When I walked in, an associate was behind the counter, but she did not acknowledge me. Another gentleman was waiting as well. After a couple of minutes, he asked if anyone was available to help. She deep sighed, walked over to me and said with clear aggravation, "yes?". I must have looked a bit shocked by her "greeting", because she then said, with the same level of annoyance, "can I help you?"
I asked for a one scoop sundae. She added the ice cream, then asked if I wanted hot fudge and caramel. I told her just hot fudge, please. She then asked if I wanted strawberries. Being very allergic to strawberries, I replied, "no thank you, just whipped cream and a cherry, please". She put strawberries in syrup on my sundae anyway. I said, "ma'am I'm sorry, but I don't want strawberries. I'm allergic to them". \
She replied, "well why would you say you wanted them then?", and then slammed the lid to the strawberry container shut. She continued talking about me under her breath but loud enough for me to hear, as she prepared a new sundae. At one point she even spoke to a coworker in another language, motioning to me as she talked. \
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I work as a concierge at an apartment community in DC where everyone is very wealthy and a good portion of people feel privileged enough to treat me as though I am a lesser human being because I sit behind a desk. I am familiar with being talked down to, being made to fulfill unreasonable requests and smiling at people who I'd really like to punch in the face, all in the name of offering high quality customer service. As such, I am very careful about how I treat others, especially those in service industries. I just came home from a particularly stressful day at work, thanks to a resident who complained to my manager about me because I took a four minute bathroom break and wasn't there to help her when she so desperately needed to be given a bottle of water. All I wanted at the end of my stupid day was a one scoop sundae with hot fudge, whipped cream and a cherry. Now I was very kind to this woman during our experience even though she was surprisingly rude to me from the start. But when she tried to argue that I actually ASKED for a topping that would definitely cause me to suffer from anaphylactic shock and possibly cause me to die, I became angry. I didn't yell or argue back with her because there is no point in that. Instead I decided to dedicate more of my time today to being angry about her hostility by writing a very detailed description of my account. I can only hope that I'm not doing this in vain. read more