It Can't Be

At one of the many grocery stores I worked at in the past there was a man that was in his late 50s who always used to come into the store. His name was Max Merrill. He would come inside the store and walk around for hours and buy just one item. He would then go over to the cafe and order a coffee and claim that the owner of the store said he could get it for free. Max was a big man, a good six feet and weighed over 250 pounds. At one time he would have been in pretty good shape but now he could barely move and walked imperceptibly slow. One time he dropped a dime and it took him several chances to pick it up. 

​He would sit down in the cafe and nurse his coffee over a period of hours. Over the course of this time the manager would come down to the sales floor and look into the cafe. Max would wave at him and my boss would go over and they would start to talk. On one occasion I sat with the two. Max looked at me through his thick bottle capped glasses and smiled. As I sat there I listened to their conversation and noticed that Max's English was very poor and the store manager was making fun of him. Max then asked my manager if he could get a job for thirty dollars an hour. My boss said sure, then laughed and  got up and walked away.

The next day I saw Max in our store wearing one of our uniforms. I thought it was a joke but it wasn't. He had been hired and I was training him. 

It was a nightmare from the word go as Max did nothing, he would wander off to the washroom every ten minutes and pretend he was having back spasms. After two weeks my manager had enough and told me to fire him; but it wasn't my job to do so. I told Max he was no longer an employee and he was to leave. He responded by threatening to kill me. He was shaking and crying for several minutes as he hollered at me.

I found out later that day he suffered from post traumatic stress disorder as he had witnessed his family being murdered in front of him during a recent war. This was the reason that my manager wanted me to fire him because he was scared of Max. 

Max eventually left the store but kept on returning to threaten me. I told my manager and he told me that there was nothing he could do about it. The threats went on for months. I finally had enough and talked to a cop friend of mine about him. My cop friend said that Max was born in Canada and had never left the country his whole life which meant his accent was a fake. Incredibly, Max had over fifty complaints against him for death threats and had been fired over twenty times because of it. My cop friend said he was a b.s. artist just looking for a reason not to work.