There was this dude I knew through a monthly infosec meeting. He knew me and my fiancee and my friends through this meeting and he started coming to the coffee shop while I was working. He took a shine to one of my coworkers. He started asking me when she would be on shift and when I wouldnât tell him he started showing up every night just in case. So she took on afternoon shifts and he started showing up in the afternoons. So she took morning shifts and he started showing up in the morning. So she started taking random shifts and he started showing up all day, from four thirty am when we opened until close at one am.
The thing is, while this is creepy in hindsight he wasnât doing anything overtly creepy. The shop billed itself as âSmalltownâs Living Roomâ and there were a few regulars who hung out all day. And this guy bought endless iced teas and ate all his meals off our menu and bought ice cream for regulars and tipped extravagantly. He must have been spending close to a hundred dollars a day at the shop and never did anything beyond placing his order, chatting for a minute, and sitting in a chair where he could always watch the counter. Sometimes heâd talk to me after I locked up and asked if she liked him and ask me how he could get him to like her and no amount of âdude, itâs not going to happen, sheâs not interestedâ could convince him. âBut sheâs so nice to me,â heâd say, âshe smiles when she sees me and listens when I talk to her. No other girls do that for me.â
The owner felt a little hogtied by the whole thing - the guy hadnât DONE anything, except spend more money than my coworkers and I made on a shift each day to have the opportunity to see her. At least five hundred a week on product. Almost the payroll of a full-time employee every week. And there was always a ten or a twenty from him in the tip jar at the end of every shift - five or ten dollars that represented about an extra hourâs worth of labor to everyone working there. So my co-worker and I felt bad too - he wasnât really being THAT creepy, was it worth it to deprive our other co-workers of this extra income? (Spoilers: yes)
After a couple months of this (and yes, it was terrible that it went on for that long) my coworker got a better-paying, stalker-free job at her university and nobody was happier for her than me. It was my stupid bullshit that had infected her life and if I hadnât told this acquaintance to swing by the coffee shop sometime she wouldnât have had to deal with being scared and tense and having to hold a brittle smile every day at work just so that five or ten would reliably show up, so that someoneâs hours wouldnât get cut because of the dip in sales.
And when she left this guy was crushed. Didnât show up for a month. Then he started coming in again. Started talking to me about how heartbroken he was, hanging out for my entire shift and thanking me for being such a good listener and marveling over the fact that my fiancee, his friend didnât appreciate me the way I deserved. Heâd follow me out on my lunch break and sit at my table. Eventually I went to the Smalltown Police Department and asked what I would need for a restraining order.
âWell, have you told him in clear words that he is not to speak to you and to leave you alone?â
âI canât, heâs a customer and he only speaks to me in front of other customers.â
âWell, unless you tell him to cut off contact and he violates that thereâs nothing we can do.â
And that was the real nastiness of this trick - always being in front of other customers. When youâre on register you canât tell a customer never to speak to you again then casually move on to the next person in line. When youâre getting a muffin out of the pastry case you canât tell a customer âgo away and never come backâ in front of some soccer mom who believes the customer is always right. You can drown someone out with a blender or an espresso machine, but only temporarily. There was a cubbyhole where we put our purses under the register - eventually it got to the point that if I saw him through the windows Iâd let my coworker know then crawl into it to hide. Sometimes Iâd spend half a shift doing dishes and making sandwiches in the back where he couldnât follow me. At least weâd never run out of clean mugs, right?
It was too much. I told my fiancee and a couple other infosec friends what he was doing. Heâd stopped coming to the meetings months before over a tiff with another dude so they werenât seeing him. The had jobs to go to, they didnât have the time to sit at a coffee shop with me all day. So they took a day off work in the middle of the week and when this guy followed me outside on my lunchbreak I texted them that he was there with me. I didnât respond to anything that he said during that lunch, I only said âI donât want to talk to you anymore, please leave me alone.â I said it quietly, but I said it in clear words, per what the police department had told me. He continued to talk while I continued to look at my book and try to eat my food when my fiancee and his friend showed up and joined us at the table. My fiancee (who is, by the way, over six and a half feet tall and built like a fridge) sat down next to him, our other friend sat down on the other side. They both very casually asked what heâd been up to recently. He didnât say anything, just bit his lip, glared at me, and stormed off. He never came back to the coffee shop.
He DID email a friend of mine to rage about how Iâd broken his heart and lied to him and misled him and sent mixed signals - how it was so nasty and two-faced to be smiling and nice one minute and turn on him the next, how he thought we had a connection, and why would I spend so much time listening to him and laughing at his jokes and smiling at him otherwise?
For two months nothing happened, then he showed up at the infosec meeting and as my fiancee and I were getting into the car to leave he charged at us and started trying to hit my (once again, goddamned enormous) fiancee and trying to push past him to come at me. This guy was about five ten and not terribly strong, and while we were scared we didnât want to fucking KILL him, so my fiancee just sort of knocked him down instead of having a serious fight. The guy got into his car, rushed around bunch of us in the parking lot, which was genuinely terrifying because we thought he might try to run someone over, then sped away into the night. We called the cops to file a report of assault. The cops didnât want to talk to me, said I wasnât involved in the altercation. They took a statement from my fiancee and two other guys who had been in the parking lot, then took down my number and a note that I claimed heâd been âcloseâ to me. I told them heâd been harassing me but they just said that it wasnât harassment if he just showed up at my job and didnât actually DO anything.
Well, it turns out that while we were making our report this guy had driven to our friendâs house and rammed the house repeatedly with his Honda. He completely caved in the garage and tried to charge the living room but was stopped by a reinforced concrete wall. When the cops showed up there he was on the lawn raging about how we were all against him and trying to control him.
I missed all my classes the next day because I went to my college campus police department and said I needed a restraining order. I explained what had happened and their first question was how long I had dated the guy. Why did he think we were dating if I hadnât been flirting with him? Had I led him on or tried to make it seem like I was interested in him? They escorted me to the womenâs violence prevention center on campus and I spent approximately six hours filling out paperwork before the director of the center drove me to the county courthouse and made sure I was granted a temporary restraining order that day. It was made more difficult because I only knew this guyâs first name. At every step I had to reach out to my infosec friends or my fiancee to ask for his address, to check the spelling of his name, to confirm the make and model of his vehicle. This guy had chased my coworker out of a job, been showing up on every one of my shifts for months, and I didnât know anything about him because to me he was just a customer who was an annoyance that had become a threat. But in his head I was the nice girl heâd had a meet-cute with at a fucking hacker hangout who blossomed into a romance in the goddamned coffee-shop AU he was scripting in his imagination, who spurned this rich, considerate, shy boy in favor of her lunk of a boyfriend who wasnât good enough for her. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to explain a fifteen-year-old gray-hat hacker meetup to a judge in a way that doesnât make it sound like youâre selling heroin? Calling it a professional infosec networking group didnât work well enough to include it on the list of places on my restraining order. He couldnât come to my coffee shop, my home, or my school but was free to return to the meeting where heâd attacked us that was full of my friends who DIDNâT have restraining orders so long as he left when I showed up.
I hate coffee-shop AUs, in case that isnât clear. It perpetuates this idea that the person behind the counter is your ONE if only youâre persistent and sweet and generous and bashful enough to keep forcing them to endure your presence in their place of employment.
Look, it sounds fucking shitty to say it but most customer service jobs can be accomplished by machines. Automated phone trees can take the place of receptionists, you can get a latte as good as anything youâd get from a Starbucks out of a machine, cashiers can be replaced by self-checkout. Even bartenders can be replaced by some tubes and buttons if you have enough money to burn. The reason customer service still exists is because it is emotional labor that the customer is paying for. An automated phone tree canât reassure you that itâll pass your message along just as soon as possible and that weâll make sure the tech gets back to you. An automated espresso machine wonât smile at you and ask if youâre having a good day. A self-checkout doesnât make small talk about how great that ice-cream is or how nice the day is outside. A drink machine may be able to listen to your problems but it wonât say âI feel you,â and tell a funny story to make you feel better. We live in the fucking future, almost everything you could want can be accomplished with an machine an a cellphone. If youâre interacting with a human itâs because you want to interact with a human and you want that human to be nice to you. You are paying for their kindness, for their smiles when their feet hurt and their questions about your day when they havenât had lunch yet.
Flirting with customer service workers at work, asking them out when theyâre on the clock and paid to make you happy, telling them you think theyâre attractive and expecting a gushing response - thatâs breaking the rules. Thatâs a lose-lose situation that youâve set them up for. If they continue to do their job and be nice to you theyâre âleading you onâ and if they react negatively and ask you to leave or to not speak to them that way itâs âbad customer service.â
A good rule of thumb if youâre thinking about asking someone out or flirting with them is to ask yourself this question: âif do this thing and it makes them uncomfortable can they leave this place without it impacting their livelihood?â
If the answer is ânoâ and you do it anyway youâre a jackass. That person is trapped. You have cornered them. You have put your desire to flirt with them over their ability to earn a living.
âOh good, Iâll do it now, when they canât get awayâ is not an effective dating strategy. Itâs abusive, itâs creepy, and nobody is well-paid enough to put up with unwanted sexual or romantic advances while theyâre trying to do their job.
