No, it’s like saying" If you don’t want strangers sending you mail, don’t list your address in the phone book. Most people I know don’t.
Word. This is the essence of it. It doesn’t matter if the message was sent via Facebook, on the phone, or left with a bunch of flowers on the server’s front porch. After the business transaction is complete, the server has no more interest in you. Continuing contact in any way that’s not you eating at this restaurant and engaging in an appropriate, professional, server-customer relationship is creepy. It’s unwanted. It’s unwarranted.
The note left for the server at the restaurant was fine and appropriate. Complimenting him to his manager would have been too. Crossing the line from business to contacting him privately outside of the restaurant was not.
Yes but in the instance of the guy with your phone number, that number was unlisted, not public. In the instance of the OP, the FB profile was public; easily found through the company’s website. So in your instance, the guy had to go to odd lengths to actually get your number. In the case of the OP, there is no mystery as to how the info was obtained. You say you had “no idea” how the guy got your phone number. You can’t say that in this case.
And I’ve asked more than once: what laws were broken here?
Exactly. The guy looked up the restaurant’s facebook page and there was his server. He then sent a message thanking the guy for excellent service. The horror.
What the fuck is all this “creepy stalker” noise? OP did nothing wrong. At all.
This is not the same as contacting someone by phone or at their home. A phone message or letter to someones home is FAR more personal than a facebook email.
In order to locate someones address, you would have to look them up through the phone book, know their first and last name, and hope that no one else in the city shares that same name. Also, hope it’s in their in the first place. Also, hope you get it right because there’s no picture to go off of.
I don’t even know how you would go about finding someones phone number.
But in either case, it takes much more effort than simply looking up someones facebook page. I bet it took less than 5 mins. Stalking? Cops? Please.
Faithfool, mentioned above that there is a big difference between the sexes and how they view this. I can respect that. If it was some guy contacting a girl via facebook, then it might be a little creepy. But it’s not. It’s two guys. Whether it was a professional setting or not, they did actually meet in real life. So it’s not like he was a total stranger. Add to it, all he did was send a nice, complimenting message basically telling him to keep up the good work. If that happened to me, I would shrug my shoulders and probably never think twice about it.
What is the big deal?
Of course this is a tad creepy, but people who are talking about calling the police and the like need a serious reality check.
I never said my number was unlisted. It was my personal dorm room phone, the number was assigned by the university, I honestly can’t remember if it was listed or not (it was certainly in the campus directory), but that’s not even relevant. Some dude I didn’t know called me and was acting way too familiar with me. That demonstrates a lack of boundaries, and I have no way of knowing how far across those boundaries he might go.
Who cares how he found it? The point is, he used it to privately contact the server outside of the work context. That goes beyond the bounds of the business transaction. It’s inappropriate. A person’s personal FB page, or personal phone number, or personal mailing address, do not belong to that person’s workplace. The person on the receiving end does not have the context to know whether it’s an indication of actual danger or not, but a person who lacks boundaries in terms of appropriate verbal contact are more likely to lack boundaries in terms of other kinds of contact as well. At the very least, it’s not a good sign.
Oh, read my bleedin posts.
1> The police need to investigate before they can determine what, if any, laws were broken and if an arrest is warranted. That’s their job. That’s not my job.
2> Anti-stalking laws. Anti-stalking laws. Laws that exist to prevent stalking. Hey, let’s throw in some laws regarding harassment, too. Take your pick.
3> A law may not be broken until there’s a repeating pattern of behavior, but you need the freaking paper trail to establish that pattern. You know, like a police report.
4> Police also serve to protect people, even if they can’t catch a bad guy, or can’t catch him yet. In my example, having a scary talking-to by the cops was enough to get the guy to back off – they didn’t arrest him, nor charge him with anything, nor did they ever complain that I shouldn’t have bothered them with it. There are also restraining orders, which again generally require a pattern of behavior (police reports) and/or testimony from a cop. There’s also having the police check your home for signs of unlawful entry, or doing a few extra drive-bys to check for strange men lurking in the bushes. Not everything the police do is directly related to making an arrest and charging a bad guy with a crime. Sometimes they act to ensure that your environment is safe. The horror that I should think to take advantage of that.
In other words, if someone I’d waited on all of ONCE then hunted me down in my personal life and sent me a message, REGARDLESS OF MEDIUM, I’d call the cops and let them DO THEIR JOBS. If all they need to do is talk to the guy to get him to back off and leave me alone, THAT’S PERFECTLY FINE WITH ME. If talking to the guy isn’t enough, and he contacted me again, then the police ALREADY KNOW that this guy is a problem, and can take further steps to address it – at this point, harassment and/or anti-stalking laws can come into play, since it’s happened more than once, and continued even after being told to stop, which as far as I know fits the legal definition of harassment.
Are you being deliberately obtuse?
Anyway, this hypothetical is spinning pretty far away from the OP by now. Yes, unwanted, unsolicited, boundary-crossing contact from a stranger gets a call to police. In the OP’s case, I imagine a visit from the cops asking why the inappropriate contact would have been enough to get him to never do it again (as it is, I think this thread served that same purpose just fine), and as far as I’m concerned that would be a satisfactory outcome, were it me.
I’m serious about reading The Gift of Fear. You might learn something.
Care to speculate on why the server’s facebook page was linked from the FREAKING restaurant’s facebook page?
If anyone was stupid enough to walk into a police station to complain about the scenario outlined in the OP they’d be laughed out of the building.
Sending a non-threatening Facebook message is not even remotely close to stalking.
Exactly!
Call the police? Over a FB message saying thank you for the great service? Seriously?:rolleyes:
Kaio, no ones saying you don’t have the right to call the cops. I’m just saying its a little much for a friendly Facebook message.
To each their own I guess.
I mean I get what your saying about the paper trail and everything, but don’t you think you should wait until maybe the 2nd unwarranted contact?
I’m not sure how the whole process works. Would you feel guilty if they decided to charge him with something and all he did was try to make a friendly contact?
That does look like an interesting read though. I might check it out.
IDK, but the OP hasn’t been around for a while. I’m assuming he’s being arraigned even as we speak!:eek:
Kaio, did the guy actually address you by name?
I see huge differences between the two cases. For one thing, a stranger saying, ‘Great service, I hope we didn’t do something to make you nervous’ is not - in any medium - at the same level of creepy as a stranger wanting to know ‘So when are we going on a date?’ The first one doesn’t include any demand; the second one does, which makes it several leagues further out of touch with reality and more dangerous.
For another thing, the medium does make a difference. A phone call requires a response, even if it’s just ‘Hello?’ and ‘Who is this?’ and ‘click’. An FB message doesn’t. If the waiter wants to ignore it completely, like it doesn’t exist, he can. Again, the call you got demanded something of you which this message doesn’t demand of the waiter, which makes the call creepier.
I agree you were right to ring the police about that call. I agree that the FB message was inappropriate. I totally disagree that it would make any sense to ring the police about it.
Also, from everything I’ve read, anti-stalking laws deal with patterns of behaviour, not with once-off contacts.
My question was, is, and has been… why was the handwritten note left for the server at the restaurant not enough to convey what he wanted to say? By the time we get to the FB message, it’s already multiple messages (that not only repeat the same message, but are showing a peculiar amount of concern over the emotional state of the server – which is frankly none of the customer’s business) and a pattern of behavior. It’s not creepy to do it ONCE in an appropriate way (the note) in an appropriate setting (the restaurant). What’s creepy is taking it out of the professional context and into the personal, and the fact that the customer felt a need to do it over and over again. That’s a peculiar level of investment in someone you spent a grand total of maybe 10 minutes talking to about food. That peculiar level of investment is an enormous waving red flag. I’m not the only one saying this.
I highly doubt someone would be charged with a crime as a first option, here. That’s not what happened when I’ve previously needed to call the cops. But if I have concerns about my safety, the cops are better equipped to investigate and respond to the situation than I am. Again, if the talking-to solves the problem, that’s perfectly fine by me. Or if the cops’ professional judgment is this guy is dangerous and he should be charged, no, I won’t feel guilty. All I want is to know that this guy is not going to start following me home from work or something.
As for why the servers FB profile was linked from the restaurant’s page, I really doubt it was. The restaurant was probably listed as his workplace in the server’s profile, and his profile along with the restaurant page were returned on a search. That’s typically how it works – I’ve just tried it with a local cafe, and have discovered the profiles of several people who work there, just by switching the results page from “All Results” to “People”. If the restaurant was actually linking to employee’s personal profiles from their page, I think that’s highly unprofessional and inappropriate of the restaurant’s management – their employees’ private communications media (any of it, including phone, email, FB, LinkedIn, face-to-face networking groups, hobbies, clubs, friends, or smoke signals) do not belong to the employer and they have no claim to it.
Hell, if the OP had put some praise into a note on the restaurant’s FB page, I wouldn’t consider that creepy, I’d consider that a nice thing to do for the server, as his manager is likely to see it and reward him for it, and it remains in the context of the business transaction. But he made something private and personal which should have remained in the realm of the professional.
I go to networking events. People give me their business cards. These business cards have phone numbers on them. I do not call the number on these cards to reassure them that they didn’t have to be so nervous around me. That would be creepy, unprofessional, and inappropriate. Just because I could use that information for such personal commentary, does not mean that I should.
It sounds like the OP looked up the restaurant page, saw his serve’s name there (presumably his full name) and used that info to find his F/B page. If I had been the server, I would’ve thought: well, that’s nice. I probably wouldn’t have responded, and would have filed it away under “customer said something nice about my work”. BFD.
Assuming you mean the weirdo who phoned me, yes, he did. But I have no way of knowing if he knew it before calling me or not. He called me by first name (“Well, hello there, [name]…”) but my first name was also in my outgoing message on my voicemail, as is common practice.
But it didn’t make a difference to me. Whether he knew it was ME that he was calling, or he was randomly calling phone numbers trying to troll for dates, that’s up to the police to find out. I don’t have any call trying to investigate that myself. I have no resources to investigate that sort of thing. And it didn’t make either option any less creepy.