Have people always been this uncharitable? This quite clearly reads like a clumsy phrasing by someone who is not a native English speaker. I'd wager one of the

Have people always been this uncharitable? This quite clearly reads like a clumsy phrasing by someone who is not a native English speaker. I'd wager one of the earlier messages was along the lines of "I can't afford higher prices because of my job" or something, and it seems obvious how this then gets kind of mangled in response. That an ESOL teacher would not make this assumption is frankly baffling to me. The world would be a much nicer place if we assumed good intentions in people we dealt with. Maybe I'm just naïve. But it kind of pisses me off that some poor support worker could quite conceivably lose their job because someone took out-of-proportion offense.