Do you take sugar?
Back in the days of my checkout-swiping youth we'd take it in turns to pull a minor tea run for one another from the company's dodgy value brand restaurant. Sure, it tasted like crap and even the instant coffee had dregs left in the bottom, but hell, when you're stuck in the same spot for 6 hours before you get a break you'll be desperate for anything someone brings back for you.

We had a dear old biddy called Lesle in our shops who we'd provide caffeine for. She was about 4"8, 600 years old and kept calling me Craig (nobody on checkouts was called Craig, especially me). Leslie is your fully-fledged hypochondriac nutter. She'd take reduced to clear high-end food home to feed her cats while she lived on cheap junk food and wine, and take a barrage of days off with feigned illnesses, including phoning in once to say she'd gone deaf before sprinting to the hospital. Calling your boss to tell them you've gone deaf and come in the next day fully healed would raise a few alarms for the most common of intellectuals, but I'm sure most of you have seen a supermarket manager. They ain't too smart (I abused this bit of knowledge for a full 3 years and have a textbook of tales for it).

Anyway, back to the story. Among Leslie's list of problems was what she referred to as 'mild diabetes'. Leslie claimed she was not allowed sugar. Ever. Sure, she required no insulin and could scoff as much wine, big macs, microwave food and sugary sweets as she wanted whilst smoking like a chimney, but she wasn't allowed sugar. Never ever.

Putting two and two together, we executed a subtle strategic game called "Let's see how much bloody sugar we can feed Leslie". Teas came back with tablespoons of the stuff, ketchup was tampered with until the crystals ruined the texture. We even took the salt out of the salt shaker and emptied a bag of caster sugar into it especially for her. You name it, we sabotaged it somehow.

Of course, nothing happened medically. She didn't explode or die (but she did go deaf again if that's a symptom), but what we'd created was a 600 year old checkout tart so tweaked she won the fastest-employee award for our store 4 months running as she threw barcodes through the system and rushed to help people pack bags. Before I left our store was ranked in the Top 10 for the country and number one in the region. I'd like to think I sweetened the figures a bit.
(FoxyBadger (try saying it backwards), Thu 18 Sep 2008, 17:09, Reply)