Listen to understand.

I work at a concession stand in an ice rink. We sell a bunch of chocolate bars and snacks and shit including Kinder Surprise eggs.

So one day this woman comes up to the counter with her two little kids, a girl who’s probably about 6 or 7 and a little boy, maybe 3 or 4. The mom asks what they want, the little girl points at the Kinder eggs and says “One of those!”. I asked if she wanted the white or the pink egg. She said pink. The little boy pointed to the Kinder eggs and says “One of those!”. I asked if he wanted the white or the pink egg. He said pink. HOLY SHIT IT WAS LIKE I OPENED THE GATES OF HELL. The mom absolutely FLIPPED and was like “YOU ARE NOT GETTING THE PINK EGG IT’S ONLY FOR GIRLS. YOU CAN GET THE WHITE ONE OR NOTHING AT ALL”. The little boy looked at his mom and said “But I want the same as ______ (whatever the sister’s name was)”. The mom completely ignored him and turned to me and gave me a death glare. “He can have the white egg.”

I had to give a little boy a white egg when he wanted the pink so that he could be the same as his big sister and he started crying. The mom just reiterated that the pink egg was for girls and told him that boys don’t cry.

I used to work at a bakery that specialized in creating custom cakes. We had this feature where we could print out any image off the computer and put it on a cake (with rice paper). One day this lady comes in and asks for an image we had of the baby Sesame Street characters. They’re all together with cake and confetti, and she asks, “Oh, well since it’s a boy, can you please change all of the little pink confettis into blue confetti? I mean, he’s a boy, you know.”

Confetti.

The fucking confetti.

It barely covered 5% of the image.

Another instance was when a lady asked me for an image of four superheroes to put on her son’s cake because her son was turning four. She admitted to not knowing any superheroes, so I offered the most obvious choice—The Fantastic Four. I pulled up a picture of them and she goes, “Oh no no, we can’t have that. Let’s do another one.” Confused, I pulled up a Justice League one with Batman, Superman, The Flash, and Wonder Woman. Again, she said no. I asked her if she needed anything specific (she didn’t know superheroes, why was she so picky?), and she just said, “Oh, it’s just that he’s a boy, you know? We can’t have a girl superhero on his cake.”

I nearly lost my shit. I did temporarily lose my customer service face and ask why, women have been superheroes all the time, Wonder Woman is iconic, etc etc and she was like, “It’s just that my son has been playing with Barbie dolls lately and I really don’t want him to end up… well, you know.”