Epic story time! This story involves a lot of bawing, and is not furry related... so grab a bag of popcorn and enjoy the mayhem at my expense :p

So I work at a Meijer, and last night was our "welcome back students" night. We invited a plethora of people into the store to give out a lot of free stuff from 9pm to 1am. They also had a few live DJs, but they wanted another one. So I offered my services to them for free. I figured, it's my store, I might as well offer an olive branch to them and get some exposure in the process. That was mistake #1.

After giving me a hard time about DJing and not "working," they decided that it would be a good idea to have an extra set of speakers going with one of their own employees at the helm. I was also to split my time at that booth between the karaoke machine that was there, no biggie. Oh and they did not want me to start until 11pm, instead of 9pm. okay, still cool.

30 minutes before I go on, I step over to the booth and let 'em know that I'll be over in about a half hour to set up. The booth operator tells me that my set is from 11 to 11:45. "not 'till 1?" I ask. "Nope, our contact told me that you're only going to be playing for 45 minutes." Which at that point, I start to realize that this guy wants to screw with me, badly.

It's 11 o'clock. I leave the work floor and head over to the booth. Everything is powered off, nobody is around. So my friends and I set up the speakers we brought and I set up my rig and start playing. Again, I'm not getting paid for this, I volunteered, and now the people that were supposed to be here, are now not there.

Now about 20 minutes into my set, one of my contact's employees rushes in and shoves a phone in my face. Mind you, I'm mid transition. I finish the transition and take the call. Its my contact. He's telling me that I have breached his contract by playing music without the Karaoke people around (they never came back, so I kept playing). He tells me we'll talk when I'm done, so I hang up. But before too long, he waddles over to my station to ream me out again, this time because I had my friends sitting behind me. "I contracted you, not them, why are they even here?" is what he asked me before he stormed off yet again. (Hint: I never had a contract with this man, I was a volunteer) By this time I am thoroughly irritated, I offer to break down my gear and simply go home, and he tells me to "do what I want," so I keep playing. I suppose that would make mistake #2

I'm set up in a walk way, people are enjoying the music as they walk by, I'm having fun dancing with them. Then who shows up again? Why yes, its our friend the waddling squirrel. He sticks his hands in front of my screen mid transition, both my hands busy with knobs. I look up at him and mouth 'just a sec' while I finish the transition. "So is this all you are doing?" He asks me. I responded by telling him that why yes, indeed it was, and in fact that I had been playing this past song on repeat for the past 20 minutes. "don't get smart with me," he tells me, "nobody likes what you are playing, see? There is nobody here" he yells as two people walk by with a bounce in their step to the beat. By now, I'm even more annoyed, and I said something to him that I can't even remember. All I remember was that it wasn't very nice, but he couldn't hear me over the music. When he asked me to repeat myself, I told him that it "probably was for the best that you didn't hear me in the first place." With a snarl, he waddled away again.

I finished off my set early upon request by a different manager so they could start clearing people out. After I packed up my stuff, I went over to another manager and expressed my thanks for letting me play for the store, but revoked my offer of doing it in following years due to a lack of communication and an even bigger lack of common decency on a person to person basis.

tl;dr - Offered services for free to a company, they took me up on it, then spit in my face.
Lesson? - Learned. Don't offer services to big companies, they don't deserve it.