A little patience can go a long way.

But this new customer had everything but patience, and eventually, all retail employees run out of theirs!

Check out how a smart employee navigated her way through an annoying interaction.

Taking the exact amount of pictures requested

During the holidays, I work as an assistant manager at what is essentially a retail photo op booth, pictures with a mall Santa.

The company normally wants us to only take a maximum of three pictures per group.

There are certain rules..

The problem with this for us is that the pictures are purchased in expensive packages (ranging from $40-50 for 3 different options, with each add on picture being $10, meaning that getting the smallest package and a single add on would cost the same as the largest package but with less items).

The most expensive package includes several print outs big and small of two poses separated evenly between them and a digital file that has access to each click of the camera.

The middle package only gave you the small print outs and the digital file, and the cheapest package only gave you the small photos.

The season was slow at first..

When we aren’t busy, we like to take our time with each family to make sure we get the most out of the pictures and give them a good experience.

The system lets us take up to 15 pictures before some pics have a chance of being accidentally deleted off the system so we try to get as close as we can.

So if you got a package with a digital file, you would have a lot of extra pictures that were printed out.

This is where it begins..

One morning, me and another assistant manager were the only ones on set for the first hour, let’s call her Jessie.

I love her, we all did, she was a super nice woman who sometimes gave too much good treatment to nice customers, even going as far to outright break rules.

She was also very petty to rude customers.

And then this woman came along.

We were on maybe our 5th customer of the slow morning, it’s early in the season and no one comes in early December to get their Santa photos, when one lady, let’s call her Karen, with her like 5 kids starts getting really impatient.

(She wasn’t in line for more than maybe 10 minutes and when we get busy most people would be in line for anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours.)

Jessie tried dealing with it politely..

Jessie goes over to talk to her while I’m taking pictures of the family I have with me, but I was listening to their conversation.

I’m paraphrasing but it goes something like this:

Jessie: Hi ma’am can I help you? What seems to be the problem?

Karen: Do you have to take so much time with all of them?

Jessie: We are trying to give every child their time with Santa Claus. The experience is the best part-

Karen(interrupting): We’ve been waiting here for over an hour! Just take one damn picture and send them away.

Jessie: Ma’am-

Karen(interrupting again): I don’t care hurry this s*** up. Just one picture per family, that’s how it should be.

I could almost hear Jessie’s eye twitch as I finished up with the current family.

Jessie: You are right ma’am we should be doing one photo per family.

Karen got what she asked for..

Right on cue I waved at her to tell her I was ready for the next family. She asks me to finish ringing up the previous family while she took care of Karen.

Per Karen’s request, Jessie situated everyone perfectly and set up the camera. She took a single click of the camera, didn’t even check if it was a good picture, and told Karen they were all done.

We feel bad for the kids..

She ushered them to the cash register and made sure she didn’t let any of the kids stay behind to talk to Santa Claus.

The kids thankfully didn’t seem to mind too much as I would’ve felt bad for punishing kids for their parents behavior.

Karen completely ruined the day!

The kicker is that with that one picture Karen begrudgingly still bought the most expensive package, which includes the digital file that normally would’ve had access to every photo, but now only has that one lone picture.

Yikes! That wasn’t very picturesque of her!

But Jessie got her best shot of the day!

Let’s check out what folks on Reddit think about this story.

This person has a funny joke.

This person loves what Jessie did.

This person isn’t very fond of Karen’s name!

This person is skeptical about a phrase.

This person is in awe of the malicious compliance.

Say CHEESE!

But just once.

Jessie clearly won’t let you have a re-take.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.