The holiday season can be earmarked by chaos, mayhem, and grouchy shoppers. Although every Hallmark movie boasts about cheerful worldly interactions and whimsical holiday shopping, any home-grown American can tell you that all decorum and merriment is thrown out the window the moment you set foot in the department store parking lot.

It can be incredibly difficult and frustrating working in customer-facing roles where your managers refuse to face up and take accountability on behalf of the operation they are managing, instead throwing the lowest-level workers under the bus for things well out of their control. When you're an honest, well-intended person, it can take an unfortunate amount of time to realize that not everyone is wired to be honest and well-intended and that there are, in fact, people trying to take advantage…

If you feel taken for granted more than anyone else you know, you're probably the parent of a teenager or you work in IT. Even worse, you might be both. Now, I have never worked at a company big enough to have an official IT person, but I know how grateful my coworkers and I would be if we did. One has to wonder where this lack of proper gratitude comes from considering how lost we would be without the technologically competent folks in our lives and especially in our workplace environments. No…

Who doesn't love a classic “you don't know what you've got till it's gone” story? Here, we have a server fresh out of school who was constantly manipulated and treated poorly by her Karen and Kevin bosses. While I have never shared the particulars of a story, I do empathize with the situation as someone who has worked for ungrateful clients. In this case, I was working in a client-facing role and was already swamped that I did not need this particular person's business. When he started making u…

A major problem with the social media-fueled “always right” attitude and justice-seeking is that we often are wrong in our own thoughts and perceptions, often because our perception is almost always formed off an incomplete picture. So, in seeking the justice we crave from the people we have incorrectly labeled as antisocial wrong-doers, we ourselves become the antisocial wrong-doers. Unfortunately, this is something that people with many permanent disabilities that aren't immediately visible t…

“I immediately wanted to call in sick,” this video game store employee wrote. What made them feel so ill? An advertisement! For those who have spent time in the trenches of retail work around the holidays, you know exactly how this person feels. No matter how much you enjoy your retail job during the year, when the holiday season comes around, customers begin to act feral.

You can never exactly predict when and how karma is going to strike. Sometimes, the people who deserve it the most get off easy (for now). But when karma does come into play, the results can be glorious. I'll never forget the time I had a friend who was so insistent that their wedding would happen the way they wanted it to that despite the forecast of good weather, it started to downpour during their outdoor wedding ceremony. It was the kind of climactic situation no one could have predicted (a…

Shouldn't animal control have been able to shut down this Karen duo? The fact that they were able to intimidate animal control into enforcing a fine that would have otherwise just been a warning says a lot more about the fragile authority of animal control than anything else. Now, personally speaking, I could not live right next to someone who keeps a dozen chickens and who always is having problems with those chickens because of raccoons and other animal attacks. That is not exactly my neighbo…

Most Karen neighbors are sticklers around noise and privacy, but you would think if they would accuse you of crossing the property line, they would at least double check first. Here, we have a Karen who threw a tantrum at her neighbor's friend, who was doing a favor and assisting with replacing his buddy's fence. Karen insisted that the fence was over the property line, prompting her neighbor and his friend to do some research. When they uncovered that her property was actually nearly 10 feet o…

We know all too well at this point that HOAs are full of obnoxious type-A individuals who will stop at nothing to make your neighborhood experience a living nightmare. No HOA is immune to these extremes, so it is up to homeowners to find some level of healthy distance from them so that life in the neighborhood is at least slightly bearable. Now, as someone who lives in a city, my personal encounters with HOAs are nonexistent, but I also know full well what it's like to be taken advantage of by…

Imagine how audacious you'd have to be to expect a free upgrade everywhere you go? Like if you were heading to the mechanic for a tire rotation and expected a full new set of tires. Or if you had coach tickets for your flight home for the holidays and Jeff Bezos just showed up to the tarmac insisting you take his private jet instead. Feels silly, huh?

Everyone had a fantasy in high school of running into their arch-enemy years later and showing them how much better they are now. Here's the thing, though: running into that person years down the road is never exactly what one expects the encounter to be. Even if one's dream has come true and that person is a total wreck. The experience of running into them can range from cringeworthy to petty to wholesome… as evidenced by these stories, which were shared to this r/AskReddit thread. Some of the…

Sometimes big problems require simple solutions. This seemed to be the case in the entitled couple vs small bookstore story we came across on Reddit. The bookstore employee recalls an older couple who oozed entitlement so much in the establishment that it ruined the comfort of big comfy chairs for everyone. This couple would come in, never by anything, but would sit in the only two big comfy chairs all day long, cut the line to demand free hot water, and even kick their feet up on the table SHO…

Karens gonna Karen no matter your profession. So whether you work in the service industry or are the CEO of your own company, nobody is safe from a Karen. Take, for example, this electrician's story on Reddit . He was hired, as an electrician, to do some lighting work at a grocery store. This was back when he was a young blue collar worker and still new to the trade. He was alone, on a ladder, working on the lights, very much looking like an electrician and in no way a grocery store clerk. And…

"Uno reverse and draw 4"

If there is one thing that working in the service industry tends to teach you, it's to hold your ground. You can't let everyone walk all over you, because there will be people who will most definitely take advantage of that weakness. For example, this server who either came encounter with a male Karen or a really empty-headed scammer. He was working a very slow morning shift, we're talking just several orders, enough to count on one hand. So when a mad came storming in demanding a refund, the f…