From: YoAuntie

Our market hours on Saturdays are 8:30-4 p.m. My daily commute is about an hour in each direction. I haven't even gotten dressed yet when I get a text from a customer:

Custy: What r ur hours today

Me: 8:30-4.

Custy: K

Fast forward to about 4:30 p.m. I am in the pharmacy next door to our (now-closed) market, waiting for a prescription. One of the Amish teens who works at the market (Cell phone? What cell phone, Bishop Yoder?) calls me to say that a customer is ransacking my shop.

I run out of the pharmacy and meet the Amish vendors at the market's back door. "She got here right after you left, and started hitting and kicking the front door. When Levi went to the door and told her that we were closed and that you had left for home, she told him that you were waiting for her. She kept kicking until a police car drove by [note: the local police station and misdemeanor court is in our shopping center too...because this is the only commercial building in town], then she drove off.

"But then she came through the back door while we were packing up our van taxis, and now we can hear her breaking things."

I send young Eli around to the police station, and go into the building with some of the van taxi drivers (all of whom are ex-felons and genuine badasses who make money under the table by ferrying the Amish and providing informal security to the market).

We find the same customer who had texted me at 6 a.m. She's opening all my drawers and boxes, letting things fall where they may, and has knocked over a display of fragrance valued at about $200 which had been on my front counter.

Two police officers arrive within a minute, and the customer tells them, "She was supposed to wait for me. I told her that I was coming."

I unholster my cell phone, and ask both custy and police officers exactly how I was supposed to deduce "I need something urgently, so I demand that you stay open after hours tonight until I get there" from the single letter "K" as texted to me several hours before the market's opening.

The irony is that my shop is one of the rare retail outlets for a cosmetics company whose marketing advertisements have always featured women making home deliveries...and I would have been happy to deliver the product that she wanted, if she had simply called me while the shop was open.

She ended up taking a plea deal which involved her paying a small fine, and agreeing to pay for repairs to the door and to reimburse me for the broken perfume display, and being banned from the market for life.

Less than two weeks later, she called me to request a home delivery, and contacted corporate when I refused. They upheld my right to refuse service to her.

--YoAuntie