I always liked telling those people that I did not know who they were and directed them to social services if they required assistance recovering their identity, and that if this was an emergency they should call 911.

IT here so “customer service” but internally for a company, and yes I get this one from time to time. More often than its because someone failed their ID check and or forgot their security questions and they blow a gasket when we tell them to open a ticket by email or the portal.

Blah blah blah, do you know how busy I am, blah blah blah do you know who I am, blah blah blah…

Look, I dont care if your some security guard or the CEOs personal ass wiper. Resetting credentials is a critical function that the admins pawn off on us techs because users are insufferable and they dont want to deal with them most of the time. If you cant be bothered to do a little managment of your creds and keys, how the fuck do you still have a job. Get a password manager if its allowed but if we fail an audit because you wrote it down under your keyboard again… Well that problem is above my paygrade.

My brother had a funny story about this. His friend worked in IT and was doing one of those system things that take all day and take the system down. He wasn’t supposed to let anyone in the building during this. So an executive comes to the door, his key card doesn’t work, he buzzes the bell. The guy inside answers, and says he can’t let anyone in. Exec says “Do you know who I am?” and the employee responds with a tentative “well, do you know who I am?”

“No”

“Ok, I can’t let you in.”

Was a cab driver. A relatively famous singer stepped in. Said where he needed to go, didn’t say a word otherwise. It was a 5 minute drive. I stopped, said… that’ll be 15 euros. Or something like that. And got hit with the ‘dont you know who i am?’ I answered, “Well ‘his name’ , Im ‘my name’ and you need to pay”.

Worked as the night manager at McDonalds for a while. Some drunk guy comes in and when we asked him to leave he ‘my sister is the manager’ (she was the assistant store manager) we were like so? Next day we told her and she said ‘yeah, my brother is alcoholic, I’d have kicked him out sooner’

Nope, but I did go to school with a kid whos dad worked at Nintendo.

Yeah, but not how you think.

I worked at a grocery store that was a bit pricey and we did get some locally famous people from time to time. When someone came in, all the employees would run around whispering about it unless they were a regular.

One day Luis Gonzales (all star baseball player) was in the store. I saw him staring at bread and asked if he needed help. He asked me, “What the hell are pita chips?” I told him my wife loves those and he said he was sent by his own to find some.

We talked a bit about wives while I took him over, and afterward as he was leaving he asked, “do you know who I am?”

I told him yes and he said something like “well thanks for being chill.”

Working on the helldesk of an internet provider in the early 2010s.

Dude had our bog standard account and tried to claim he was our biggest customer.

Really mate? You aren’t a university, you are a mum and pop shop that got shafted by our competitor and we came in and rescued you.

I was the sysadmin for a local company that mainly did custom ecommerce & CMS site building for local companies. Way before I started they also provided email addresses to local residents, and the first like ~100 people to sign up got a free account for life. We offered like 250MB storage, which was pretty awesome in the pre-gmail days.

Anyway, one of the lucky residents to sign up was a very interesting guy. In and out of homeless shelters, he ran for mayor every election, and at one point built his own three-wheeled Segway-like thing that he decorated to look like a Roman chariot that he would ride around during the weekly farmer’s market.

So yea. One day we get a call and the usual tech support bump it up to me because they don’t understand it. I answer the phone and am met with a barrage of rants about how my company is in league with the satanic monsters at AOL trying to stop him from becoming mayor and how once he’s elected he’ll blow our cover and expose us all.

Dear reader, he was trying to send an email to an @aol.com account that didn’t exist, and was getting a “no such address” reply from their “mailer daemon” - their mail server software.

I didn’t know who he was before then, but that’s how I learned.

Famous old story. There is a fire alarm in a fancy hotel. Guests are told to go to the front of the lobby (near the exit, in case they have to evacuate) and wait for an all-clear. They do that except for this one guy, who lingers around the service desk or something. Hotel worker goes up to him and says “excuse me sir, guests have to wait over there (pointing)”. Guy puffs up and says “you know you are talking to the vice president?”. Hotel worker goes apologetic and says “oh I’m sorry sir, I didn’t know! Do whatver you have to” and leaves the guy alone.

A minute later the hotel worker returns with a suspicious look, and asks the guy “Wait a minute sir, what are you the vice president of?”. Guy puffs even more and with a chill in his voice says “the United States of America!”. Worker says “Oh! Get over there then (points to guest area). I thought you were the vice president of the hotel!”.

I had that once, they weren’t be rude or anything they were just genuinely surprised I didn’t know who they were.

Turns out there were some famous basketball player from Florida. Still not sure why he was touring a recycling plant in England.

Yes. It was a cousin on my mom’s side who I definitely should’ve recognized. Oops.

Yup, by a semi-high level military dude working at the Pentagon, I kid you not. I got a visit from his boss who apologized and ordered him with an official document that was verbally read to me to not have any contact with me, a 50 bucks gift card and a few months later they transferred him to some random place in Kentucky or Nebraska or something like that. He had been pulling that line all over Pentagon City, Crystal City and Arlington in general and people complained. Had the nicest wife, but he was just a massive asshole. And all this while I was doing him a solid.

Yes, and I got fired for not knowing. I was new to the city so I didn’t recognize the famous local sports journalist who demanded to see the doctor who also worked with the famous local sports team. Normally no one gets to walk into a doctors office and see the doc immediately, so I told them to sit down and wait - I was gone the next day.

I had a “I can’t believe you’re who you are.”
When a very wealthy businessman who’s well-known in the city as a traditionally married, conservative senior and founder of a charity gave me his laptop to “update and fix any issues”. He had a Chrome shortcut on the desktop, but I noticed it also had Firefox installed.
I routinely check all installed browsers for any issues like add-ons that may have been installed unintentionally or malicious websites with the permission to show desktop notifications.

When I opened up Firefox, links with images to gay bondage, leather and shit-eating fetish sites showed up directly on the start page. And this guy was watching me while I was working on it. The tension in the room was palpable.
I quickly opened the settings, did my checks and closed the browser without skipping a beat.
“OK, found nothing malicious installed, now let’s check your update status.”
And pivoted to some small talk about his charity.

Got the biggest tip of my life that day.