Two Customers Refused to Take ID Photos for the Same Reason, Leaving the Employee Unsure What to Do
Pexels
If you’ve ever worked in customer service, you’ll know how unpredictable other humans can be. Because the chances are, if you don’t work in a customer-facing role, you go about your life paying little attention to the weird things that folk do until things are so odd that your attention is drawn to them. But the little idiosyncrasies of people living their day to day lives aren’t anything to notice or remember, because of course, you’ve got your own things going on.
But if you work in an intensely customer focused role, your job is about dealing with these folk, and probably notice a lot more about people than most. Whether it’s the inflections of a person’s sentence when they’re getting mad, the way that a guy looks at his girlfriend like she’s the most important person in his world, or the winding path of a child in a toy store, there are plenty that you can notice about folk when you take the time to pay attention.
Sometimes, however, people peopling around can be a bit much, especially when you’ve been working with them all day. And the retail worker in this story was clearly tired of customers and their strange requests by the time that they came into contact with this customer, who instead of challenging they simply humoured and then got on with their day.
Read on to find out what happened.
I’m disabled, and my friend’s disabled too
I work at a wholesale store that generally requires customers to have membership cards to shop.
We put your info in the system and we give you a card with your name and photo on it, which allows us to enforce the rule that cards be non-transferable. Simple, right?
Yesterday, a disabled woman came in and signed up for a membership, I put her info in, and then said, “Okay, ma’am, all we have to do now is take your photo!”
The woman replied, “Oh, no, you don’t need to do that. You can just print out my card and give it to me.”
Let’s see how the employee responded to this woman’s weird response.
I told her, “Um, I do, actually. It helps us prevent fraud and that sort of thing.”
But then she replied, “No, I’m disabled, and I can’t have my picture taken. See, they couldn’t even take my picture at Competitor.”
She pulled out her Competitor’s card, and where her photo would be, there is simply a dark square as if someone had covered the lens.
I was thoroughly confused, but I gave in and said, “Well, okay then.” And I printed out a card without a picture.
But the woman’s strange demands didn’t stop there.
But then she asked me, “And you can print out my friend’s card so I can give it to her?”
So I told her, “All your friend needs to do is come up here with her license and we’ll print out her card for her!”
Of course, the woman said, “My friend’s disabled too, so she can’t have her picture taken either. You can just give me her card.”
Okay… So I printed out her friend’s card, give it to her, and was done with it.
This is the strangest excuse for not getting a photo taken, and it feels like something fishy is definitely going on here.
Because even if this woman did genuinely have a disability that meant she couldn’t have her picture taken (for which she’d definitely have some sort of evidence or documentation) what are the chances of her friend having that same disability too?
It really feels like instead of being gullible, this retail worker simply couldn’t be bothered dealing with this woman’s increasingly odd demands.
Trending and Popular
Let’s see what folks on Reddit said about this.
Sign up to get our BEST stories of the week straight to your inbox.
This person couldn’t believe that the worker gave in to this weird claim.
And others thought that this was a really smart scam.
Meanwhile, this Redditor could think of only one disability that would prevent photos being taken.
The truth is, if this woman actually had photo-sensitive epilepsy, the chances are she would have said that. Rather, she said the vague “I’m disabled” without any further insight into why exactly that prevented her from being able to have her photo taken. Not that anyone should have to disclose a disability if they don’t want to, but the vagueness from this woman was completely bizarre.
Because there are certain disabilities – from types of autistic spectrum disorder and body dysmorphia to a deep fear like scopophobia – where folk would be exempt from having their photo taken, but they would be very used to showing the paperwork that legally exempted them, rather than simply asking the worker to just trust them, whilst also trusting that their friend also suffered from the same rare disability.
In truth, the worker should have called over a manager to deal with this sensitively – because if she did have a rare disability that meant that she couldn’t have her photo taken, and so did her friend, a manager would have been better positioned to deal with the situation in line with store policy and discrimination laws. But this worker was clearly done with confusing customers for the day, and fair play to them.
Trending and Popular
Sign up to get our BEST stories of the week straight to your inbox.
