Censorship at Work

Dealing with the general public can be somewhat exhausting. I work in the pro-shop at a golf course so I see a variety of people. Most are nice and sometimes like to share their experiences from their round or ask where they should go out to dinner that evening. But then there are always those few who are..well lets just say not the friendliest in the world. So a few nights ago I was closing with another co-worker and this gentleman walks up to the counter wanting to exchange two windshirts. Well one of them has a logo that does not belong to our golf shop, so my co-worker and I are trying to find out where it may have come from. The gentleman was starting to get aggravated and insisted that he had purchased the jacket from our store earlier that morning. We were trying to do our best to assist him but we needed to make sure that we had the appropriate information in order to do a return and the exchange. As we were explaining this, the gentleman started reomoving the items from his bag and throwing them around at the windshirt display, so now we are completely confused as to which items he originally had and the ones that he would like to exchange. He is also giving us attitude and treating us like we do not know what we are doing and that we are in some way wasting his time...hmm now is about the time when I would really like to mutter something unkind under my breath....but I hold my tongue. So we return the jacket that belongs to a course related to ours and give him a credit so that he could purchase the same thing in the size he needed at the other store the next day... and he leaves with a jacket from our store that he had exchanged...yeah it was a nightmare. So the debacle is over but my coworker and I are still confused and hope that we did the process correctly, and we are stuck having to straighten up the display that this disgruntled man just destroyed. So the point of this crazy story is that it got me thinking about Free Speech and consequences. So we all have the freedom to say what we want, but then we must realize the consequences that could arise.  As I was getting flustered and upset with the treatment from this guest, I had to remind myself that this is not the first time something like this has happened nor will it be the last. I knew it was in my best interest not to sink down to his level and risk loosing my job over not being able to self censor my speech. It was a good lesson for me in how we determine the limits and boundaries to assgin to free speech and how that can play into the workplace environment.