Almost had my first "Do you work here?" moment

[bhskittykatt]

I always read other people's "Do you work here?" stories with amusement. I almost had one done to me the other day in the grocery store.

I was behind an older couple, picking up some eggs. The lady turns around and gives me a hesitating look, then laughs. "Oh, for a moment I thought you worked here and was going to ask you where the vitamins were!"

I just laughed it off with her. In hindsight, since she was so polite and laughed at herself for it, perhaps I should have questioned her logic to try and understand these types of people better. The employees in this store wear black slacks and (at least this time of year) dark gray sweaters. I was wearing blue jeans and this shirt. I have no clue how I could have been mistaken for an employee even at just a glance.

[Cooper]

The one time that happened to me, it was at least vaguely reasonable.

My work got uniforms, which the guys love, because the shirts are heavy-duty enough to handle what they do, and they don't have to pick out what they're going to wear to work. (They aren't mandatory.) Because I'm on a lake, most of the stores have X Lake Function as the name.

Just down the road from us, right next to the workshop, in fact, is a store that sells pizza, pop, sandwiches, and so on, so we usually get lunch there. It follows the naming pattern, X Lake Grocery.

I went in for the lunch run. A woman walked up to me, saw the X Lake Marina shirt, asked me where the 'item' was, then went: "Oh, nevermind, you don't work here."

Me: No, I don't, but I know the store well enough it's there. *points* Made me smile a bit.

That store tends to make fun of us, because we usually parade in there. They'll see a Marina mechanic, then a cashier, then one of the owners, the accountant... they joke we really need to co-ordinate better. We could carpool.