The facts: Janet and her daughter scheduled appointments to get small tattoos together. They did this over the phone, they never came into the shop. Later they called and needed to reschedule, but their artist’s gmail account had been logged out and we weren’t immediately able to reach him in order to get them rescheduled (we handle all of our booking through Google calendars, but sometimes it will log you out for security reasons and that’s what had happened.) We told them we would call them back and get them rescheduled when we got ahold of their artist, as we couldn’t see his schedule and thus, had no idea when he had time available.

Then something rare happened: WE dropped the ball. They never got called back. Shame on us.

The ladies called the shop back to inquire about their appointment and another person, also quite new, answered the phone and didn’t understand what was going on, initially believing that they had missed their appointment and thus would need to leave another deposit. Things went a bit off the rails here and the woman started yelling at the receptionist. We say ‘yelling’ because people could clearly hear what she was saying over the telephone handset fully twenty feet away. That’s pretty darn loud. the woman got off the phone before the situation could be properly resolved.

That same day, some twenty minutes later, her daughter called back and spoke with the artist slated to do the tattoos. He explained the situation and got everything worked out, he apologized for the confusion and for the ‘heated’ nature of the previous conversation. He got the ladies rescheduled, no sweat, and we were moving forward.

Pause this for a second.

That Saturday we had decided as a group to go to the Tennessee Ren Faire, but Matt had a couple of appointments that evening and two of them were these women, we didn’t want to reschedule again for something so trivial, but since their appointment wasn’t until 7 pm, we thought it would be okay to see if they would push back to 8pm to give Matt time to get back from our little company outing that day. We called the number we had for them and the daughter answered.

This is where things go a little off the rails.

The young lady tells us that she and her mother won’t be coming in to get their tattoos. She says that since Matt used the works ‘ a little heated’ when describing her mother’s exchange with our receptionist that they didn’t feel comfortable moving forward with the appointment. Keep in mind, they’d already rescheduled and didn’t inform us there was any problem at all. The daughter said that while her mother would ‘sometimes talk loud’ that should would never yell at anyone. I guess that depends on your definition. It would also depend on your personal bias with regard to the individuals participating in the exchange. Either way, people could clearly hear what she was saying over the phone from a distance where normal-volume calls can’t be overheard. Regardless of all of this, it was just based on a misunderstanding, because three different people spoke to these women on two different days. The new people have been counseled and we were moving forward at these ladies’ request and she was just now telling us this, a day late and a dollar short.

Ahem, here’s where it gets good: Not only did these women not bother to call to get some clarity with regard to the disposition about the ‘heated’ phone call (which was abusive to our receptionist); not only did they reschedule their appointment with no intention of showing up and no notice that they weren’t going to; they also attacked our business online with a terribly skewed, uniformed, you guessed it, 1 Star review!

The funny part: they were getting ‘Faith’ tattoos.

Here’s what’s wrong with that: They should have called to speak with a manager or the owner if they had some reservations about getting tattooed after hearing Matt say ‘heated’ when describing the conversation, but he’d apologized, Forgiveness being one of the tenets of Christianity, we thought they’d moved past it. Secondly, Lying is definitely a no-no and Janet lied about several things when she left her review, implying that we’d overcharged her deposit arbitrarily (we raised our shop minimum to $80 and thus our deposit as well, months ago. We merely failed to change this on an old part of our website, which we have since rectified); she claimed that we attacked her after making a mistake, our only mistake was not returning their call in a timely fashion, which got sorted out after a mild misunderstanding; she also lied by omission by scheduling our time with no intention of honoring her appointment; she also lied because she charged back her credit card deposit when she knew the deposits were non-refundable, which is technically stealing, another Commandment. She went on Google reviews and tried to hurt our business even though at this point she hadn’t suffered any loss, personally or financially. She did this without consideration to any of the other people who work here or their families, indiscriminately. She also went so far as to file a complaint when, in our usual fashion we took her to task regarding her Google review and when we used swear language she had to taken down. Lol. Apparently this lady thinks nothing she’s done has ever been wrong.

She lied about the way she treated others when she was yelling at our receptionist.

She lied about being overcharged, she wasn’t.

She lie to and stole from us by wasting our time.

She lied by disputing her credit card charge when she knew it was nonrefundable, she’d been told over the phone and read it on the website (we know this based on her review).

She attacked people she’s never even dealt with by disparaging their place of work without any regard to the impact of her words.

Y’all, ain’t none of that Christian.

So Will could fight the deposit dispute and probably win, citing the woman’s review itself and her knowledge of the deposit policy online, which contains the nonrefundable status but he won’t, saying it wasn’t worth the time and he’d rather this person move on anyway. He paid Matt for the his time that was wasted so it’s funny that the damage done was to someone who was never involved in the situation ands the only person who could have handled it, he has an knack for this sort of thing. He also added this:

‘I learned as a Christian that it was better to turn the other cheek. I certainly wouldn’t try to hurt someone’s business, especially after they apologized to me. But if I was going to complain, I’d complain to management before taking it public and I definitely wouldn’t lie. This woman is skewing the facts to make herself look better and make us look worse, just to justify her lousy behavior. Sounds like another textbook Christian who can’t follow what their faith says.’ Then he laughed and called her a hypocrite. We tend to agree