I’ve worked customer service, retail & fast food. I’ve been a drug addict & spent a lot of time with other drug addicts. I’ve pulled scams and known lots of people, many of them drug addicts, who pulled petty scams on a regular basis.
The situation described does sound like someone pulling a scam. In fact, it sounds like a drug addict pulling a typical drug addict scam. And abandoned or simply run-down houses being used for drugs/prostitution are not uncommon or hard to recognize once you’ve seen a few or have spent time in the drug scene yourself.
Seeing that the meal this unfortunate, marginalized woman “thought” she paid for could not have existed at the time, and her escalating level of outrage & confrontation, along with heading towards a house that has the appearance of a drug/prostitute house, could easily lead anyone to label her a “crackwhore”.
In other words, this broad walked like a duck & quacked a lot, my friend.
The store I work at has problems with Scam artists. At least once per week someone tries to get something for free. I was the person who dealt with this customer, I may be incorrect in my assesment of her behavior. However after 20 years in this business, I am a pretty good reader of poeple.
If she was mentally ill. It seems a big coincidence though that she would wander, towards the one house, out of the five on the street, known for drug sales.
Yes the building was abandoned, but people still pound on the door at all hours of the night.
I have no reason to disbelieve you, and this is useful information. If you’ve had this problem before, then you probably do have an idea of how scammers operate and what to look for when they do.
I’ll bow to your experience in this one. I just wanted to raise the possibility that she wasn’t quite the danger she seemed.
But don’t you think it’s bizarre, dantheman, that she wasn’t demanding the fish-filet she’d “paid” for, but rather the money? Think about it. When you go to a fast food joint and they take your order, and are slow about bringing it, you get impatient for your food. She wasn’t asking about that- she was asking for the money. That doesn’t sound suspicous to you?
I don’t disagree that the woman was trying to get something for nothing, but I just want to point out that being mentally ill AND being a drug addict are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they often go hand-in-hand. Schizophrenia may not be as P.C. an illness as Alzheimer’s; however, it still exists. I’m not saying she was or wasn’t mentally ill, just that her behavior would not be inconsistent with mental illness.
Thanks to everyone who replied. I won’t be replying back for several hours. I have to go to school. After twenty years I’m getting out of this business.
Dantheman, I should have mentioned my past experience. I’m sorry if this led to a pile on for you.
Check out my story of crack, whores, and debaucheryhere for a tale of more illogical ramblings from a crackwhore. (I’m not a crackwhore, she’s part of my rant).
Actually, the people who tried to scam me when I was working at DQ were by and large well-dressed, well-heeled people, including la conne westmountaise which some of you may remember from my Dispatches From A Dairy Queen trilogy.
My daughter works at KFC. At LEAST twice per shift which she works someone tries to pull the “the staff messed up/didn’t give me my order” trick. At LEAST twice per week someone calls the store manager wanting a refund on a “bad” meal which hasn’t even been sold at the store. And - believe it or not - even though the prices are clearly displayed on the menu (and the customer is told the value of their order when it is placed),at least 5 times per shift my daughter deals with the “I’m only 50 cents short, won’t that do?” line. (you do realise that any shortfall in the till comes out of their pitifulwages, don’t you?)
These kids get paid horribly low wages in the first place, and if they really thought that you were starving they’d probably find a way to sneak you some of the food which gets thrown in the bin because the “holding time” has expired.
But just because they work for low wages doesn’t mean they are totally stupid. Ironically, the people who turn up at hte store and want free food tend to be the WOMEN (I don’t know why, but it’s usually women) who’ve driven right to the door in their Volvo, Porsche, or Mercedes.
Yes, my daughter does find ways to sneak food to the genuinely hungry - she would also lose her job if the store ever caught her doing so (you don’t want to know where the binned food goes, really you don’t).
Actually, she started by asking for the food she had paid for. Then, when they wouldn’t give her food she apparently hadn’t even ordered (much less paid for), she demanded her money back. If my reality matched hers, and I actually paid for a meal and then never received it, I too would ask for the food and then eventually demand the money back.
When I worked at Pizza Hut, we used to get people coming in asking for the mess ups that would sit on top of the oven all night. We had several reasons for never giving those out:
Our very nice assistant manager did that once and they kept coming back asking for more
We took those pizzas home ourselves, at least until we couldn’t stand the sight of another pizza
It isn’t really safe. Some of those pizzas might’ve been sitting up there for hours.
When I read the OP, it sounded exactly like a scam to me. And I don’t get where he was vituperative with the scammer. I read it as (s)he wanted to say those things, but instead simply said no.
Yep. That comports with my ancient experiences delivering pizza. It was always (OK, often) the seemingly well-heeled ones who always had a story of why they should get a discount or tried to pull a quick-change or whatever.
