A man with a facial disfigurement says he was asked to leave a restaurant in south London because staff said he was “scaring the customers”.
Oliver Bromley has Neurofibromatosis Type 1, a genetic condition that causes non-cancerous tumours to grow on his nerves.
Speaking to the BBC, he said when he had gone to place an order at a restaurant in Camberwell, staff told him there had been complaints about him.
“It’s a horrible thing to happen. I took it very personally on the day,” he said.
The article says he thinks there wasn’t enough time for someone to complain, the restaurant staff was using it as an excuse.
“He said: "After entering I noticed a cash-only sign, so went straight back outside to withdraw my money.
“I went back into the restaurant to place an order, and they told me to ‘please leave’, because in their words I was ‘scaring the customers’, and there had been complaints about me.”
He added: “There had not been enough time between the time I had been there first, and the time I went back, for anyone to have made a complaint about me so obviously the restaurant staff were not happy with the way I looked.” “
Yeah, I read the article. I was just imagining a hypothetical situation where he and I were eating in the same restaurant.
“at that”… If you don’t want to eat around other people that exist then just don’t go to restaurants.
Woosh
It’s pretty clear that they are saying your phrasing was pretty dehumanizing. They didn’t get wooshed, they were pointing out your well-intended micro aggression.
It looks dehumanizing because they cherry-picked my reply. I referred to him as a person in the very same sentence. When I said “that”, I was referring to the skin grafts and scabs. Those are things. They are not him.
The accusation was not made in good faith, and/or was made by someone with poor reading comprehension. They definitely got wooshed, and it’s pretty clear that you did, too.
Yes absolutely, the polite thing to do would be to stare at the man’s disfigurement for the entire meal…