Hot weather tends to bring out the worst in people, and no one bears the brunt of this more than retail employees.

One such worker was just trying to survive her shift when a nightmare customer mistook her asthma attack for attitude.

You’ll want to read on for this one.

“An asthma attack is a personal attack on the customer”

So this happened a few years back when I was working at your favorite, now defunct toy store.

For some background, the store I worked in was very old—no air conditioning and the air flow was terrible. This specific day was a very humid and hot day (New England summers are HUMID), and I had been having issues with my asthma on and off.

This particular day was already off to a horrible start.

I had been working at the electronics desk, grabbing video games and just working as a general checkout. I grabbed some games from the lockup for a customer and headed back to my checkout desk.

Two people were already waiting in line. I did my usual spiel, apologizing for the wait, etc.

She could tell one customer in particular was going to be trouble.

Customer is visibly agitated already, so I can tell this will be fun. She’s pulling a bunch of stuff out of her cart, saying she no longer wants it.

That’s cool—at least she didn’t shove it on a shelf somewhere. As I’m turning around to place her item she doesn’t want on the counter, I can feel an asthma attack coming.

But things turned out even worse than she expected.

I do that thing when you feel like you can’t breathe so you try to inhale really hard. She assumed I was sighing at her for not wanting her items (for real, don’t care, I’m not closing, not my problem).

This began the biggest freak-out of the day.

This woman starts yelling at me for being rude, saying it’s my job to take her things she doesn’t want and to be polite.

The customer’s attitude is only making her condition worse.

As she’s yelling, I’m now starting to stress out, making my asthma worse. As she’s still yelling at me, I sit down.

That was apparently the wrong move.

She decides that it’s the final straw and says, “I’m not buying any of this, you need to learn how to treat customers!”

Unfortunately, the customer followed through on her horrible promise, but luckily her manager had her back.

She did call corporate. I was talked to by my manager about it and explained the whole thing (she knew about my asthma), which was on video.

My manager actually apologized for the customer, saying, “I never knew an asthma attack is a personal attack on a customer.”

I will never forget that line or that manager. She was amazing.

At least the manager was rightfully on the employee’s side.

What did Reddit think?

This customer appears to have lost any semblance of humanity.

A customer taking an employee’s asthma attack personally — now that may just be a new one.

The least the employee could have done was wait until she was done checking out to have a health crisis.

Oh the irony of a customer complaining about an asthma attack she caused.

This whole ordeal could have been avoided if the customer just had a shred of patience — or empathy.

Just when you think customers can’t get any worse, they raise the bar again.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.