But How Did She Find You?!

I’m shopping at a local supermarket, reaching up to get some food from a higher shelf, when a really prim woman walks up to me and starts to ask if I can fetch a bunch of things for her.

Me: “I don’t work here, sorry.”

She turns her nose up at me. Knowing how this goes from reading this site, I’m bracing for this whole song and dance.

Woman: “Well, can you help me anyway?”

Me: “No, I’m sorry. I have to finish my shopping and get to an appointment.”

She looks even angrier but drops it, and I breathe a sigh of relief at avoiding having a story to tell.

Or so I think, until about three days later when I’m at my job (working with insurance) and my manager gets a call complaint that cites me by name. My manager calls me in, laughing, to play the message back.

Woman: “You need to fire [My Name]! That [transphobic slur] refused to help me with my groceries!”

This is especially confusing because I’m cis male and look it.

Woman: “How you can allow anyone like that to work at an establishment like yours if they can’t practice good customer service even at a job that isn’t their own?”

While we both laughed at it after hearing it, I paused to realize that this woman had somehow managed to find my name and my place of employment without me volunteering any of that information. And she seemed to take it personally, in a demented fashion, that I wouldn’t take time out of my day to spend fifteen to thirty minutes helping her shop.

She called back daily, getting more openly threatening and viler in her speech until we blocked her number. Somehow, she kept escalating it until she found the direct line to our CEO…

…who, not having any of the lady’s nonsense, proceeded to call the police on her for stalking his employees and harassing me and the business — without so much as a word of warning — and the calls stopped. I never saw her at that grocer again.