Getting a slap!

Post Reply New Topic

My mom has a habit of giving people who work in stores an attitude and starting arguments when she feels something is not up to standard. Once my brother said to my mom "if you keep giving people that work in places an attitude you are going to get a slap in the face eventually"

Why might my mom get hit if she kept doing what I mentioned above?

My mom is obsessive-compulsive in the extreme. This happens occasionally with her but I think it's mostly about accepting a precedent and incorrectly believing things will constantly work that way for the foreseeable future. Just because she had done so the last few years, my mom took my car sans approval straight out of my driveway after harassing me rationalizing about why I should hand over the keys to my project. Subsequently, she & her boyfriend destroyed most of its' capabilities.

Now my dad is stuck mortgaging his house because of consumerist greed. Everyone should be nice to clerks because they usually aren't being paid enough to buy anything in the store.

It could happen. If she picks the wrong person on a bad day.
Why does she do this? People who work in these jobs get little pay and long hours.

Dunno? My mom works as a chief executive of a hospital. That could have something to do with it?

I'm not sure why that would matter. Maybe she thinks she's better then service workers and views them as servants. Until you've worked in service its hard to know how dreadul it is.

Sadly this is EXACTLY the case. My mom manages a lab for a Chinese firm in Seattle; everywhere she worked prior to this was a bigger company. It's not like women are unilaterally excluded from having a Napoleon complex... My mom denies all the advice my plebeian brain can produce relating to her own health & safety while deriding my meager academic ambitions at the same time.

edit the 2nd: My mom views ME as a service worker, strictly due to the fact that as a microbiologist she sees all computing as glorified calculation.

Last edited by cberg on 09 Jul 2014, 4:33 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Probably because she totally deserves it... or at least that is how it sounds.
I'd probably hit her myself if I so much as heard her doing that.

Yep. The "who do you think you are?" slap. Your mom shouldn't do this. If she feels something in a store isn't up to standard, she's welcome to shop elsewhere.

I used to work a lot of retail and, in certain places, would get customers like this. I started out subtly insulting them, but they were impervious, I guess because they thought so well of themselves that it didn't occur to them that a lowly shopgirl would insult them. Eventually I just developed a sense of what "too far" was, and if they crossed that line, were rude and argumentative, I'd suggest another shop or simply walk away from them. My managers backed me up every single time, and a few times were pretty stroppy right back at the customer. But people working in shops are there to help (to a point), not to take abuse.

Yeah . . . I handled it the opposite. I just keep being polite until they realize they are an a**hole and they skulk away. Same result.

Only in Canada. Might possibly work in Minnesota, too.

I think such whiners see education as strictly a function of how someone's job was defined. They don't even factor in what the person is doing, the assumption goes something like 17-25y.o.a = dedicated fry cook serfdom. I've been paid less to test software on multiple occasions than the chain smoking dudes holding yield signs on my commutes.

Just like your mom might have a low tolerance to people in stores that person in the store will have a low tolerance for taking abuse from costumers like her.