chazkuangshi:
I think there’s something to be said that saying the words “Deny, Defend, Depose, you’re next” to an insurance sales rep can get you arrested for ‘threats of mass homicide’ or whatever with a threat of 15 years in prison
But when I was a manager in a fast food restaurant I’ve had customers throw food at me, demand for my personal phone number with an added threat of “Well I’ll just have to FIND it”, customers charging past the front counter to physically intimidate me and my coworkers, screaming and swearing, demands to know what time I get out of work, demands to know when my manager would be at work as a threat, people sitting in their car waiting for me to finish closing because they were angry at me, causing me to stay in the office watching the camera waiting for them to drive away…
But none of those incidents are arrest-able offenses, not one, any time I called the cops on any customer I would just hear excuses like “
"there isn’t anything illegal about calling a restaurant”, that nothing physical happened and therefore there’s nothing they could do, to call back and let them know if anything else happens
Idk, just think it’s A TEENY TINY BIT ODD
Cop in the news goes “words have consequences” as if people don’t berate and threaten fast food and retail workers every day
EXACTLY.
Like I said we literally had someone make a national threat and everyone laughed it off at my work.
I’ve heard people get threatened with all kinds of shit and no one cared. It was just something you had to “leave at work at the end of the day” something you had to “move on” from.
But lo and behold when CEOs and rich people feel threatened suddenly it’s a fucking huge ass emergency. Suddenly, it’s something they can take you to jail over.

YEAH.

This is part of my complex feelings about the whole thing.

Like. I’ve worked in retail and in call centers. I currently work in an open-to-the-public pharmacy. I have been blamed for the evil of CEOs making decisions that I have absolutely no control over. Just about every entry-level employee anywhere has experienced that. And it’s terrifying and awful.

And the vast majority of the time, no one does anything about it.

And I am scared that some of the “copycat” response to this will be people taking out their anger on the messenger. I don’t trust people, in general, to be good at distinguishing between who deserves that and who doesn’t. And they’ve just started affirming, en masse, that the CEOs do deserve it– but the powerless messenger is still usually the one they can reach. So yeah. I am scared.

And yet.

And yet, the ONLY REASON anyone even cares now, enough to try and punish someone who, technically, was threatening a powerless call center employee– is because they now view it as a threat to someone rich and powerful.

Which is fucked up.

…