TIFU by Insulting a Customer's Child

This story takes place in about 2004 when I was half-way through high school. My step father, John, owned his own hardware store and I was the entitled kid who was forced to work there. I say forced because it wasn't my idea, but my parents decided it would be good to get some easy work experience before I entered the real world. It was a simple "This is where the screw drivers are..." type job, and I got paid minimum wage for 2-3 hours a few days after school and 8 hours one day of the weekend. It was enough that I could easily do my schoolwork and make some extra (legitimate) money on the side. Being an entitled jerk, I hated it and tried everything I could do to entertain myself without doing the work I was assigned.

More often than not, friends of mine would come hang out with me while I was working. We'd usually spend most of my 'shift' playing solitaire/minesweeper on the ancient computers (even at that time), use some scrap wood from the custom-cut jobs the store did to put together rubber-band guns, build gopher snares, or whatever else our dumb teenage brains could think of.

Now, being dumb kids living in a town with less than 3k people living in it, we got into spouting niche jokes that we repeated at nauseum. (Think, "Your mom," "Deez Nuts," or any joke that could be inserted into a random conversation.) At this point in time, our joke was, "Some people's kids...."

So we're sitting in front of the hardware isle, 2 of my friends and me, and we're joking and playing with the new fangled technology that is Microsoft's legendary text-to-speech. We were making it say various strange phrases, repeat foul words on repeat, and generally having a great laugh.

That's when one of the customers walked in with their little boy, maybe 4 years old. He was a regular at the store, and I'd seen him dozens of times, though today was special! He had brought his son with him for the first time. He glanced at us, smiled, and walked into the back to grab some horse feed.

As he was walking back to the register with his feed, however, I (in response to the text-to-speech program) uttered our current favorite joke... "Some people's kids..." and shook my head disappointingly as I glanced up and noticed him, and he looked up to noticed me.

The death glare was real.

Normally, any sane person would say, "Oh, no, we were talking about..." but even then, it wouldn't have made sense to someone who's known nothing but cattle and tractors their whole life. So we all froze...

And we all looked back at him... And he stared at us as he walked in slow motion with a bag of feed over his shoulder past us.

That loyal customer of my step father's never came back after that. That look of horror, disgust, and indignation haunts me to this day. I wake in the night thinking of that look, of how much of a horrible person I must have seemed to him, and how much of a blow to my step-father's business I must have made given the size of the town.

TL;DR I told a customer his kid was trash and cost my step father a potential life-time of business.