Scary old ladies
Old ladies have to be the scariest beings on earth.

I used to work in Victoria Wine in Bristol (fun fun fun, but that's not the point of this post). We had a regular customer who was called the "scary old lady with something wrong with her". I'm not being nasty here - she actually didn't have anything wrong with her, but average conversations with her went along the lines of:

Scary Old Lady (SOL): Can you tell me the prices of the brandy?
Me: Certainly, they're on the shelf over here. The prices are just below the bottles.
SOL (from three feet away): Can you read the prices to me? I've got something wrong with my eyes

Her list of ailments varied - in an average week she would have "something wrong with her legs" so we'd have to lift her over the (4-inch high) step into the shop, "something wrong with her fingers" so we'd have to count her money out (which was always, always in 5p pieces, even when paying for a 10-pound bottle of brandy), and "something wrong with her brain" (yes, that one is true).

In addition to all this, the majority of the time she'd wander all over the shop, asking for prices of everything known to man, and then ask for 20 marlboro lights. And then she'd demand two packs of ten, because "the packs of twenty go stale". Then she'd pay for the fags in 5p pieces. Then she'd demand a receipt - and one time she brought one of the ten packs back, saying that the "other pack was stale" and demanding her money back for both packs, brandishing a receipt. She was loony.
(wasted industry, Fri 2 Jan 2004, 11:29, Reply)