Routine paperwork becomes strangely dangerous when every required question sounds like a personal attack to the customer answering it.

In this one, a storage rental could not proceed without identification, insurance details, and one alternate phone number.

Instead of supplying the information, one woman answered each request with an increasingly uncomfortable challenge about what the employee thought she looked like.

Then the conversation truly escalated.

“Do I LOOK Like I Have Common Sense?!”

Where I work, we have storage units that customers can rent.

To get these units, we need two phone numbers from them and then an alternate contact to reach who does not live with the customer.

The store had a perfectly good reason for this, but of course, not all customers saw it that way.

This is so that in case there are changes to the unit, or if the customer were to disappear or become deceased, we have someone else to contact.

I already knew this customer would be tough when she didn’t like me having to see her driver’s license as photo ID.

I asked if she had homeowner’s insurance so that she didn’t have to take the additional insurance from us.

It was immediately clear that this would be a difficult interaction.

“Do I LOOK like I have a home?” she replied.

I didn’t respond.

And it didn’t get any easier from there.

So it came to asking for the alternate phone number. This alternate number to reach the customer could be any other number. It could be a spouse, friend, family member, or work number.

Technically, if someone were to give me a fake phone number for this second part, I wouldn’t know. It just had to be another number.

I asked for the second number, and she said she didn’t have any, with a look to me as if I asked if she would like to see me slap a puppy.

The employee continues to plead with the customer.

I relayed to her it could be ANY number. Perhaps a work number.

“Do I LOOK like I have a job?!”

I tried again and told her that I can’t keep going on in the screens unless I had SOMETHING to write as an alternate number. Any kind of friend or family member.

“Do I LOOK like I have friends?!”

Finally the employee is nearing giving up when the customer decides to drop a very surprising detail.

“Ma’am, I can’t determine your life story by your appearance,” I told her in the nicest way I could. “I know it’s annoying, but please, I just need a number.”

At the top of her lungs, in front of the rest of the customers and my manager, she screamed at me, “Everyone I know is dead!”

She starts to cry.

Of course, the optics of this aren’t great.

Now I look like a complete jerk, and I STILL need another number.

She ended up giving me the number of the hotel she was staying at, and as an alternate contact, my manager begrudgingly said just to put his information in to please the system so I could go on.

This interaction stuck with this employee for long after the initial interaction.

Now every time I have to ask someone wanting a storage unit for an alternate phone number, I flinch a little.

Definitely a customer I’ll never forget.

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Well at least they finally figured out why she was so cagey.

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The customer eventually provided her hotel’s number after revealing, through tears, that everyone she knew had died.

Management entered its own information as the alternate contact, allowing the shaken employee to finally complete the rental.

The computer demanded one emergency contact and somehow turned a storage agreement into the most emotionally devastating questionnaire imaginable.