A drunk guy came in fully clothed, wandered the aisles for a minute, stood in place for several minutes, then headed to the bathroom. When he came out, he was wearing nothing but his t-shirt. He left the store hanging dong out into the parking lot and vanished into the night. Never saw him again.
Fugue state, I guess. Not my story, but a friend of mine found out during a robbery that the emergency button under the counter doesn’t call the cops right away. It just locks you and the store inside with a now panicking armed robber. His boss later told him it was to prevent people from getting away.
It did put in a call to the alarm company, who eventually called the police, but for a good twenty-five minutes, my friend genuinely thought he was going to die in there. Sounds like a massive liability for the store. Most places tell their employees to cooperate. Cash can be replaced.
Lives can’t. Oh man, I have a great one. I worked at this gas station that constantly got robbed. One night, it was me and this woman.
We were dealing with a couple of customers when these two guys walk in, grab four suitcases of beer, and walk right out the door. They were so slick about it we almost didn’t notice. They peeled out of the parking lot in an old white Ford F-150. We called the cops, gave statements, and went on with our lives.
Maybe two hours later, we see that old white F-150 tearing down the street, followed by nine cop cars. We’re like, holy crap. Maybe fifteen minutes after that, we see the same truck tearing down the street in the other direction, followed by about fourteen cop cars. Not an exaggeration.
I counted. The rest of the shift went by, about five hours, and we’d basically forgotten about it. A cop stopped in shortly before I punched out and said, “Yeah, they were in a stolen truck. We got the guys.
”
I clocked out, got in my car, and had to pause while a tow truck trundled by. I pulled in behind it. What was it towing? That same freaking old white Ford F-150.
Worked overnight at a QuikTrip for two years. So many drunks. People would vomit all over the bathroom. Had one guy puke from the middle of the candy aisle all the way to the front door.
Another guy fell down and broke the refrigerator door. One guy threatened to kill me and then flicked me off because his food stamp card declined. One regular would come in and tell everyone she was my aunt, then flip out over trivial stuff. Threw a temper tantrum one night, and it took four cops to take her down.
One of the workers would get plastered at the bar next door on her nights off and draw dongs on coworkers’ cars. Okay, that was me. Wisconsin. I once saw a man come in, stare at me for a few minutes, walk into the soda aisle, and slowly pour a two-liter bottle of Sprite down his pants.
Then he left. There was the time a woman drove her car into the 7-Eleven I worked overnights at. It all started when a guy no-called, no-showed again. I got called in so another guy didn’t have to work twenty-four straight hours.
Goes well. I’m tired. Counting cash. Four in the morning.
All of a sudden I hear a loud noise behind me, and the rack of cigarettes behind me rains down on me like a waterfall. Once the cigarettes stopped falling, I used some colorful language to ask myself what was happening and went outside to check. There’s a Jeep backed into the spot where the cigarette rack had been. I check if the driver is okay.
She is. But I hear through her phone—which didn’t seem to be on speaker—a voice saying, “How the hell did you crash into a 7-Eleven? ”
I called the cops and the owner. It all got worked out.
When the cops arrived, they first laughed, then breathalyzed and field-tested the woman to see if she was drunk. She wasn’t. Just a tired, crappy driver. The owner trusted me from then on because I handled the initial insurance stuff and took pictures of the damage for the regional manager.
The customers were impressed that I didn’t panic when it happened. And I got this story out of it. While working an overnight shift at McDonald’s, I watched a guy go through the drive-thru in reverse because his window was stuck and he refused to open his door. Please tell me it was a two-door, so there’s no excuse for him not to use the passenger window.
I had a regular customer nicknamed Spy, a shell-shocked Vietnam vet. He came in once and gave me six hundred dollars and just said, “Hold on to this for me. I might need it. ” I found out later they kept an envelope in the safe for him to make deposits into, because his daughter would steal his disability checks.
One day, Spy came in with a mangy-looking pit bull. He grabbed the mop bucket and a big jug of floor cleaner, went outside, tied the dog to the spigot near the entrance, filled the bucket with water, got some good suds going, and dumped it on the dog. The dog proceeded to attack him and bit him up pretty bad. Spy just bailed and ran off.
Meanwhile, the dog was tied up in front, furious, and nobody could get in or out. Had to finally call animal control. They got there, accidentally unleashed the dog, and it attacked one of the dog catchers before running off, presumably to find Spy. Legend has it that dog is still chasing him.
Not super crazy, but a few years ago I worked third shift at a Walgreens. I noticed a car in the parking lot with its lights on. Didn’t think much of it. An hour or two later, it was still there, so I told my manager.
We went out to investigate—not supposed to do that—and noticed the car had a lot of damage on the driver’s side. The driver was passed out on the steering wheel. We knocked on the window. They woke up and were clearly wasted.
And there was a kid in a child’s seat in the back. Long story short, we called the police. They gave the driver a sobriety test and arrested them. Saw the mugshot on the local newspaper website a few days later.
Felt bad for the kid. Dad takes you on a trip to get cigarettes and forgets you’re in the car. I worked briefly at a gas station convenience store. The owner, my boss, when he tended the store, just sat in the back room doing whatever while his German Shepherd hung out near the cash register.
He somehow trained the dog to bark three times whenever a customer came up to pay. My boss would hear the three barks and walk out to serve them. The dog only did it for my boss, not for me or anyone else. The dog also peed by standing on the toilet seat and aiming into the bowl.
Creature of habit. Probably way too late to get in on this, but I used to work on Bourbon Street. Got loads of stories. One: found a gun in the urinal while a guy was fighting with one of our shot girls.
Took a moment. Hid the gun carefully. Asked my boss about it. He pointed to the guy.
Guy had an empty holster. Two: had a guy pick up a girl from the restroom because “I am leaving right now. ” Except she was still using the bathroom. You never want to be the guy with a mop on Bourbon.
Three: watched a guy argue with a cop about football or something. He got mad, then hit the cop in the jaw. One of the bouncers from down the street walked up and grabbed the guy while about a billion cops came from God knows where. Four: a prostitute walked up to me with some powder and asked if I could tell whether or not it was coke.
It was crushed Smarties. At a Mazda-based convenience store—I think they meant Maxima or something—had a guy in our parking lot doing what looked like martial arts at one in the morning. He’d do the motions, then kick-flip off the side of the building, then go back to the motions. We told him he needed to stop.
He goes to the pumps, takes the nozzle off, buzzes for inside pay, chooses a grade of fuel, and splashes it into his mouth. He spits it out, chooses another grade, and does it again. That’s when we called the cops, after he decided he was done mouthwashing with fuel. He comes inside and starts loading up with bags of chips, candy bars, a single twelve-ounce beer from a six-pack.
Half the stuff was already opened. The cop got there, told the guy he had to pay, then put him in the back of his car. Word from the cop the next day: he was an extremely disturbed individual and was admitted to a mental ward. Creepy as hell.
That was by far the weirdest. I’ve had a forty-five-year-old drunk lady dry-hump me. People taking juice into the bathroom and playing finger paint all over the walls. Had an idiot stuff a six-pack down his pants, walk down the aisle, drop it on accident, and have five cans roll away while he walked out the door.
By far the most disgusting one: someone placed two plungers in the bathroom on adjacent walls and balanced a piece of crap between them. I just couldn’t wrap my head around that one. I didn’t personally experience this, but at a competing convenience store down the road, a guy came in one night, sat down at one of their tables, and filled himself from floor to ceiling. Even hearing the story still bothers me.
While my crew and I were on break sitting on the loading dock at our grocery store, we witnessed a very drunk man coming from the recently closed bar try to steal a Christmas tree from our parking lot. We let him get about twenty feet with it—which took him a good ten minutes—before yelling at him and scaring the hell out of him. I had a guy come into the gas station where I work about a year ago. Obviously on drugs, but I have a lot of regulars who are addicts, and most aren’t violent.
Just weird. He wandered around the aisles, occasionally looking over and staring at me for ten seconds or so each time. After the last customer left, he came up and pulled out a small pocket knife, the Swiss Army kind. Looked at me and said, “I was supposed to do something very bad to you, but I decided not to.
” All while opening and closing the knife. Robbing me is one thing, but this guy directly threatened my life. Then he gives me the knife. Just hands it to me.
Tells me to hold on to it. Looks around for about fifteen seconds. Then asks for it back. Obviously I shouldn’t give it back.
This dude just threatened to murder me. But he was huge—about six-three, two hundred pounds of lean muscle. He could have killed me with his bare hands. So I gave it back.
He told me to keep my eyes open and left. I called the cops after he left. Turns out he was an Iraq War vet who wasn’t taking his medicine. Such a shame.
I started open carrying my handgun after that, since the owner was a pro-Second Amendment conservative. It really cleared out a lot of the troublemakers. Haven’t had anything that crazy since. I did have an older homeless guy try to pay for junk food with jewelry before asking about any houses for sale in the area.
This guy wasn’t interested in buying a house, if you catch my drift. Oh, and yesterday I found some used needles in the trash. So that was fun. Another time, this lady commented on my gun, talking about how she wanted one.
This was right after trying to sell me a scale that had what I can only imagine was drug residue on it, with other customers in the store. Bold freaking move. She ran to the bathroom for twenty minutes, during which a local police officer came in to buy some cookies. Perfect timing.
My coworker told him what was up. He called for backup, they searched her, and found heroin and paraphernalia. Turns out she was shooting up in my bathroom and left blood on my floor, which upset me the most because I had to clean that crap up. Whataburger ex-worker here.
Night shifts vary. Saturday at the end of spring break, a house party got broken up, and all the kids came to Whataburger at once. I’d seen the Snapchat videos of the cops breaking it up. The kids thought the corner table was a good rolling surface for joints.
At the end of the shift, I saw the same cops from the videos. I told them the party they broke up just rolled through here. They laughed. Fourth of July, I did a ten p.
m. to five a. m. shift.
Stoners, drunk people. It was busy. I love the chaos of drunk people. Guy walked behind the counter.
New Year’s Eve, jam-packed. Our manager gave us beads to wear for morale. Some drunk lady thought we earned them like they do at Mardi Gras. I said no.
I lied and said we danced for them. Of course she wanted the shiny beads. I told her I did the little teapot dance for them. She drunkenly did the dance in the lobby.
I said it wasn’t good enough. She huffed and sat down. My manager thought it was hilarious. All in all, pretty sane for Whataburger.
I ruled the diner and kept it in check. This happened in 1996 at a store in Live Oak, Florida, called Suwannee Swifty. We were located on Walker Avenue, which at the time was referred to as Crack Alley. On Friday and Saturday nights, we’d have a huge number of cars in the parking lot, lots of shoplifting, people getting high and drunk in the lot.
I’d already had to call 911 for a heart attack in the bathroom and two others in the parking lot at different times. Anyway, I was working the store alone and was at the tail end of a double shift that was turning into a triple. I’d been there since five in the morning, and it was coming up on one a. m.
My relief, which happened that night to be my manager, called in drunk and said I’d have to stay until five when the next morning shift came in. I was pissed. And I could see folks just openly stealing stuff and daring me to do anything. One of the workers from a different location came in and told me to just shut down for the night.
I tried asking people to leave, but they wouldn’t. I had maybe forty people in the store by then. Finally, I called the police, got up on the counter, and made the announcement that cops were on their way. Everyone had about three minutes to take whatever they wanted and get the hell out.
It took about three minutes to clear out every case of beer and every forty of malt liquor, not to mention most of the bread, beef jerky, and even the big jar of pickled eggs and pigs feet we kept on the counter. When the last person left, I put a chain and padlock on the door and went home. The next day, I came by at lunchtime. Police and insurance people were there, along with a still-drunk manager who showed up hours late for the morning shift and had no idea what was going on.
I asked if I was on the schedule for the week. She just slowly shook her head and told me to get out. Not a convenience store story, but for a while I was a manager at a dive bar in a dodgy strip. We were open from nine in the morning until five a.
m. and would get all sorts. One morning, a woman ordered three drinks and three meals. She looked a bit out of it, but we got a lot of people coming off night shift, so I didn’t think much of it.
She proceeded to sit at one of the outdoor tables, down three glasses of cheap wine, and when her meal came, she started feeding the nearby pigeons, tearing the schnitzel with her hands and dropping it. She then escalated to chewing her food and spitting it on the ground, quickly attracting loads of birds. I politely asked her to stop feeding the birds. She acted really offended, like I was the weirdo, but said she’d stop.
When I turned to walk back inside, she screamed, “I’ll drag you to the car park and stab you in the throat with a screwdriver. ”
Lucky the cop shop was right across the street from the bar. They didn’t take long to respond, but it took four cops to subdue her. I work at a twenty-four-hour BP garage.
We had an old creepy Russian bloke, no English, cheap tracksuit, wandering around at one in the morning. He bought something, and I thought he was stroking himself through his trousers while I served him. After he left, we noticed a puddle on the floor. Turns out he’d peed himself while standing at the till.
Not a fun one to clean up after. Not a twenty-four-hour story, but I worked at a grocery store for a while. In the middle of the day, a guy parks his brand-new BMW in the handicapped lane. A lady rolls up right across a divider from him, and instead of braking, she slams the gas and rolls right up onto the hood of his car.
Neither driver was hurt—the BMW driver had already walked off—but the car was six days old. And he had no handicapped placard while parked in the handicapped spot. Trying to avoid getting dinged by parking in the handicapped space. That backfired.
I used to work the graveyard shift as a waiter at IHOP. One night, as I was checking out a group of people, a man covered in sweat hurried through the front door and stammered out, “Where’s the bathroom? ” I pointed to the back and continued taking orders. About ten minutes later, I saw him in a corner booth shaking back and forth and muttering under his breath like a madman.
I asked a table if they knew what his deal was, but they were just as weirded out as I was. I went up to him and asked if he wanted water or something to drink, but he didn’t acknowledge me. I went back into the kitchen. After I told my manager, I saw three cops quickly enter the restaurant and detain him.
Turns out the dude was high on meth. He’d crashed his car into a bank about a block away, then ran to the IHOP. I worked at Wawa. One night, this guy came in.
I assume he had a mental disorder. He walked toward the gas pump and put the nozzle in his mouth. Then he grabbed a lighter and started flicking it. My manager had to beg him to put the nozzle back on the pump.
Waffle House in Albuquerque, on the edge of the war zone. 1993, pre-cell phone. After nine p. m.
, the office was locked, and the only other phone took incoming calls only. No outgoing. Just me and another girl. I was eighteen, she was nineteen.
We worked the night shift. Every few weeks, some crackhead would come in and start picking up plates off the tables and smashing them on the grill. We couldn’t call anyone, and they were between us and the door, so we just had to ride it out and, after they left, try to get all the glass out of the grill so we weren’t serving bloody-mouth hash browns. One guy demanded all the money in the register.
He wasn’t armed, and the place was in a crappy neighborhood, so it had bulletproof dividers. It also had a button that would lock the door. We locked the door on him to prevent him from leaving and called the police. He spent the next five minutes tearing up the place.
The place was tiny, maybe eighty square feet of merch. Got a free paid day off out of it. I’ve shared this before on Reddit, but a few years ago, when I was working cash at McDonald’s overnight, a car load of highly intoxicated dudes rolled up to the drive-thru. If you’ve worked fast food, you know immediately when customers are drunk when they get to the mic, because they literally never stop laughing, yelling, or cussing as they order.
But these young gentlemen were different. They had a special request for each item they ordered: add lettuce to everything. Everything. I made a milkshake blended with lettuce, topped with whipped cream and lettuce.
Black coffee with lettuce. McNuggets—I made a McNugget salad. French fries with lettuce. It was actually pretty fun to make everything.
Overnight shifts get slow. When the guys came to the window, the driver could not hand me the money to save his life. His entire complexion was flushed, his eyes were red and dull, and his hand trembled and swayed as he tried to pay. Needless to say, don’t drive under the influence.
But drunk customers are usually entertaining. You’d think people would try to be more discreet about the fact they’re driving intoxicated, but I literally had a guy smoking from his bong while he waited for his food in the drive-thru. I worked the suicide shift at a gas station for a short while, since I was moving soon and wanted extra money to get out of a town that drove me up the wall with lawlessness and corruption. I wasn’t robbed, probably because I only had the job for two weeks.
But I did spend those two weeks being shot at by punks with paintball guns. Every time I stepped outside, I got nailed. The guys literally had nothing better to do than hide behind bushes for hours, waiting for a chance to snipe me. The police in that town would never show up for a complaint about vandals with paintball guns.
It simply wasn’t a crime as far as they were concerned. So my mind was made up: I’m never opening the front door again for any reason, no matter what. And they tried everything to con me outside. “There’s a fire.
” “There’s someone out here having a heart attack. ” “You better get out here quick. ” I told them to get lost. Then this drunk guy came up and asked for the bathroom key, saying he was too drunk to open the door himself.
He needed me to open it for him. I slid the key through the slot and told him he was on his own. He fiddled with that lock for nearly an hour. Then he gave up, brought the key back, dropped it on the ground, unzipped his pants, and pissed on it.
I was livid. I went outside to beat the crap out of that drunken bastard. Guess what happened the second I opened the front door? The whole station came under a barrage of hundreds of paintball rounds.
There had to be a dozen of them hiding in the bushes across the street. It took an entire day to wash that crap off the windows. I got hit a few times, but that drunk got the worst of it. He took at least three rounds to the face.
That was the last time I ever opened that door for charitable reasons. We sealed off the bathroom to non-customers, but those punks still found a way to get to me. They came in—I didn’t recognize them—bought gas, and asked to use the bathroom. So I slid the key out to them.
When the drawer slid out, two of them grabbed the box and yanked it out as hard as they could, making it impossible for me to close it. Three more jumped out of the car. One of them yanked his trousers off, and the other two picked him up and dropped him with his bare ass on top of the open box. He sprayed diarrhea all over the inside of that box.
With the drawer out of commission, guess what happened every single time someone had to pay by cash? I opened the front door, and everyone got nailed with paintball gun rounds. I’m so glad I got out of that town. Abbotsford, British Columbia, in case anyone’s wondering.
Three years ago, I worked graveyard shift Monday through Friday at a 7-Eleven. I had a strange gentleman come in a minivan. He had a group of people in the van with him. It was about three in the morning, and he looked like a Green Day reject—green spiky hair, obese, greasy denim vest, eyebrows shaved off with the words “and the world” tattooed across where his eyebrows once resided.
He purchased forty dollars in gas and handed me a hundred-dollar bill. It passed the counterfeit pen test. At the time, that was the only way to detect counterfeit bills. But as I looked at the bill, I felt really uneasy.
I accepted it anyway. As he filled up, I stepped outside to smoke and memorized the van’s color, make, model, and license plate, then wrote it down. After he drove off, I went back inside and called the local police. The officer arrived and spent forty-five minutes examining the bill.
He determined that in his seventeen years of policing, it was the best counterfeit he’d ever seen. The paper dissolved when it came in contact with moisture. The officer confiscated the bill, and I gave him the vehicle information and a description of the man. The next day, my supervisor called and said I was suspended until further notice because I’d given the bill to the officer.
I had no formal training on what to do if I received a counterfeit that passed the pen test. It was a fairly new 7-Eleven. She caved two days later and asked me to come back. Joke’s on her—I already had plans to give my two weeks’ notice because I was moving to Cleveland.
My parents had a corner shop, and somebody carried a broken sofa chair from somewhere, plopped it by the front door, and fell asleep in it, blocking the entrance. I was working, and this was a huge bloke, very smelly. I called my mom and dad, who were upstairs. While Dad was all for yelling at him, Mom woke him up with a sandwich and a cup of tea.
He ended up wandering off into the night wearing one of my dad’s old coats and a pair of his New Balances, carrying two grocery bags full of food. We never saw him again, and we never found out where the chair came from. My dad worked gas station graveyard shifts in college. He was held up once, just handed over the fifty bucks or so in the drawer and reported it to the police and his manager.
Another time, he received a call from someone claiming to be in a building across the street with a rifle aimed at his head through the window. The guy said he’d shoot my dad if he didn’t empty the drawer into a bag and throw it over the back fence. Unfortunately for the would-be robber, several other people had called in with similar threats that all turned out to be unfounded. So my dad just told him no, called the police, and went back to stocking the drink coolers.
I worked the overnight shift at a gas station convenience store for years. We were on a major road outside of town, and on weekends we used to get the crowd from the nightclubs. You can always tell when they’ve had a good night. One occasion, about five young women came in, all around eighteen to twenty-two, very drunk.
One in particular was pretty much plastered. She needed help and was essentially being propped up by her friends. She was beyond wasted. They immediately headed for snacks and soda, and I watched them leave the really drunk girl behind, who immediately flopped to the floor.
They finally came up to the counter with a bunch of items. I scanned them through and asked about their night. Suddenly there was this really loud noise, like a band saw at a sawmill, only louder. I looked at the ladies.
They looked at me. We looked at each other. Then we all turned to see the girl had suddenly started snoring and drooling on the tiled floor. I don’t know what it was, but it was the funniest thing ever, and we all burst out laughing.
Another time, my boss came in, which never happened, since I usually worked alone. About three in the morning, a guy came in bleeding profusely. The boss started applying first aid, and I called the police. I put up a barrier because the floor was covered in blood.
He’d lost probably a liter of it. He passed out. The ambulance was on its way. Then some guy came in shouting, brandishing a knife.
A customer who happened to be in the store tried to run, slipped on the blood, and hit her head on the ground. The guy with the knife panicked and ran. Then the ambulance arrived. I was so glad my boss was there to witness that.
I could barely believe it myself. Working late at Burger King, only the drive-thru was open. Slow night, so we were just hanging out. A car pulled into the parking lot and went to the back by the dumpster.
A few minutes later, a patrol car pulled in next to it. A woman got out of the car and got into the patrol car. About twenty minutes later, the woman and the cop got out. They made out, and then she drove off.
The cop got back in his car and drove off too. The whole time we were speculating. Cop called in a hookup during his shift. Cheaters.
We’ll never know, but small stuff like that made time pass. Not super late, around ten p. m. , but I worked at a gas station.
We had one customer who came in frequently around that time. He only mumbled gibberish and made high-pitched keening noises for yes and no. He wouldn’t make eye contact, and it made him visibly nervous when you looked straight at him. He refused to touch his receipt and would mime ripping up paper, meaning he wanted you to tear the receipt into tiny pieces and throw it away.
He also refused to touch quarters, so when you gave him change, you had to use dimes. He’d check the security camera each time he came in. I’m guessing he was schizophrenic, or that combined with other things. The other employees and even my manager would make fun of him and laugh at him while ringing up his purchases, which was messed up, because he knew he was being laughed at.
I made sure to humor him and be nice. It got to where he would pat the counter a few times after I gave him his change. I think it was his way of saying thank you. You’re a nicer person than your coworkers.
That man knows he has problems, and it’s wonderful that you treated him like a human being. I’m sure he was thanking you. Always an upvote for Wawa.
Nothing better than a midnight Wawa run.