One clerk who has a reason to be grumpy

Only one time here in Amsterdam did a clerk at the store counter respond to me with a surly attitude. This was one morning when Maura and I were trying to get on a tram. We didn’t have tickets—we had always bought them on the train itself. This driver did not have tickets to sell. She told Maura some unspecified place to buy the tickets. When I stuck my head in to ask again, many people suddenly appeared behind me and the driver panicked, and told me to get on the tram. I turned to tell Maura to come on board. She didn’t want to mix it up with all the people getting on the train, so she waited. I shoved to the door and got off at the next stop. She got on the next train with one other person but I didn’t see her and she didn’t see me.
I knocked on the window of the next train and the driver opened up the door. I got on and said, “Okay, this is the deal. I need to take the train, but I don’t have a ticket.” He could see me open up my empty wallet as I said, “…and I don’t have any money.” He said nothing…just opened up the door again. I got the point and stepped out.

This remined me of the time I was driving a cab in Baltimore. I was on my way to pick up someone who had called and ordered a cab. Someone flagged my down, so I stopped--not something I was supposed to do, of course. He looked in my window and said, "Okay, here's the deal, man. I got 5 dollars--" I just drove away. There was no way I was going to haggle with some guy trying to swindle me when I have a paying customer waiting for me.

Luckily, I could go to an ATM machine not far away and extracted 50 Euros ($78). I went to the next bus and tried to buy a $2 ticket with my $78. The driver excitedly said, “Oh, no! I cannot. You need to go somewhere. I have no…” He was still talking as I got out again. I found a newspaper/tobacco shop and looked around. I almost bought a Sudoku book—hopefully with some really easy puzzles—but there were other things in the book written in Dutch so I passed on that. Then I almost bought a $17 PC World magazine, but I couldn’t stomach this expense. So I asked the clerk if I could change the 50Euro note.
“No, you can’t change that here.” So I turned around and pulled a candy bar off the shelf. The second cashier snorted as I put the candy and the bill on the counter. Cashier #1 complained a blue streak as she dug for my change. I tried to tell her that she should just have said, “No, I cannot change that bill here.” In retrospect, I should have made that decision myself and gone off to find a shop with more change. My judgment was clouded, however, by my desire not to lose track of my wife. The sad thing is that if I had just told her why I needed to change the money, she would have been able to sell me a strip of tickets for the tram—something we bought at a tobacco shop later that day.