Bartending means absorbing a lot, and a bartender who had spent months patiently shutting down a disabled regular‘s stories about mistreating his dog had his work cut out for him.

This particular customer had a storied history of taking conversations too far, but in the past, the bartender had always redirected the conversation, but everyone has their limits.

So when the troubling dog stories came up again mid-rush, the bartender finally snapped told the regular that nobody wanted to hear about that.

What he didn’t realize was that a bystander would totally misconstrue his intervention as needlessly cruel.

Keep reading for the full story.

AITA for telling a special-needs regular that nobody wants to hear about how he treats his dog?

I bartend at a very popular local bar that has a lot of regulars.

There is a nearby special-needs community, and many of its residents come into the bar.

Most of them are friendly, easy customers, and I genuinely don’t mind talking with them.

This does present some issues when it comes to socializing.

One regular in particular comes in very frequently.

He is relatively independent but struggles with social cues.

He often tries to hold long conversations with me while I’m working, even when I’m clearly busy serving other customers.

The employee tries to be as gentle as possible, but the customer’s lack of awareness makes things awkward.

I do my best to be polite and make him feel heard, but it can be difficult because he rarely notices when I need to move on.

A lot of his conversations revolve around wanting a girlfriend, and some of the things he says can make female staff and customers uncomfortable.

I usually try to redirect the conversation or tell him directly when something he’s saying is inappropriate.

There’s one topic in particular he loves to talk about.

The bigger issue is that he frequently tells me stories about “teasing” his dog.

He has described things like pretending to give the dog food and then pulling it away, or fake charging at the dog to scare it because he thinks it’s funny.

Whenever he brings this up, I tell him that I don’t think it’s okay and that it’s not funny.

The other day, during a very busy shift, he started talking about his dog again.

So finally, the bartender lost his patience.

After hearing these stories many times before, I got frustrated and told him, “Nobody wants to hear about that.”

He looked upset afterward.

A customer who knows he has a disability, but didn’t know the context of the conversation, later told me I should have been kinder.

AITA?

Sounds like this bartender simply just reached his breaking point.

If you enjoyed this post, check out this story about a hardware store employee who lost his cool with customers wandering around after closing time.

What did Reddit have to say?

This user thinks the bartender still kept it as respectful as possible.

If this bartender could do it over again, he could have taken a slightly better route.

Kindness doesn’t always mean just letting everything slide.

This bartender is already doing his due diligence here.

The kindness lecture would have landed better if it came from someone who had been there for the previous conversations, which they clearly hadn’t been.

At the end of the day, this bartender knows better than anyone else about his experience, and ultimately he did the right thing with speaking out, even if it made some people uncomfortable. If anything, he was brave enough to say what many others wish they could have said.

The customer’s disability didn’t give him free rein to be cruel.