DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I am a mid-50s male, retired early and work part time at a retail shop in their “order online, pick up in store” desk.
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A few days ago, I was waiting on a customer who went on and on about how his wife orders online, how he has to pick it up and…. While he was talking a nice-looking woman came up (40s-50s years old?) and waited. We made eye contact and she rolled her eyes about the guy talking on and on and I kind of rolled my eyes also.
As the guy was done checking to make sure he got everything and started to walk away he said something about “I hope your wife doesn’t do things like this to you”. I said “I am single, I don’t need to worry about it”. The lady stepped up to the area and said “I am single too, maybe we should have coffee or something sometime”. I said “sure”, all while I scanned her phone, the package she picked up from the bins, and printed the receipt which took a very short amount of time. She then walked away. As I had another customer walking up I really couldn’t ask he to come back to the counter to ask more questions.
So, she gave me the invitation to get together, that is the good news. Bad news is she personally didn’t give me any contact information. Good news is I have her account information with name, address, and phone number. Do I use this information to call her? Or because it is actually the store’s information I have access to I shouldn’t? Or, I checked her public social media profiles and it says she is single, so I thought about going to the area around where she lives and conveniently running into her as I do have her address, is this creepish/stalkish?
Thanks,
Customer Service Cupid
DEAR CUSTOMER SERVICE CUPID: Let me make this incredibly simple, CSC: holy hopping sheep s--t don’t do that. Don’t do any of that – don’t look up her information, don’t call her, don’t crawl any further on social media, don’t “just happen” to show up in places where she hangs out. DO. NOT. DO. THAT.
Yes, I know, she made a comment about getting together for coffee. There’s a difference between an idle comment and an invitation with intent. “Maybe we should, some time” is not the same as “I would definitely like to do this, here’s my number, please call me.” She did not give you consent to try to find her by any means necessary. This is an astoundingly bad idea on many levels, with a near-certainty that it’s going to go horrifically wrong for you, messily and all over the place.
Let’s start with pure self-preservation. Simply accessing the store’s information on a customer for your own purposes is going to get you fired if you’re lucky, regardless of the whys and wherefores. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the employee handbook and terms of employment you signed have very specific things to say about how you can access and use customer information and even more pointed things to say about misusing it.
But let’s say that you manage to find a way to look it up without leaving a trail – either because you logged in, you used someone else’s access or you just happened to shoulder-surf and find it while someone else was looking it up for legitimate purposes. Your contacting her out of the blue, friending her on social media or just “conveniently” being in the area is the sort of behavior that has an incredibly high chance of freaking her the everloving f--k out. She may not remember you, or may not remember making the comment about being single and maybe you two should meet for coffee. Hell, youmight be misinterpreting what she said, because memory is a slippery thing. But even if you are recalling it correctly and she remembers saying it, that’s not the same thing as giving you permission to go sleuthing around to get her info and doing it this way is going to send up more giant red flags than a military parade in Moscow.
Why? Because this is a significant violation of privacy and boundaries. It suggests that you’re capable of finding her even if she doesn’t necessarily want to be found, and you’re willing to make wild leaps without getting permission, based on very little. Under the most generous interpretation of those actions, it would suggest that you don’t have the emotional intelligence to know that this would be a bad idea, which would imply that you lack judgement in these sensitive areas. A less generous reading would suggest that you knew but didn’t care.
Yes, you know you have the best of intentions. She does not. So even if she was sincere, the way you’re talking about going about it has high odds of changing her mind.
And if we take this further, the consequences of those actions escalate. Now your romantic gesture means complaints to your manager and the store – again, if you’re lucky. It could also lead to things like, oh, ruining the store’s reputation or even suing the s--t out of the place for this incredible breach of privacy. Which, I might point out, could very easily rebound onto you, with you being held liable in civil proceedings.
So no, under no f--king circumstances should you do this. This is a series of very bad ideas with no upside, just varying degrees of how f--ked you’d be for doing so.
What should you do instead? Simple: you wait and let her come to you. She knows you’re an employee and she can make reasonable inferences about when you’d be on shift. If – and this is a mighty big if – she’s serious and would like to see you again and she realizes that she didn’t leave you her contact information or get yours, she’s entirely capable of coming back to the store to find you and rectify that mistake.
If she doesn’t? Well… that’s a shame. But all it means is that this wasn’t meant to be. You don’t need to leap on every chance that comes by, especially when the risks are so drastically out of proportion to the reward. There will be other women and other opportunities… opportunities that don’t involve massive invasions of someone’s privacy.
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Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com