So if you worked at Mcdonald's , would you recognize the assassin?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Well, would you? Huh?
As for me…I sure wouldn’t.
For two reasons:

  1. As a McD employee, I’m a minimum-wage slave who just wants to finish my shift. My situational awareness is pretty much limited to counting the burger patties and keeping an eye on the boss, so he won’t see me doing stuff wrong. (Side question: are employees at McD’s allowed to keep their cell phones while working, or do they have to leave their phone in the back room? What’s the penalty if the boss sees you using your phone while on the clock? )

  2. In general, most people don’t pay attention to stranger’s faces. Especially if you work retail and see hundreds of faces all day long.

So I am REALLY surprised that they caught the “insurance adjuster” assassin based on some random person being alert, and being willing to do his duty as a good citizen, while on the clock at a crappy fast-food job.

Seriously: What are the chances? I am genuinely amazed.

There was basically only one photo of the guy, showing about half his face, smiling at the hotel clerk. He had no unusual or easily-identifiable features.
I know that when I read an news article about him, including maybe looking at that photo for less than 2 seconds, and then if I happened to walk past the guy 3 minutes later-- I wouldn’t recognize him. Would you? How? Would you be concentrating on looking at all the faces around you, all day long, for that specific guy? (Especially when there is no reason to think that he is even the same city or same state as you.)

Let’s compare it to a situation we’ve all been in–finding your waiter.

You know that feeling…you’re in a nice-ish restaurant with friends. The waiter approaches you and says “hi, I’m Steve, do want to order some drinks?” You order your food, you look directly at the waiter’s face, paying attention; asking a question about the price, listening to his answer, etc…in short–concentrating on him as a real human being. You know his name, you know his face, you know that he has something of value for you.
Then, five minutes later, you want to change your order, and you say to your friends–“who’s our waiter? Is it that guy over there? I dunno–I think it’s that other guy, with the glasses, but I’m not sure.”

If the assassin wanted to be sure he never gets caught, he should have taken a job as a waiter. :slight_smile:

Would you have been able to identify him?

2

I’ve been thinking about this too. For one thing, has it been proved that the person who identified him was an employee?
For another…I’ve worked at McDonald’s. If I was on the clock, saw him, and was ready to make a call…how would I even get the chance? It’s hard enough to get away from your station just to take a piss.
And lastly, I don’t blame that person for calling in. I hope they get the money and it changes their lives for the better.
Oh, and to answer the question asked in the OP: Nope, I wouldn’t recognize him anyway.

3

Yeah, but he was cute! The photos of him appeal to a certain demographic, one that may be employed at McDonald’s, yes?

4

I’m not sure if I could but about a year ago two women stopped in my store to ask the cashier if she had seen their mother, who has dementia and wandered out of the house. My cashier recognized the random picture someone had on their phone as a customer that was in 10 minutes earlier.

Dead CEO jokes aside, if you have, what you believe is, a person on the run and wanted for murdering someone a few days earlier, you’ll find a way to get to a phone (or alert someone that can call the police).

5

I’m partially face blind, and his face looked very ordinary to me. The odds that i would have recognized him and turned him in are zero. But i know that other people are better with faces than i am.

6

No. I have a hard enough time recognizing people I actually know if I see them out of their usual context; recognizing a stranger I saw in a security-camera photo on the news is just not going to happen.

7

I have severe face blindness. I don’t recognize good friends sometimes.

8

As I said in the other thread, there is absolutely no chance I would have recognized him. The amount of information available is too low for me to be able to distinguish him from many other Mediterranean people that I see every day in Chicago (in the “flirting” photo, he looks Greek to me.) All I see there is big nose, bushy eyebrows, and chiseled chin. Those are not particularly unique qualities, even put together. I don’t think I’m face blind. I’m a photographer and look at hundreds of faces at a typical job and I tend to remember who is who and whose photo I’ve taken, and whose I’ve haven’t.

I am somewhat wondering if there is a little more to the story than just McDonald’s employee calls police on a hunch and gets lucky. Now what that “more” would be, I don’t know. Maybe he said something suspicious to the employee that isn’t being reported for some reason. Maybe he was reading a book titled “How To Kill Healthecare CEOs for Dummies” at his table. I dunno.

9

Was the McDonalds busy? Was Luigi (JFC, this world) sitting and eating allowing the employee to study his face. Did the employee have a tattoo of him on their ankle?

So many possibilities.

I might have thought he looked familiar but I’d never have been able to figure out why.

10

I’ll bet they got a thousand random witness tips from Schenectady to Sacramento, with the cops thinking the same “yeah right, I’ll bet you spotted him, sure” on every call. But they still had to send someone to check each one, because the case was a red-hot flaming bag of shit. And, if I’m right, every time they’d go out, the cop would walk through the door to perform a routine check and then bug out for the next one… until they got very, very, very unexpectedly lucky on this one.

If I understand the news correctly, the suspect was apprehended by a single officer responding to the tip. That’s not the protocol when they get a report that tells them they definitely have their guy; if they knew for certain the shooter was in the McD’s, they would have swooped in with every armored car and helicopter within fifty miles. This is more like the protocol of, “Yeah, we got another call, hey Jerry, go peek in the window and see what’s up.”

So I conclude the authorities were likely as skeptical as you that the report was worth anything, and it’s all just a fluke.

11

And he probably wouldn’t stand out much more prominently in Altoona, which has a sizeable Italian-American population.

12

Oh, yeah, no doubt. This is unlikely to be the first call police ever got about him, but of course it’s the call that’s going to be reported.

13

I’m pretty sure I would not have recognized him, but your point above might actually help in this situation. I mean, you job is so mind-numbingly boring and repetitive, that you can’t help but think about and observe other stuff to keep you entertained. You listen in on customer’s conversations, you notice their outfits and what they look like, maybe a cute guy catches your eye, and maybe you notice things around you more than if you actually had to put effort and concentration into your job. I don’t know, just a theory.

14

Same for me. There’s no chance I would have recognized him even if we’d talked for a while. I sometimes have trouble recognizing friends and family, so a stranger would be impossible for me.

In our salad days, I worked pipeline jobs and was away for six months at a time. Sometimes I’d walk right past my wife waiting for me in the airport.

15

Better be real sure before you walk off your register and risk getting fired!

16

As I recall, it was frequently more like getting slammed and running around until you disappeared up your own asshole.

17

I’m not “face blind” but it does sometimes take me a while between recognizing a face and remembering where I know the face from. So I’d be like “That guy looks really familiar…” then spend the next ten minutes trying to place the face, and by the time I arrived at “Oh shit that was the health care CEO shooter!” the guy would be long gone.

18

I don’t blame that person either, but if 50,000$ really do change your life, then you are headed towards a pretty problematic life and 50,000$ won’t change that after all.
And no, I wouldn’t have recognized him either, but I am the opposite of a super recognizer short of full blown prosopagnosia.

19

I’m bad with faces - heck, I almost didn’t recognize a coworker of several years when I encountered him in WalMart because I’d never seen him other than in the office. Unless someone has a particularly striking feature, like missing half a nose or having 3 eyes, it’s highly unlikely I’d make any connection.

Heck, even when reports say: The suspect was wearing faded jeans and a black hoodie…" - well, duh, so are a gazillion other people. Plus if I committed a crime in jeans and a black hoodie, I’d be quick to change into a sundress and a sequinned cape.

So to answer the question, probably not.

20

Hopefully it turns out better for him than it did for Arnold Schuster, who recognized Willie Sutton even though Sutton had had plastic surgery. Even before Mangione’s arrest there was a “snitches get stitches” post from a shit-weasel on Twitter.

If you paid close attention to photos of Mangione and something struck you as odd or suspicious about a customer, it’s not that outlandish that you’d recognize him.