Radio Replay
A couple of years ago I worked the counter at a Chinese restaurant. They were a fairly busy place right beside my house and I would work for a few hours almost everyday after school to get them through the rush.
As a result I had a lot of regulars who I recognized and I behaved in a very friendly, familiar way with many customers. One guy would come in around 9pm once every couple of weeks and was very quiet.
I would give him his food and he would stammer out a thank you and make terrified, jutting-all-over-the-place eye contact during our interaction. This was no problem. He seemed like a normal middle aged man.
One night he picked up his takeout bag and somehow managed to get his finger snagged under a staple and cut himself. He started bleeding pretty profusely and I grabbed some napkins, trying to help him but he kept playing it off and just booked it out of there.
The next day I get to work and a bunch of my customers are telling me they heard about me on the radio. Apparently, this guy was a very popular morning radio DJ and he had been talking about a girl he gets take-out from and is completely in love with for months.
He would mock all of his awkward interactions with me and profess his love and how beautiful he thought I was and I guess that in telling the most recent staple story he revealed that I worked at a Chinese takeout place and a ton of my customers/coworkers put it together.
Everyone was recounting all of these cringey, humiliating things that the guy had done while picking up food from me that I’d barely noticed or remembered. It was so weird. I felt like a tabloid celebrity.
He kept coming in and I never told him that I knew he made a habit of mentioning me on the air but I did try really hard to make sure our interactions went smoothly and to bolster his social confidence a little. Story credit: Reddit / AshleyBanksHitSingle