Unfiltered Story #280374

I work in a musical instrument store. We sell everything from keyboards to guitars, all kinds of drums, from everywhere, and sheet music detailing how to play songs on random instruments. We are the go-to place for our city and if you can’t find what you need on the first floor, try the second or third! (Don’t worry, we have elevators for getting King Kong’s Drum Set safely to the ground floor without risking the stairs, but after that, vehicle transportation is YOUR problem!)

Anyway, in came Pervert Customer, disgustingly well known in these parts, and identified by wearing an I <3 Jesus hat. The Boss had been complained to several times by other employees, but refused to ban him, because he was technically a customer. (‘Technically’ because he’d buy something as small and cheap as he could find as justification for being in the store in the first place and then would use it as carte blanche to be lewd.)

One day, I made the mistake of greeting him like a normal customer before I spotted the hat.

Me: “Hello! Welcome to [Music Store]! What are you looking for today?”

Pervert Customer immediately began to preach to me.

Pervert Customer: “Jesus is life! Jesus is light! Jesus will save us all from our sins! Have you been saved yet? Give me your hand so I can call Jesus to you. Let Him come inside you and bless you with the holy milk of salvation!” (He continued on in this vein, becomming less and less subtle with his euphemisms, and I’m pretty sure a preacher would get in trouble if he tried this spiel in a church.)

My professional smile was frozen on my face and after several unsuccessful attempts, I finally turned his attention to the fact that he was in a music store and there are things to purchase. That’s when the switch is flipped and he goes full pervert.

Pervert Customer: “So what instrument do you play? I bet you play the flute, right?”

Me: “Well no, actually, I play the bassoon.”

Pervert Customer: *leers* “Oh, so like, a bigger instrument than a flute, huh? You like big things?”

Me: “…”

Pervert Customer: “Yeah, a bigger, longer, thicker version of the flute. Can a little girl like you can handle big things?”

It was in this moment that I decided that I didn’t need this job THAT badly.

I gave him a scathingly disgusted look: “Sir, this topic is NOT acceptable or appropriate. Leave the store now, or I’m calling the cops.”

Pervert Customer: “Hey! Hey! I’m a customer! Look, I’ll buy this!”

He grabbed for some random thing off a spinning display.

Me: “No. I’m refusing you service. Put it down and get out.”

Pervert Customer pulls out his wallet, “Look! I have money, see? Cash!”

I was walking away from him. I grabbed the phone off the hook, “OUT! OH YOU TEE! OUT!”

The boss came out of the back office, saw and heard me yelling at the “customer” and started running towards me, trying to sweet talk and smooth things over.

Nope! I talked over the boss at full volume.

Me: “I WILL NOT BE SEXUALLY HARASSED IN MY WORKPLACE!”

Pervert Customer ran out the door as I reached over and started to dial.

I made sure he was gone, then put the phone down.

Me to Boss: “Ban him, because if I see him in here again, I’m calling the police.”

Boss just stared at me for a long time, then quietly walked into the back again.

After getting some amazing advice from some awesome people on another website, I called a hotline for the company, detailing the sexual harassment that the manager allowed Pervert Customer to get away with. (Trust me, I know now that I should have done this long before, and I’m sorry that it took so long to get to my breaking point.) This hotline is taken down by a third party, and employee complaints are then forwarded to the correct department. They did a lot of typing as I described the incident.

The next day, I walked in to see what my duties were. (Register, stocking, etc, we cycle through those as scheduled duties, but it’s flexible enough for those of us stocking to walk a customer to the registers and ring them up personally if there’s a free register and no line.)

Nothing. Nada. I was not on the list of employees that day. I looked at the weekly schedule, and yes, I was supposed to be there, but the DAILY schedule doesn’t know I exist.

Aha. Okay. I see how it is.

Playing nice, I asked my coworker where the Boss was. Not in. Other Manager was in that day for my scheduled shift. Other Manager looked confused by my “innocent” inquiry. He looked at the weekly, looked at the Daily, scratched his head and told me to give him a few moments while he called the Boss.

He came back, his expression awkward. He said the Boss fired me for a slew of No Call/No Shows (which didn’t exist before this day). Other Manager was confused and disbelieving because he had worked with me a lot and he never even heard a whisper of a rumor that I wasn’t always on time. And since we worked with me regularly, he was usually saying “Good morning” to me as I stood by the time clock.

I thanked Other Manager, and walked out. I called the hotline again. I talked to the girl on the other end of the line and told her that I had an update to my previous incident. I gave her my name and cellphone number (which I had voluntarily divulged, both to identify my file and to allow someone to get in contact with me) and she opened the file that has already been made. I updated her on what happened. She thanked me for my call, promised that my file was already marked Urgent, and my update would be appended and forwarded again, as soon as we were done. She told me to expect a phone call within the next couple of days.

I went to lunch and indulged in some not-good-for-me comfort food to calm my nerves, because I knew the real reason why I’d been fired, and I was furious.

I got the call that same afternoon. It was a bigwig, and he wass EXTREMELY concerned by my report. He told me that he had been in the middle of reading my first report when he got the ding announcing my update had arrived. He gave me an HR spiel about the company being a machine and that even the smaller gears need to be taken care of or the whole machine could seize. It was all corporate sweet talk and pretty words, but even though he didn’t say so, I got the distinct impression that he was halfway to panic mode and about to do some emergency damage control.

He asked me if I was okay (emotionally and financially) and asked me if I would be willing to give him 48 hours minimum to look into the situation. He was flying into the area early tomorrow and was going to do a surprise inspection of any and all paperwork potentially created out of this incident. He promised to be in touch with me, one way or another, to either tell me he needed more time, or to tell me the verdict.

I gave him the time. The rest of the story is pieced together from the Bigwig and my coworkers:

Bigwig appeared on the scene and took command of the back room. Boss didn’t work that day either. There he found my employee file, with some No Call/No Show write ups crammed into it. He was suspicious within five minutes, as the “signatures” on the write ups didn’t even remotely match my signatures on other documents.

I was neither shown these, nor did I sign them. Strike one.

He took a closer look at the No Call/No Show papers and they were practically identical; copy/paste text with stuff like “first warning,” “second warning,” “as you have been warned before” tacked on. Very bare bones, and the company is a big fan of details and attempts via the company to accommodate the employee or otherwise expand upon what the management did to try to remove the problem.

None of that happened. Strike two.

Finally, he checked the dates of my supposed write ups, and couldn’t find any notations in the computer. Apparently there is a procedure of dotting I’s and crossing T’s once a schedule is made. A No Call/No Show, or a call out sick, or other alterations to a schedule once it’s made are to be logged into the system so that there’s a digital backup to physical paperwork. So the days I was supposedly No Call/No Show weren’t even mentioned on the system. Everything looks normal. One of the days, I was actually present, as seen by my sign in times. The other two were days I had off, as labor laws decreed I was supposed to get. So even if I WAS supposedly slated to work that day, Boss would have been dinged with a labor law violation.

I didn’t show up because I wasn’t SUPPOSED to show up. Strike three.

(As related to me later by other female coworkers) Female coworkers on duty were called back and asked about how Boss handled the incursions of Pervert Customer, and their stories corroborated the security video… which Boss had apparently failed to remember that our security cameras also just happened to pick up audio.

The Bigwig spent hours reviewing multiple incursions of the Religious Freak Pervert harassing female workers and grabbing his crotch while staring at them like a sheepdog stares at sheep. He got to see Pervert Customer making lewd gestures by positioning large instruments ‘just so’ and running his hands up and down their length. Blatantly disgusting stuff in a similar vein happened regularly.

He got to hear Boss admonishing female workers that if Pervert Customer didn’t actually touch them, there’s nothing anyone can do because all he’s doing is talking and handling merchandise. He got to listen to the Boss flat out tell employees that cops won’t do anything about what people SAY, only what they do and that their only option was to ignore Pervert Customer. Of course, he was banking on employee ignorance and fear of being fired to keep them quiet.

Apparently the Bigwig gave a lot of horrified, wide eyed silences as their tales of woe came out. He gave up trying to look professional shortly after starting and just let his horrified expressions say how wrong this nonsense was. My coworkers said that when he left at the end of the 48 hours, he seemed to be contemplating a little nighttime visit to a disused rock quarry.

The verdict? In short, my job is back, with full time pay for the days I missed to be added to my next paycheck. Boss is no longer with the company and his replacement reviewed with everyone what to do if Pervert Customer, or anyone like him, dares to stick their nose through the front door of the shop.

I almost hope Pervert Customer comes back, because I want to see the lady who replaced Boss eat Pervert Customer alive. She has this dominatrix voice that she can turn on with the bat of an eye and I so VERY much want to see Pervert Customer get Scary Dominatrix Lady instead of meek, intimidated, coworker lady.

Oh, and the Boss forging my signatures? That is going to be handled in the legal system soon, filed under F for “felony.”