this actually happened a few months ago, but something reminded me of it today. i don’t have a lot of work stories, but this is the best one i have lol.

i worked at a pet store. man comes in, kinda wired looking. he tells me he took his dog to the emergency vet clinic, and that they basically treated his dog very poorly. i feel sympathetic and give him my condolences. emergency vets are always really hit or miss, and the misses do nothing to really treat your pet and overcharge because you don’t really have another option if in a crisis.

anyway, i show him what he needs, he comes back got the register, i get him rung up. then he starts to say that “veterinary medicine is becoming corrupt like human medicine.” i’ve been in the pet industry for a while, including as a vet assistant, so i explain that since it’s unsubsidized it can be quite different from practice to practice, even compared to human medicine. he verbally bulldozes over me and continues, “we got by just fine without them, why do we need them now?”

in like a split second i had to decide if i wanted to keep my mouth shut, or if i wanted to fuck with this guy.

i decided the latter.

i told him, as calmly as i could possibly muster, “well, with vaccines we eradicated polio and we almost eradicated measles.”

this man was kind of flabbergasted that i responded to him. “well, what about the vaccines that bill gates is giving to kids in africa! he’s killing them!”

“well, sir, if that’s true that’s awful. but in the us, vaccines have a high efficacy rate, and extremely low chance of complications.”

he accused me of not responding to him, and that’s the problem with “woke people.” i said he wasn’t responding to what i just said, either. i dont remember how we got to this, but eventually he said something about vaccines being against god.

i think i was in a mood to piss someone odd that day. i blurted out, with no goddamn hesitance to be seen or heard, “well sir, i’m jewish.”

his eyes were bulging out of his fucking skull, dude. the way he looked at me with such shock and vitriol. i think i kinda stumped him, so all he said was “you are mistaken.”

i’m not dumb. i grew up in a very antisemitic town, so i know what that means. i’m a dumbass so i decided to double down, “oh don’t worry, jews don’t believe in hell, sir”

he started walking out but he just turned around with that same face and repeated “you are mistaken”

i wish i could say i never saw him again, but i saw him the next day. i told my manager about the whole thing, all she said was “allow her to take care of him when he comes back.” i quit not long after that, but now that i quit i can beat that guy’s ass.