “Could you get me a cup of coffee?” Kelly went to the kitchen. When she returned, the woman had gone, leaving exact change for her $15 bill—and 37 cents for a tip.

Men. “Here’s the deal, sweetie,” the man told Sarah as he arranged some coins on the tabletop at the MetroCenter chain restaurant. “This is your tip. Every time you don’t fill my water glass, I take away a quarter. Every time I have to ask where my food is, I take away a quarter. Got it?” She got it. Soon she learned the game was rigged. “Not fast enough, sweetie,” the man chuckled, snatching away a quarter as she filled his glass. Before his meal even arrived, Sarah’s tip was gone.

OK, it’s a draw.

Bartenders, on the other hand, draw no such gender-based distinctions. There are nice drinkers, and there are mean drinkers. There was the grizzled patron at a Lower Broadway bar, who, after he had been cut off by the bartender, leaned over the bar and started hocking loogies into the ice chest. There were the two off-duty police officers from an outlying county, who downed Wild Turkey shots and launched a contest to see who could spit cherries into a waste basket at the opposite end of the bar. The bartender looked up in time to face a hail of spit-soggy Maraschinos.

Then there are the purely strange customers—like the biker lady who offered one Second Avenue bartender $1,000 to sleep with her. Or the two women at the same bar who felt a sudden chill—so they started burning a heap of napkins in an ashtray. But the worst patrons, bartenders and servers agree, are those who look for faults before they even set foot in the door.

“People come in sometimes with this big chip on their shoulder, just wanting to take their frustrations out on you,” says Dan. “They wouldn’t do it if they’d ever worked a shift.”

Among My Souvenirs

In the hotel business a certain amount of theft is part of the daily routine. One Nashville hotel, the Budget Host Inn, loses about 1,800 towels a year. That’s nothing compared to the Steeplechase Inn in Brentwood, where a staffer estimates that some 7,300 towels disappear annually. Add in the cost of soaps, shampoos, ashtrays, sheets, and even comforters, and you have tens of thousands of dollars lost every year. The euphemism for these enormous losses, paradoxically enough, is “shrinkage.”

Shrinkage, however, is hardly le mot juste for the behavior of some patrons at Nashville hotels. A staffer at the Doubletree Hotel once caught a guest trying to leave with the headboard from a bed. “I chased someone trying to carry off a TV set,” says Clint, who manages a hotel off I-65. He’s seen customers try to carry out linens, remote controls, and paintings off the walls. “I mean, face it—who wants a hotel picture?” Clint asks.

He even stopped one nice old lady who had a lampshade, a lamp base, and a cord sticking out of her suitcase. (She explained, somewhat defensively, that she had bought it from “a guy.”)

Back in the 1980s, says Bill, who manages a hotel on Music Valley Drive, a customer left his sink running all night. When the hotel staff arrived the next morning, the room was ankle-deep in water, and the steam had caused all the wallpaper to peel from the walls. The customer pitched a fit. “I think he was hauled off to Central State,” Bill muses.

Still, one group of customers remains more hellacious than any other—worse even than visiting rock bands, football teams, and Shriners. “We had these Baptist kids on convention here last year, and they were a nightmare,” Clint groans. For days, squeaky-clean teens vented their frustrations by ripping ashtrays off the walls, grinding pizza into the carpets, heaving garbage cans down the staircases, and plastering takeout food in their beds and between the mattresses. “Some of the things they did would never have occurred to me,” Clint says. “And I’m a Baptist too.”

Thorny Issues

Here’s some free advice from local florists: If you want your plants to live, water them. In other words, don’t come in on Mother’s Day with a dried-out Christmas poinsettia and expect a leafy new replacement model. A florist whose shop is located just off Hwy. 70 says people regularly bring in Easter gardenias months later in barren, dusty soil, claiming the plants were dead from the start. Even so, she usually swaps them out. “There’s an unwritten rule in the florist business,” she confides. “It’s easier to keep a customer than make a new one.”

Then there are the new customers who don’t want to pay. One society matron called to say her daughter was being married in a huge Nashville church. The decorations, gowns, and catering were costing a fortune, she explained, and she was purchasing only the best for the wedding. “How would you like to provide the flowers for free, as publicity?” she asked. The florist was stunned. “After all,” the woman continued, “you’ve probably never done any large social events before.” The florist was still shaking when she put down the phone. She remembers the advice a florist near Belle Meade gave her: “People with the most are the hardest to collect from.”

The best florist story, however, concerns the two women from an established Nashville florist who were hired to line the inside of a grave with flowers. (The customers did not want their loved one sinking into mere dirt.) The florists climbed down a ladder into the grave and began packing the sides with lemon leaves. They went about their work so quietly that an assistant passed by and assumed they had left. He pulled the ladder out of the grave and walked away.

When the two women noticed the ladder was missing, they began to shout from inside the grave. The assistant, being above ground, couldn’t hear. As the women yelled for help, there appeared to be no way the situation could get worse.

And then it began to rain.

Maybe the flies enhanced it...

Many years ago, at a nice restaurant on the Cumberland River, a not-so-nice customer was making life miserable for his server. While Susie, the waitress, was trying to take care of a party of 10—in a packed room, on a Saturday night—the man would wave his glass at her and shout, “Over here, honey!” Even when she rushed over to his table and filled his glass, the customer wasn’t satisfied. Instead, he continued to snap his fingers and whistle at her from across the room. “You don’t snap your fingers and whistle at a waitress,” Susie declares.

With a newfound sense of purpose, she returned to the kitchen, where the customer’s bowl of gumbo sat ready. Gingerly, she picked up four or five dead flies that were lying near the garbage area. She carried the flies back to the kitchen and emptied them into the bowl of gumbo. She stirred it tenderly, disguising the flies as okra. When she was done, she set the bowl before her customer with a big, bright smile. “He said it was the best he’d ever had,” Susie recalls. “Maybe the flies enhanced it....”

Susie is now an X-ray technician. Whatever you do, don’t snap your fingers at her.

It was just like a bomb...

No matter how it was cooked, the chiliburger would never satisfy the man who returned every week to the Murfreesboro fast-food restaurant. The staff groaned every time the man appeared because they knew the routine: The man would order a chiliburger, find some imaginary fault with its preparation, and create a huge argument in the hopes of getting another burger for free. On this jam-packed night, however, he tangled with the wrong employee. “This doesn’t have enough chili,” snarled the man, thrusting his half-eaten burger through his car window. “We’ll bring you another,” Eric the server said.

Eric took a foil burger wrapper from the kitchen and ladled a mass of runny chili into it. When it was half full, he submerged the burger in the pouch of chili and ladled in more until the wrapper bulged. He then neatly folded the wrapper once, stuffed the mess into a sack, and handed it to the customer. The man sped off, pausing only at the exit to withdraw his free burger. As he removed it from the sack, the pouch emptied its greasy contents all over his shirt, his steering wheel, and his upholstery. “It was just like a bomb,” Eric marveled.

The customer never returned. Eric has chosen another line of work.

A cherry'll hold more bugs than you think...

On the Sunday shift at a Nashville restaurant known for its brunches, Maggie the waitress was being hassled by a woman who kept demanding Manhattans. No sooner would the woman down one than she’d be rattling her ice cubes for another. “If you could make it this century,” the woman jeered. “And don’t squeeze the cherry this time. I can tell.” Maggie was fed up.

A No-Pest strip hung in the employee breakroom. Maggie took some tweezers and plucked a few insects from the adhesive. Using the tweezers, she mashed some flies into the center of the cherry and plugged the end with a moth. “It’ll hold more bugs than you think,” Maggie observed. Taking care not to squeeze the cherry, she rolled it around the lip of a garbage can a few times. She plunked the cherry into the drink and carried it to the woman, who downed her cocktail without complaint.

Maggie is now in medical school.

It's a little trick bartenders know...

You don’t work more than a decade in the bartending business without learning how to take care of bad customers. Susie B. had just the ticket for one clown who kept bothering her. “My stupid ex-boyfriend used to come in and bug me,” Susie B. said. Every so often, he would appear at the bar, begging her for drinks and berating her if he didn’t get them. After one such outburst, she decided she’d cut him off—for good.

In the register drawer, Susie B. kept a little bottle of Visine. It wasn’t for her eyes. It’s a closely guarded secret that a few drops of the odorless, colorless liquid—which can be mixed into a drink without the unlucky victim ever catching on—can cause stomach cramps and an epic bout of diarrhea that lasts for days. “It’s a little trick bartenders know,” Susie B. noted. She poured her ex a stiff belt, and then, while he wasn’t looking, she added a Visine chaser. He left folded up like an ironing board.

Susie B. now works at a sports bar outside Nashville. Treat her kindly, and tip her well.

One last cautionary tale

When Dorothy saw the party of eight walk into the fancy Vanderbilt-area restaurant, she breathed a sigh of relief. It had been a slow night, and she could make $50 off this one table alone. So she didn’t mind when they changed their drink orders several times. Nor was she perturbed when they sent back a couple of appetizers, claiming they weren’t cooked properly. However, when they started sending back their dinners—one dish at a time—she sensed that she was being made the butt of a joke. The punch line came when they paid their $350 bill, leaving her a $5 tip for an entire evening’s work. She was crushed.

The man at the head of the table, however, had left Dorothy the weapon with which she would work her revenge—the yellow receipt that provided his credit-card number, complete with expiration date and home address. She folded up the slip and took it home, plotting her revenge. Inspiration struck late that night, as Dorothy was flipping from channel to channel on her TV. Her attention was captured by an ad on a home-shopping channel. For $39.99, the ad announced, you could own your very own food dehydrator. Dorothy decided to send her skinflint customer a token of her appreciation. She dialed the number onscreen, read off the information from the credit-card slip—and ordered five food dehydrators to be delivered to her customer’s doorstep, four to six weeks later.

By that time, of course, he would have forgotten his $5 waitress. But she would never forget him.

Danny Solomon contributed to this article.