Using the wrong tone at work can sometimes make people believe things that aren’t true.

So, what would you do if a customer accused you of having bad intentions because you were a little irritated while explaining a store policy over and over again? Would you brush it off and move on? Or would it leave you feeling a little bad?

In the following story, this very thing happens to a phone store employee. Here’s how it all played out.

AITA for repeating myself to a customer?

I (31F) work at a phone store. I am also Eurocentric in terms of my appearance. My family is mostly from Central America, and I look white, I know it.

Anyway… a customer comes in, and I go to try to help her. She is an older black woman. She wants help putting on a screen protector for her phone that she did not purchase from us.

Ok, we do that a lot. However, when we do it, we usually tell the customers that if, for some reason, we mess up, we cannot replace the item. I explained this to the customer, and she began to get defensive with me.

Her coworker ended up helping the customer.

So, I may be wrong because I repeated the same statement 2 other times and was trying to hold back my irritation because she had accused me of wanting to “mess up on purpose,” so that she would have to purchase one from us.

She then says she doesn’t want my help and goes to my co-worker (also a black woman), and my co-worker told her the same thing. After the customer let my co-worker put the screen protector on, I asked if the customer said that I was racist, and she said that that’s how she (the customer) felt.

I did feel bad if I came off a little strong, but that afternoon I wasn’t in the best headspace and after she had accused me of trying to mess up I was admittedly annoyed.

AITA?

Yikes! That seems like a pretty awkward situation.

Let’s see what the folks over at Reddit think about the whole thing.

This reader thinks she did the right thing.

For this reader, there’s the question of how race came up in the first place.

According to this comment, the customer was just being difficult.

Here’s someone who believes it was a misunderstanding.

It sounds like both sides handled this poorly.

Her customer service skills could’ve been better, and the customer could’ve been less defensive.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check this one out about a man who created a points system for his inheritance, and a family friend ends up getting almost all of it.