You Disrespect My Choice, I’ll Disrespect Yours
CONTENT WARNING: Dark Humor/Religion
A customer is checking out and when she pays with cash, she also hands over a religious tract.
Me: “Oh, no thank you.”
Customer: “You don’t want to hear the word of God?”
Me: “I’m an atheist, so I think this would be better going to someone who would read it.”
Customer: “Even more reason for you to read it! You need to be saved!”
Me: “No thank you, ma’am.”
The transaction finishes but she leaves the tract anyway. I make a show of throwing it into the trash.
The following week she is at my checkout lane again (I think on purpose) and she has three more tracts to me, each one with an increasingly more aggressive “you’re a bad person unless you let Jesus into your heart” kinda vibe.
Me: “Ma’am, I told you last week, I don’t want your religious literature. I am uncomfortable with you leaving them with me.”
Customer: “Each one takes maybe five minutes max to read! It might save your life!”
Me: “I feel I have made my feelings on the matter clear; please stop.”
Of course, she doesn’t stop. She leaves even more with me next week, one of which contains imagery that might be distressing to someone with a sensitive disposition. I bring it up with my manager on my break.
Manager: “There’s nothing we can really do about it at a managerial level.”
Me: “You can’t threaten to ban her?”
Manager: “I could but then corporate wouldn’t uphold the ban. They’re kinda conservative up there and they’ll just say the customer is expressing their right to practice religion.”
Me: “Even in [Store], which is private property?”
Manager: *Shrugs.* “Just politely ask them to stop doing it; try to deal with it at your level.”
Me: “Try to deal with it? Are you giving me carte blanche to be creative?”
Manager: *Turns around.* “Walking away now. Plausible deniability and all that.”
When the customer comes back the following week, instead of having thrown the previous week’s tracts away, she was presented with my attempts to creatively “uplift” them. I won’t go into too much detail as I don’t mean to offend, but let’s say on one cover Jesus now looked like a metal rockstar with a mohawk, and instead of holding some bread he was wielding a killer guitar.
To the customer’s credit, she doesn’t say anything but it looks like it does take a lot of effort. Does she get the hint and realize it’s a waste of effort, not to mention super f****** weird, to zero in on me for her conversion efforts?
Nope! She’s back next week with another tract, this one about what will happen to blasphemers.
The following week:
Me: “You know what, ma’am? You’ve worn me down. I have decided I will read your tracts—”
Customer: “—oh! That’s wonderful! I have just the one to—”
Me: “However, since we’re sharing, I think it’s only fair you take some of mine?”
Customer: “Oh, well, I… er.”
I reveal from under my desk, a wide display of ‘tracts’ that I sourced and printed out online, in case she came back. One is about how to summon a demon, another is an introduction to the Church Of Satan, another provides a detailed explanation of paganism and witchcraft.
Customer: “You said you were an atheist!”
Me: “Yes, but your persistence and your faith got me thinking, so I thought I would go out there and sample all the faiths – I mean it would be pretty bad of me to take the word of the first one I read about without checking out all the others, wouldn’t it? Becoming a witch seemed to make the most sense to me; I mean I already own a cat! Would you like to meet up sometime and I can tell you how difficult it is to find a human skull to store blood for my spells these days?!” *Smiles maniacally.*
She did not take me up on my generous offer. She did complain to corporate, which did come back down to try to bite me in the a** but I simply said I was expressing my right to practice religion, just like the customer was. They dropped it.
That customer still shops here, but avoids me completely.
