Albany

Most anyone who has worked retail can tell one or two stories about obnoxious customers who believe that spending a few bucks means they're free to degrade the person on the opposite side of the counter.

Few of those stories compare to the one Maurice Rucker told me the day he was fired from The Home Depot in Albany.

Rucker, 60, was working a booth in the store's garden center. He was talking to a customer on the phone, he says, when a man with an unleashed dog pulled his cart to the opposite booth and loudly complained.

"He's slow. He's just slow," the man repeatedly said of Rucker.

Initially confused, Rucker decided to tell the man that his dog should be leashed while in the Central Avenue store. And with that, the man lost his cool, letting loose with a string of epithets and telling Rucker, who is black, that his opinion did not count.

"You're from the ghetto," said the man, who was white. "What do you know?"

That wasn't all. According to Rucker, the man told him he wouldn't have a job if it were not for Donald Trump. He said Barack Obama is a Muslim who didn't know what he was doing. All the while, he continued to hit Rucker with F-bombs and other incendiary language.

Rucker eventually concluded that enough was enough. He left his booth, walked up to the man, demanded he leave the store and added this: "You're lucky I'm at work, because if I wasn't you wouldn't be talking to me like this."

Could that be interpreted as a threat? Perhaps. But Rucker says he wasn't willing to let the man's rant go unchallenged.

"I'm a black man, and I have dealt with all levels of racism all my life," Rucker said. "I am not going to accept racist behavior at work, home, the streets or anyplace else."

This happened Thursday afternoon. Rucker was fired five days later.

"We take any termination very seriously and we're careful to ensure associates are treated fairly," Home Depot spokesman Stephen Holmes said in a statement. "In this case, we're appalled by the customer's behavior and no one should have to endure verbal abuse, but we also must require associates to follow proper protocol to defuse a situation for the sake of their safety as well as the safety of other associates and customers."

I should mention that the man returned to the store after the initial confrontation with Rucker and again bombarded him with insults. (Believe it or not, he'd left his dog behind.) What if he'd returned with a weapon? That possibility is among the reasons Home Depot wants its employees to avoid confrontation.

Rucker was told by his boss, he said, that he should have immediately called a manager and should not have approached the man. But from Rucker's perspective, strapping on an orange apron doesn't mean he has to accept being treated with ugly disrespect.

"Firing a black man for defending himself seems unfair," he said.

Rucker, who lives in a studio apartment in Albany's South Mall Towers, had worked for 10 years at Home Depot. He started in a Boston-area store, then worked for the company in Vermont before transferring to its Central Avenue location seven years ago.

His hourly salary when he began with the big-box hardware chain: $12. His salary when fired: $12.78.

I asked Rucker if he'd had other incidents that might have led Home Depot to consider him a risk. He remembered being "written up" twice, once for sweeping up fertilizer and dumping it in a regular wastebasket and again for cutting a security tag off a customer's purchase with scissors.

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Neither infraction kept the store from putting Rucker in charge of its monthly "Kids Workshop" that teaches children building skills. He was the "cashier of the month" when fired.

"I don't think I've ever been late for work at that store," Rucker said. "I do what I'm told when I'm told to do it."

If Rucker's name sounds familiar, that might be because he was recently profiled in this newspaper for his visual art and vocals with the country-rock-soul band known as MOZZ. Rucker is also the former lead singer for Moe Pie.

Art and music are his passion. Home Depot was Rucker's day job, and now, because of a bitter man with hate in his heart, he needs to find another.

The cliche is wrong. The customer is not always right.

cchurchill@timesunion.com • 518-454-5442 • @chris_churchill