I didn’t get banned, but my comment on a company message board apparently pissed off management so much they shut down one particular sub-forum. The thread topic was a discussion about suggestion boxes that some locations had–my comment was “Little known fact: the suggestion boxes are actually shredders.” A couple of days after that post, there was a banner notice that the General Chit-chat (or whatever the forum name was) had been closed because of unprofessional comments.
Indiana wants me. Lord, I can’t go back there.
I banned myself from a McDonald’s, last August or September.
Little background here: When I started working, decades ago, someone told me the following, paraphrased from memory:
“The customer is always right does not mean that the customer always is right. It means we treat them as if they are, and don’t tell them to their face that they’re wrong. For instance, if someone asks for a beer, they can’t have one because we don’t have beer or a license to sell it. In that case, you tell them, ‘I’m so sorry; we can’t,’ but without any comments like ‘This is a family restaurant!’ that implies that they’re wrong for wanting a beer. Now, if someone wants an ice cream float, but they want it with Dr Pepper instead of root beer, we have Dr Pepper, so we can do that. But you don’t say ‘Ew, Dr Pepper; are you serious?’. You go and make their Dr Pepper float without comment.”
Now skip ahead to summer 2021. I go into McD’s and ask for a value meal, but I want the sandwich without cheese or onion, and I want the drink small and the fries large. I get my tray, and the sandwich is all-the-way with cheese, and the fries and drink are both small. I pipe up, “Hey, I wanted large fries…” and the manager right away starts explaining how value meals work. Except I knew that when I made my order, and I had specified large fries…Long story short, I told her, “Just give me a large fries and a sandwich the way I ordered it, and I won’t come in here again this year.”
In fact, I still haven’t been back. No, not because they got my order wrong. Because the manager was basically telling me I was wrong. I’ve worked at McD’s, also long ago, and I clearly remember that the immediate reaction to “My order is wrong” is supposed to be “What did you order?” It is not “Too bad, so sad.” Honestly, I wish TCIAR had never come into the vernacular, the way it’s gotten subverted.
The problem is that TCIAR has been interpreted to mean that if what the customer does or says is deplorable the employee is supposed to suck it up or at best complain to a manager who will not in fact turf the customer out, but instead at best assign them a different waiter/salesperson/CSR.
If a customer pinched a waitress’ ass, the proper response is to toss them out after making them pay for anything they’ve already ordered. Not send a different waiter to apologize because you had to change their waiter. But way too many business owners and managers choose the latter instead of the former.
I’d like to add a little to the McDonalds subtopic, seeing as I once had a strange incident at a McD that gave me pause. I may have fallen into a gray zone between proper communication to the customer and “TCIAR” type, fear of telling me the situation.
I had placed an order for a seemingly common item, possibly a triple cheeseburger, which had been available for a while. But apparently not when I ordered it. Instead of saying “we don’t really make that anymore, how about a double cheeseburger?” which I would have been fine with, they moved me to the waiting area, where I had to wait for 45 minutes until they delivered it. C’mon, it’s just an extra patty and slice of cheese. They realized their error and gave me some coupons for free fries in future visits.
I marveled that they’d rather keep me waiting 45 minutes than simply say “it’s no longer on the menu” upfront. Maybe it was a training issue, or newbie employee problem.
I was banned from the Rapture Ready forums 20 years ago for instigating discussion about masturbation.
Sorry, I have to ask: was it about the rapture happening while masturbating, and the consequences? Because this would have been hilarious.
Their error was that they forgot about you. No offense, but why didn’t you speak up earlier?
Aw, fuck, I remember that place.
I seem to get banned at least once everywhere I go. I tend to be chaotic-good when practical (yes, I did just read the thread on alignments), so rules don’t really mean much to me, and I can be a little headstrong advocating for what I think is right. Tends to rub some staff the wrong way. Haven’t had many problems here, though.
I just remembered, I got a three-day Facebook suspension maybe two years ago, plus or minus, for “racial hate speech.”
A close friend of mine, who is Puerto Rican, posted a funny story collecting several “gender reveal stunts go wrong” incidents into a survey article.
I replied: “Wypipo, am I right,” using the amusing abbreviation that I first encountered on The Root.
Within seconds — and I mean literally within seconds — I got a notification that I was in violation of Facebook’s policies on hate speech and offensive racial language. My comment was automatically hidden and would not be shown to anyone, and my posting privileges were locked and would be available again in three days. It was clearly a system action, programmed behavior.
After the suspension was lifted, I was tempted to poke this button again, to see if using the same word would trigger another response, but instead I chose to begin the process of notifying people that I’d be closing my profile and migrating to other communication channels. I was already greatly disillusioned with their service, but this incident, well … Facebook claims to employ an army of people to subjectively review user reports of hate speech (and then rarely takes action on any of them: I reported tons of posts — gay slurs, “r*tard” used as an attack, etc. — and not one of them was ever found to be a violation of community rules), but when it comes to protecting the sensibilities of white people, even on something that doesn’t come close to being as offensive as the stuff they won’t police … for that, they drop the hammer programmatically? Yeah, fuck that site.
As of the last time I looked at my profile before leaving, I still had a “warning status” thing from that incident, telling me I was on a short leash and I needed to watch myself lest I suffer greater punishment. Super fuck that site.
I think I did, a couple times. But busy crew, possible shift change, etc. Yeah, I was probably forgotten, maybe multiple times.
I got a warning from a message board for describing my kitchen as “spic & span.” Their software picked up on the first word in that phrase and deemed it offensive.
I have been banned so many times from this place that I can’t even count how many it’s been.
I’m also getting a nice yellow warning for creating this post. That’s cute!
(note - I’m a test account - I’ll probably be banned again by the time you read this)
Hey, at least he’s on topic!
Something about this post is fishy, but I can’t quite put my finger on it… 
A mention upthread reminded me that I was temporarily suspended on TWoP, too. They were very sensitive to “boards on boards.”
It’s the user name. Clearly fabricated. Everyone knows the McBan clan has been feuding with the O’Faces since the Platters put down The Great Pretender in '55. So fierce was the reception that it’s as likely we’d see Christ lie down with Lucifer ere two members of those warring clans share offspring this side of judgment day. A most unnatural sight. I daresay even unholy.
I forgot that I was banned from a Facebook group and no one knows why. When you’re banned from a FB group you don’t even necessarily get a message telling you that, it just doesn’t show up in your feed and you can’t find it when you’re logged in. So when I hadn’t seen an update, I just assumed it was quietly disbanded since it was a medium size group with only a couple of posts a day. Then I saw someone on another group mentioned it a few months later, and only then did I figured out I had been banned, and confirmed it when I logged out or went into incognito mode and suddenly I could find the group again. That was also the only way I could find the group administrator, and then I had to log back in to PM them and ask them if I had been deliberately banned since I didn’t recall any drama or discussions when it happened.
He said no, I wasn’t deliberately banned and he reinstated me. So either someone had Marley’d me or the FB software had messed up.
Yes, I was banned from a FB group and didn’t realize it for a couple of days, when I went to find it, it was just gone, but a group with a very similar name was there, and the header explained it was for people who had been mysteriously banned from the other group (apparently it is famous for that) and directing me to a new group for people who had been banned from the other group. My god.
Closest I can think of is I’ve been banned from leaving reviews at Amazon. My account was compromised once and the intruder took the opportunity to leave hundreds of boilerplate reviews for all sorts of items. I got the account back fairly quickly so they must’ve used some automated method to leave so many reviews in such a short period of time.
Just as I was beginning the process of deleting them, the powers that be at Amazon deleted them all at once and did not allow me to leave any more reviews, period.
Here’s what I get if I try:
We apologize but Amazon has noticed some unusual reviewing activity on this account. As a result, all reviews submitted by this account have been removed and this account will no longer be able to contribute reviews and other content on Amazon. If you would like to learn more, please see our community guidelines. To contact us about this decision, please email [redacted].
I’ve never bothered sending an email as I assumed they’d just reply with a polite version of “too bad, so sad.” It’s been several years now and only a few times have I wanted to leave a review for something I purchased there. No big deal to me.