Imagine working in a store when a customer yells at you and gets in your face because of a small mixup.

Would you stay calm, defend yourself, call your manager, or call the police?

In this story, one employee is in a situation like this, and both the police and his manager get involved.

Let’s read the whole story.

Customer accused me of assaulting him. Is now banned from our whole chain.

Some background: I work at a store that sells building supplies.

We have a wide array of products and some of them do not have barcodes on them, so I have to know them all by name.

I write the products down on a paper, give it to the customer, the customer pays, comes back to show me the receipt and then I open the gate for the customer to leave.

The product in this case is a sort of brick which has three different types: basic, outer corner and inner corner.

So, on with the story.

There was a problem, but it would be easy to fix.

One day a customer comes up to me with a single brick. It was the inner corner type. So I write it down, give the paper to the customer and send him on his way to the register.

He comes back to show me the receipt and I notice that that it has the basic type brick on it.

I apologize and tell the customer that the cashier propably made an error and I have to fix the receipt, as in change the right product on it.

The customer immediately turns blood red mad and starts yelling at me for not writing the right product on the paper.

I said it is not a big deal and this will only take a second.

The customer gets quite aggressive.

Before I even get to my computer with the receipt, he grabs my arm and pulls me very close to him and keeps yelling about me not doing my job correctly.

Again, I apologize for the inconvenience, but he doesn’t seem to care.

At this point he is very close to my face, putting his fist up against my cheek and straight up insulting me.

I calmly ask him to leave, but he refuses.

He made sure he told his manager.

I said I will go call my manager so we can sort this out.

As I was on my way to the phone he tells me to open the gate, so I did and he left.

At the end of the day I ran into my boss and told him what happened.

He was glad I told him and that nothing worse went down.

Here’s what really happened.

Shortly after I told this story to a coworker and she actually was the one at the register with the customer I was telling her about.

It turns out that she didn’t make a mistake with the product, but it was the customer that told her that I had written down the wrong product so she believed him and changed it to the basic kind.

A few days go by and my boss calls me to go talk to him. Someone had made a formal complaint about me assaulting a customer and apparently the police was involved too.

At this point I was the one turning blood red mad.

The security camera doesn’t lie.

I told my boss what had really happened and asked him to take a look at the recording from the security camera.

He quickly noticed that it was the customer that was assaulting me. He saved the recording and sent it to the police.

A few days go by again and my boss comes up to me and tells me that the customer is banned from every store in our chain and the police said there was going to be consequences for the customer.

My boss thanked me for being professional and actually gave me a raise.

I have a feeling I have to thank the customer for getting me that raise.

I’m glad it actually worked out okay in the end for the employee. That was a pretty dramatic customer interaction.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

Same!

The customer wasn’t too bright.

This person explains why the customer was violent.

The customer never should’ve lied to the cops.

This person would’ve reacted completely differently.

Sometimes staying calm is the hardest but best thing you can do.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.