The response of a waitress in Fort Wayne, Indiana, to a gay slur that was written on a receipt has gone viral.
Michele Crider said she was working a lunch shift on Tuesday at the Dash-In restaurant in Fort Wayne, where she has worked for almost a year, when she was assigned a table occupied by two men "who were not that nice."
Eight years in the service industry have taught her to recognize when customers seem to want their space, she told NBC News in a phone interview Thursday. That seemed to be the case with the two men at this table.
But when Crider, who is gay, went to pick up the check after the men left, she found: "I don't tip f---," written on it.
Crider said her interaction with the customers was brief, but the note on the check left a mark.
"If he were to walk in the restaurant today, I wouldn’t know who he is," she said of the one she believes wrote the note.
So she uploaded a video to Facebook later that day and made the post public, thinking that some of her friends would share it and that the customer might see it. The video had been viewed more than 680,000 times as of Thursday afternoon.
"Why did you feel the need, sir, to write that on there," she asked in the video. "If you don't like gay people, then that's whatever."
She added that her identity is more than her sexual orientation. "I need you to see," she said. "I'm a lot more than that."
Crider said that the note hurt her, but the support from her colleagues and Facebook users has been uplifting.
"I go through the messages and stuff that people have sent me and 99.9 percent of them are nothing but positivity and encouragement and it makes my heart happy," she told NBC News.
Crider, who wears her hair short, said she had to explain what happened to her 7-year-old son, Jax, after a local news station visited their home this week.
"He was asking what the uproar was about," she said. "I broke it down in a 7-year-old's terms, I used the word 'bullying' a lot."
Her son could not understand it.
Crider said his response was: "'Why wouldn't they like your hair, Mom? You have really cool hair.'"
