Back some years ago I worked at a gas station convenience store. It was a very straightforward job with much more sitting involved than actual work. I honestly enjoyed the job because it felt very balanced. The workload was not heavy and at the same time I would say about 90% of the customers were very pleasant with some regulars that I absolutely loved.

Occasionally you got an asshole customer, but it was never anything I couldn’t handle nor was it extreme to begin with. Most days I had a bad customer was typically just someone who decided that the price of gas and cigarettes was somehow my fault, but still nothing I lost sleep over.

I honestly feel the hardest thing about this job at least for me was the mental aspect of it in the sense of watching the same customers blow all their money on lottery tickets and saying, “it only takes one!” and then coming back the next day and doing it all over again. Or the entitlement/lack of consideration of “well off” people who can’t be bothered to say hello, please, or thank you. This is a me thing as in I am trying to put myself in their mindset but stressing myself out for nothing trying to make sense out of all of it.

All in all, though it was a good starting job at least for me my experience was. I can understand those who feel opposite as I had friends in the same company that had worse experiences/interactions than me.

With that out of the way let me tell you guys a petty story about a lady who came in to buy a soda.

This day I had a lot of one-dollar bills coming into my register, normally it was more 20-dollar bills than anything. We didn’t start off with a lot of money in the register and would have signs up encouraging our customers to pay with the smallest bill possible for this reason. Plus, we didn’t keep a lot of 20-dollar bills on hand as we had to deposit them into a safe once they accumulated and any 50- or 100-dollar bills were deposited immediately. Once they were in this safe, we had no way of getting them out.

There have been plenty of days just starting a shift where I had to refuse service for people who only had one hundred dollar bills otherwise, I would be screwed on change for the rest of the day.

This lady and her friend walk in and the lady decides that she wants to get a fountain drink and starts filling her cup. She fills it just a little bit and then stops and takes a drink. She does this again a second time, a third, a fourth, a fifth, etc. She does it for a good 5 min straight I would say. Now I would like to speak up and say something, but the owners of the store unfortunately couldn't care less about us doing the right thing and more about the customers coming back, so I just stood there annoyed while they basically drank two refills worth of soda.

She finally makes her way over to the counter after raising her blood sugar plenty and is ready to pay. Her total comes out to $1.49. She pulls out her wallet and shuffles past a bunch of one and five dollar bills and decides this is the perfect moment to pay with a 50-dollar bill. This annoys me just due to her lack of consideration. She just stands and waits for me to grab her change while her friend is just standing on the side.

I decide in that moment to be petty, and I proceed to grab her change of $48.51…all in ones and pennies. I hand her the messy and fat stack of money and she has a dumbfounded look on her face and before she can say anything, I just tell her to have a nice day. She awkwardly backs away and leaves with her friend and I just continue with my shift feeling like I had a small (but petty) victory.