* For obvious reasons, most of the people interviewed for this package spoke on the condition of anonymity. Nothing like crabbing about the clientele to get the boss all worked up.
Bladder Up!
Customers who just can't hold it anymore
We heard this dismal anecdote at a tattoo parlor on the Strip:
"One of my worst stories was a guy who came in from Austin with a lady he was going to marry in Vegas, and he was getting this yellow rose tattooed ...
"I could tell he was getting clammy, and then his head went back and he passed out. Next thing you know he snapped to and just immediately looked at his crotch, and urine was dripping out of the chair. He was really embarrassed.
"But the worst part was that his girlfriend and my girlfriend went to buy him some clean pants, and his girlfriend was so upset that he'd peed on himself that she told my girlfriend she wasn't sure she could marry him."
A dancer named Lauren once found a surprise in the lap of a man she was giving a lap dance:
"The worst customer ever was a guy who had been there all night long. Instead of getting up to go to the bathroom he peed on himself. He then wanted more and more dances. But after I realized he had pissed on himself, I had to stop."
At a local tanning salon:
"More than once we've had people urinate in the trash cans in the tanning booths. I don't know if they're just too lazy to go down the hall to the bathroom or what. The sessions last 11 or 20 minutes. ... I don't check the trash after every customer, so I don't know who did it.
And one more from the tattoo scene:
"I was working OzzFest, and this woman passed out in the chair, peed herself, woke up, jumped up, her wig came off, and she reached up and felt her bald head, and she ran out of there without paying. But her boyfriend paid."
A Cabbie's Story
by T.R. Witcher
Cabdriver Mason Craddock has been driving a cab for 15 years. His cab is festooned with several Mexican flags, and he wears a pair of suspenders bearing the country's colors, as well as an orange, green and white hat. In between fits of almost drunken laughter—though the only drink onboard was a two-liter Diet Coke—Craddock said that a few years ago, he had Microsoft chairman Bill Gates in his cab. He didn't know it was Gates until Gates got out and the next person getting in mentioned it. As it turns out, Gates wasn't the customer horror story—if the fare really was the world's richest man. No, Craddock and Gates kibitzed about 32-bit computer operating systems. Gates apparently asked most of the questions. It was a cool conversation.
In fact Craddock, in a ride from the Renaissance Las Vegas to the MGM Grand, was reluctant to tell any tales of customer bad behavior. Of bad customers, he says, "I don't even talk to them at all." Similarly, when he gets an "unusual" person in the cab, "we end up laughing and I don't hear a word."
Still, a little later in the ride he told me that he usually has one lousy fare a day.
"What was worst customer today?" I asked.
He thought for a second. "I didn't have one."
"What about yesterday?" I asked.
Then, lo and behold, Mason started to warm up. There was a shaky customer, or would-be customer, earlier in the day. It was a woman at the Renaissance who was about to get into his cab right before me. She got in back, and then got right back out, complaining to the hotel doorman that there was smoke in the cab. I smelled nothing but the faintest flavor of a cigar. "I don't smoke, I don't allow anyone to smoke."
Still, not exactly the story of—what shall we say?—debauchery that I was hoping for. We pulled around to the MGM.
"You've got about 10 seconds to try to top the woman and the smoking story," I said. The cab came to a stop and Mason dug deep in the well, and he came back with this story: He was taking an elderly couple from Treasure Island to an address near Twain and Swenson. The couple were locals, and it was raining out. Traffic was slow. Mason tried to find another way around.
The couple get angry and began badgering him. "They complained about me taking the longest way. They just wouldn't let me be. They irritated the heck out of me."
And so finally Mason had had enough. He pulled into an Arco station at Twain and Paradise—a quarter-mile away—and opened his door. "Don't worry about the cab fare," he said. "Just get out."
Disturbing Behavior
Customers who were creepy in ways not necessarily involving their urinary tracts
Shelly, a hairdresser, recalls a descent into clientele hell:
"I was cutting a gentleman's hair one day, and I saw the little cape moving. At first I couldn't figure out what was going on, and then I realized he was masturbating while I was cutting his hair. So I removed myself and called the supervisor. The supervisor asked him to exit. I didn't have to finish the haircut and the supervisor paid me the $12.99."
Luckily, this didn't happen to Francesca, the dancer who told us the story:
"It wasn't my customer. But there was one time I saw a guy leaving the VIP room slap a girl on the ass. She turned around and slapped him in the face. He punched her in the face three times, and she was a bloody mess. The police came, but nothing came of it. Nothing happened to the guy."
At a certain fast-food sandwich shop inside a certain food court at a certain casino:
"I've gotten propositioned by these drunk ladies who come in here. I can't repeat exactly what they said, but it was terrible—they were like 50, and I'm 23. They're wanting more than a sandwich, I'll tell you that. ... Also, we get your everyday rude customers, people who get mad because we can't break more than a $20 bill, so we save the green tomatoes for them."
From the tanning parlor:
"I had a guy that left his underwear in the tanning bed. He was really hot, but I threw them away. I mean, I wasn't going to keep his underwear. When he came back next time, I said something to him about it. He was really embarrassed.
Page, a dancer, had to contend with what must be an occupational hazard in her line of work:
"A customer I had was psycho in love with me. He wasn't a legal resident. He wanted to get his green card and marry me. He got an air-brushed license plate that said 'I Love Page.' The doormen would let me know when he came in so I could go hide."
Tales from the Elvis-a-rama Museum
by T.R. Witcher
Ronnie Bonja works the counter at the Elvis-A-Rama Museum. His dad once served as the King's tour manager and photographer. And Bonja has seen some sights—like a 6-foot, 6-inch Fat Elvis whose belly goes down to his ankle.
But he sees no customer so often as an older lady who comes by three or four times a week. "We just let her in for free," Bonja says. With good reason—she's a one-woman marketing machine. She'll rip out ads for the museum from local magazines and hand them out as flyers on the Strip. "We gave her our Elvis-A-Rama T-shirt, and she'll just walk around on the Strip with that," he says. "She'll hand out coupons. She's nuts. She's wild." And she brings in business—one guy came in once on her recommendation.
"She's going broke, spending all her money here, buying a ticket every day to see every show," Bonja says. "She always tries to get a job here, too, but I guess they don't want someone who's that much of a fanatic working here. She probably wouldn't be doing her job. She'd be watching the show or something."
He has a picture of the woman, whose name he doesn't remember. She sports big red glasses and a red scarf tied around her neck. "She's a really nice lady, she's just obsessed with Elvis."
She's also, Bonja adds, a ferocious karaoke singer and dancer. "She's like a little party animal."
Early that morning, another woman came in with a three-month-old ad that showed a ticket price $2 less than the museum's new price. The woman complained, and Bonja says he agreed to sell her a ticket at the lower price. But that wasn't enough, apparently. "She was standing here complaining, just nagging me, telling me how to do my job. She was giving me a hard time." She told him she was gonna stand in front of him all day.
When a group of 10 customers came in, she insisted that Bonja give them the discounted price, too. So he did.
"I was trying to be in a good mood today," he says. "She kind of ruined it for me."
Rude Rules
Customers who couldn't stop themselves from being jerks
The tanning-salon attendant tells this story:
"We take fingerprints at the tanning salon, and this guy was like, 'This is like being at the airport, looking for Arab terrorists,' and I'm part Arab. I told him I was from Tunisia, and he argued with me that Tunisia isn't really Arab."
From an employee at an upscale clothing store on the Strip:
"A customer used to come in all the time, ever since we opened. She is the biggest pain in the ass you will ever meet. First of all, she has like zero percent body fat. So she's really, really skinny, and she has these huge fake breasts and this long reddish, dyed-blond hair. And she always goes to the tanning salon, except she uses this stuff called Pyro, which you're not supposed to use on your face, and so she's always bright red and she looks like she's on speed. Every time she'll come in and she'll pick a bunch of stuff up—she's married to some doctor and she's a housewife. So she comes in and she'll pick out all this stuff and you have to stand outside her dressing room. She'll be like, 'What do you think about this?' And she has to get everybody's opinion in the entire store. You can be like, 'Oh, that looks nice.' And she'll be like, 'OK, but what does this person think? What does everybody think?'
"Say she'll try on an extra small. She'll try on three different extra smalls in the same pants and then ask you which one looks better. Like you can tell which one looks better, like they all look the f--king same. It's so ridiculous. She's like, 'I don't know, this one makes me look fatter.' And you're like, 'Hello, they're the same pants.' Then she never closes her fitting room door, and she always gets naked. And whoever's in the store has to deal with it. She asks customers who are there, 'What do you think of this?' She's just really, really obnoxious and annoying.
"Whenever she comes in, nobody wants to help her. She keeps getting passed from person to person because nobody wants to help her. Whoever starts new, that's who we always make help her. Because they don't know, and they get suckered into it and they think they're going to make a huge sale, except for they spend like two hours with her and they sell like $200. And then she'll keep calling you, and then she'll, like, talk to you, like you care about her life."
A story from Valentene, a dancer:
"A guy came in and sees me on stage and doesn't tip; then he talks to me for 45 minutes and he still doesn't want a dance. Then he keeps bugging me all night."
You'd think civility would reign at a bookstore, of all places. Not always, as these stories show:
"My worst customer was a woman who came in and bought six tiny books, each under $5, and wanted each wrapped separately and labeled. Then she came back two hours later and bought six bookmarks, and wanted each of those wrapped. Then her credit card didn't go through.
"There was also the woman who asked for the most recent Danielle Steele book; I went and got it for her, and she looked at it and liked it and told me, 'Great, I'm gonna get it from the library.' Then she asked for a Barbara Taylor Bradford book. I got it for her, and she said, 'Terrific, I'll get that one from the library, too.' Meanwhile, her husband came in, read the entire New York Times, folded it and put it back.
"Then there are those people who come in and ask for pencil and paper and then ask for recommendations, and you walk them all around the store, showing them books and telling them all about them while they write down the titles so they can order on Amazon.
"There was the guy who came in every day for one week straight, drunk as anything, and read Aristotle and Nietzsche and wanted to chat. The smell was overpowering. He smashed the spine of both books and never bought them. One day he came in not drunk, but he had two full drinks in his hand.
"There was this obnoxious lady from New York, she came in asking for children's books and acting as if she knew everything about everything. We told her A Wrinkle in Time is a great book, and she said, 'What's that?" We said, 'it's this classic book by Madeleine L'Engle,' and she said, 'Who's she?"—as in, I haven't heard of her, so she must be nobody. Every book we suggested, she said, 'No, that doesn't teach the lesson I want to teach.' She told us this was very important, because she was buying books for Mayor Bloomberg. Then she looked at the New York guidebooks and said, 'These all suck.' She said she'd write her own. She was there complaining when I went to lunch, and she was still there complaining when I came back."
The Saint of the Bad Habits Cigar Company
by T.R. Witcher
Steps from the canopied mouth of the Fremont Street Experience, the Bad Habits Cigar Company has seen plenty of foot traffic since it opened last September. The cigar shop has a front room painted yellow, where customers are encouraged to grab a seat on a sofa or chair, watch a little TV, enjoy a cigar. But TV usually stays off. Instead, says employee Garland Hicks, the staff just keeps the door open. "I guarantee you'll see some shit up here," says Garland Hicks.
Garland remembers one guy wandering in off the street one day. He asked Garland what was the cheapest cigar in the store. Garland pointed out a $1 cigar. Then the guy turned to the half-dozen other customers in the shop, all of whom were enjoying a smoke, and asked them, one by one, "Do you got a dollar?"
"Do you got a dollar?"
"Do you got a dollar?"
"Man, get the f--k up out of here," someone finally barked back, and the man never came back. Didn't get his cigar, either.
Another customer is a regular, says Hicks. This man comes in every other week. He dresses well—or, at least he thinks he does—in a gray tweed jacket, black slacks and some sort of towel wrapped around his neck like an ascot. The man always carries himself with great refinement, great posture. Each time, he steps into the humidor, and points out a variety of cigar boxes he plans to buy for his brother. He comments about the names of the cigars he wants, and the prices, and then—every time—he walks out the door without saying another word.
Now, the staff of Bad Habits simply let him enter the humidor at his leisure.
Clueless!
Customers who just don't get it
From the tattoo parlor:
"We had this guy in the back getting his girlfriend's name tattooed across his stomach in giant, Old English font—'Kimberlain.' So while he's in the back, she's out in front with us, and she's wearing this little skirt, with no panties, and she starts dancing and bending over and showing us her goodies—while he's back there getting her name on his stomach! Freaky girl ..."
Few folks feel more besieged right about now than accountants, as panicked taxpayers attack in droves and seven-day work weeks become the norm. Too many returns, too little time is the most common complaint, but every so often, there's the tale of the client who's as dumb as a box of IRS regs. This Vegas CPA recalls one:
"A client, whom I'll call Disturbed, comes into the office and wants his return prepared. He brazenly said he expected a refund because that's what he always gets, and that's what we need to do, no matter the actual circumstances. We explained that it doesn't always work out that way. He insisted that it is his policy to get a refund, and if we couldn't comply, he would go elsewhere. ... He went elsewhere."
A successful casino host is a study of reserve in the face of boorish behavior. But there comes a point ...
"A player comes in, has VIP check-in. So you're already giving him the cream-of-the-crop check-in services. Checks in, and automatically just starts bossing everybody around. And I'm standing at the end of the counter, and he hasn't met me yet, but he knows he's coming in referred to me from a really big player. I've gone out of my way to take care of this guy to the T. So I'm standing there waiting, and I'm just watching him before I make a move to say hi. And I see how he treats all three girls like servants. And it was terrible. He talked down to them, and they were getting pretty upset. But they kept their composure and gave the best customer service still.
"All of a sudden, I walked up to him, greeted him, his whole attitude changed. 'Hey, how are you? Nice to meet you! I'm looking forward to it.' All of a sudden everything changed. When we walked out of that room, I told him, 'Do me a favor: Find yourself another host. Because if you're going to treat people that work for me like that, you're a reflection on me. And being that, I can't deal with that. Because everybody respects the people I bring in. And you wouldn't want me going back and telling the person that referred you that you were terrible to other people.'
"'Oh, no, no, I just had a rough flight' and everything. Total change of attitude. And the guy just ended up tipping everybody by the end of the trip."
An apartment agent, Cheryl, relates this anecdote:
"I have a resident with bad teenagers. So we sent her a letter to advise her of how they are being bad and causing problems on the property. She came in and tried to explain that her kids weren't bad. I asked her if she knew that her kids were not in school for the last week. And she rapped her head on my desk and said, 'Well, I have short-term memory loss.' At that point, I just told her she would have to work that part out, and it was still her responsibility to discipline her children."