Being a familiar face in a small community can sometimes work against you in the weirdest ways.

So, what would you do if someone approached you in a store you don’t even work at and expected help, then got upset when you didn’t act like an employee? Would you explain how they know you? Or would you just walk away and let them figure it out?

In the following story, a retail worker finds himself in this predicament with a customer and chooses the latter. Here’s what happened.

Used to work in retail, any store I walked into within a 1km radius customers would recognize you and assume I worked there

I used to work at Biway when it still existed in Ontario, but whenever I walked into any store in the area, people kept assuming I worked there. I didn’t realize so many people could remember my face.

I’m not sure if this happens to other people as well, but it went on for a couple of years even after I stopped working there.

One time that stands out, I was shopping at Canadian Tire across the street from the store I worked at, holding a jar of paint, when a lady walked up and asked where I kept my wrenches.

He thought she was just making conversation.

I reply, “In an old milk crate, I want to get one of those upright tool boxes one day.”

She says, “Excuse me.”

And I tell her, “Gotta go. I got things to do,” and I walk off and continue shopping.

As I’m getting close to the cash registers, the same lady is yelling at three employees, and she starts pointing at me: “There he is, it’s him.”

I stop, look at them, and one of them says, “Are you talking about this customer?”

Then, he sees her at his job.

At this point, she starts going on about them just trying to cover for their buddy, and she wants to talk to the real manager.

The manager says, “You can go. She thought you worked here.”

The next day, I’m at work at Biway, and she sees me as I’m walking in for my shift, and lets out an annoyed huff, walks away, and of course comes back with my manager.

He tells her to wait while he talks to me, then follows me to the stockroom and asks me what happened. I tell him she thought I worked at the Canadian Tire yesterday and thought I wasn’t helpful, and was yelling at the staff when they couldn’t find the rude employee.

The manager laughed.

At this point, he laughed and said he thought I set a record for ticking off a customer before I even managed to punch in.

But what we didn’t notice was that she followed us into the stockroom, because at this point, we hear, “Aren’t you going to do something about it?”

We both turn, and he says, “No, and you’re not allowed back here.”

Then, the manager turned it around on the woman.

She says, “I’ll never shop here again.”

To which the manager replies, “How about your father?”

She tells him, “You’ll never see us again.”

He looks at me and says, “Thank you, you figured out how to get them out of my store.”

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She stomped off, but I saw her again, and again, and again. Apparently, she and her father were always a pain to deal with.

Wow! That lady has a lot of nerve.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a cashier who was on break when she was physically dragged back to the register by a customer.

Let’s see if anything like this has ever happened to readers over at Reddit.

This woman encountered a new mother.

Here’s someone who knows where the Biway store used to be.

This would get so annoying.

For this person, getting recognized went on for years.

People like her are impossible! No matter what you do, they’re never happy.