Have you ever had a boss who made unreasonable demands? For example, imagine being a cashier, but your boss seems to think you can clean the patio and wait on customers at the same time. What would you do?

In this story, one cashier is in this situation, and she does exactly what her boss tells her to do. He really doesn’t like that!

Let’s see how the story plays out.

I ignore customers… because the boss said so

After graduating college, I worked for about 6 months as a cashier at a local branch of a chain sandwich shop.

Mostly, it was a great job. Customers were mostly polite, my coworkers were friendly and helpful, and I genuinely believed in the company’s products.

Even my bosses were pretty great, except for one.

We’ll call him The Jerk.

He was awful in many different ways.

The Jerk was belligerent, vindictive, nitpicky, and pretty much an awful boss in every way a boss can be awful.

He had the type of stupid ‘no excuses’ policy that defined ‘excuse’ as literally anything besides “Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”

I could go on and on about all the different ways he was terrible, but this story is about one specific flavor of his awfulness.

They had cleaning duties.

During our shifts, each employee had a certain section of the store they were assigned to keep clean in addition to their duties.

The cashier’s section was the front counters and displays, and the coffee kiosk.

I don’t know if it was officially the manager’s job, but as long as I worked there whoever was the shift manager always took care of the outside patio area. Except for The Jerk.

He was clearly wrong.

At first, he would just say things to me like “I’m really busy right now, could you clean the patio?”, which was fine. Part of the job description stated that if you had free time and the manager asked you to do something extra, you did it. He was well within his rights.

But one day he suddenly started asking me why I was shirking my duties by not keeping the patio clean. After all, the patio was part of my section.

It wasn’t and never had been.

I asked the other cashiers and they all agreed they’d never been told anything about the patio being part of the cashier section.

It’s really not practical either.

I didn’t mind helping out with the patio if my other cashier duties were done, but it irked me that he had taken something extra I was doing to be helpful and turned it into something that I was neglecting my duties if I didn’t do.

It felt like a bait and switch, and I felt cheated.

The bigger problem, though, was that keeping the patio clean through my entire shift was a huge pain for me as a cashier.

In the afternoons, I was often the only one at the counter, and customers would trickle in with a few minutes between each group. This meant that I was constantly having to run back and forth between the patio and the register, which confused customers and made it hard to get any actual work done on the patio.

He definitely wasn’t thinking clearly to prioritize cleaning over customers!

One day when this was particularly bad, The Jerk came upfront and started asking me why I hadn’t cleaned the patio.

I started to explain that I kept having to come back inside to serve customers, but he cut me off.

I don’t remember his exact words, but it was something along the lines of, “That’s no excuse. Cleaning the patio is your job. Now go outside and do your job. Don’t come back inside until the patio is clean.”

That last sentence was music to my ears.

Let’s see how this goes.

I assured him that of course I would do exactly as he said, went outside, and started cleaning.

A few minutes later, a family walked past me through the front doors into the store. Through the large front window, I watched them stand, confused, in front of the register. There was no one at it to serve them. (The Jerk had gone back into his office to attend to his oh-so-important manager duties.)

I continued to clean the patio.

This is funny!

A few minutes later, another family came in and joined the first, standing confused, and now annoyed, in front of the counter.

At this point The Jerk must have noticed them on the security camera, because he came out of his office and started ringing them up.

Then came another set of customers, and another.

The Jerk was at the register, so he had to serve them. He was now being forced to cover my job, because I was too busy doing his.

All she did was what she was told to do. How can he complain?

I finished cleaning the patio and came inside, and The Jerk immediately tore into me, asking where I had been, why wasn’t I at the counter, couldn’t I see there were customers?

I put on my most innocent smile. “But you told me not to come back inside until I’d finished cleaning the patio. I assumed that meant you would take care of serving customers, since I couldn’t possibly be two places at the same time.”

He just glared at me for the longest moment, then mumbled something about how I should have known what he meant and I was never to pull a stunt like that again, and shuffled back to his office.

Not much of a victory in the grand scheme of things, but seeing the momentary flash of panic in his eyes as he realized his “do as I say no excuses” policy had backfired had me giddy for the rest of the day.

At least The Jerk was forced to do something, even if it wasn’t his job.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This is a good point.

Nobody is a mind reader.

He probably wasn’t doing anything important.

Another person shares a similar win.

You can’t know what someone means unless they say what they mean.

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