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.

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.”

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.

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!”.

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”.

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.

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.

I (also) expeirenced this in reverse. I worked with someone who once casually mentitoned they “play some guitar on the weekend”.

I figured out later that I have bought several of their albums. Lol.

worked at Walmart. someone pulled that on me. my response, “If I knew who you were, would you have to ask me that?”

they stood there, kind of stunned and asked to see a manager.

evidently they were some distantly related person to the regional manager.

🤷 like that fuckin matters. I still didn’t know, nor care, who they were.

I once had a guy claim he was one of the guys that invented the internet. I googled his name afterwards and it didn’t turn up anything and he was incapable of performing the basic tasks required to reset his password to our website so I’m pretty confident he was full of shit.

Former ISP helpdesk monkey. Had it several times. Didn’t recognise any of them.

My theory was that no-one important enough to take that tone needs to make their own helpdesk calls.

“You don’t know who you are!? Do you have dementia? Is your carer here?

Hey Dave, this lady doesn’t know who she is! Can you get her a cup of tea while I call the police, somebody must be missing her”

I actually had to do this twice to two different customers over a number of years. Both times they backpedaled quickly and stopped being dickheads.

I was working security at a port where cruise ships were loaded, and a bunch of dudes carrying guitar cases and music gear came through. They didn’t listen to any of my instructions and tried to go through the metal detectors without putting their shit on the conveyor belt thing. I had to send them through several times, and one of them was like, “Are you sure we have to do this?” and I was confused and told him yes. I found out later that they were the Beach Boys.

I have done customer service, and I have heard the phrase used by a customer; though not at the same time. The only time I actually heard someone say “do you know who I am?” in a customer service capacity was a random dude ahead of me crashing out at 7-11 over $0.05 because the asshole couldn’t do some simple arithmetic. He claimed to know the owner and threatened a bunch of shit to the teen behind the counter, holding up the line for like 20 minutes. And in a very “that happened” moment, when he finally fucking left, half the people in line literally clapped.

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