I keep an eye on clever things people do to market their products or businesses. And because not everyone is clever, or indeed smart enough to dress themselves without diagrams or YouTube tutorials, I sometimes see the unclever things people do to market their products or businesses.

Here’s a winner, y’all.

Call it “You Did What? A Saga Wherein Food and Customer Service Collide and Nobody Wins (But Someone Could Have Caught a Case), or Please Never Do This Ever in This or Any Other Universe.”

Once upon a time, there was a Dude With a Restaurant (DWAR). Like many dudes with restaurants, he liked good reviews on Yelp. But there was suffering in the kingdom, for this dude with this restaurant received a meh, dunno-about-this-place, 3-star review from a lady of the realm.

Not content to be average, DWAR sprang into action. Our intrepid hero made a replacement order and took it to the fair lady’s home, where he rang her bell and knocked on her door and called her phone to let her know he was there to make things right!

So here’s how that all had to go down:

• He saw the Yelp review.
• He found this woman’s info either in the system or Sherlocked it from her description of her order.
• He made her a whole replacement meal.
• He got in his car.
• He drove to her house at almost 11 o’clock at night.
• He knocked on her door AND blew up her phone.

At no point in this extensive chain of events did he think to himself, “Hunh. Y’know what? Maybe this is weird and off-putting. Maybe this is, in fact, creepy af. Maybe I shouldn’t be at a strange woman’s house in the middle of the night with increasingly soggy pastries like some sort of sad Phantom of the Bakery.”

As both an eater of food and marketer of businesses, let me give y’all some free advice. A little tip, from me to you. On the house, much like DWAR’s second order.

Do. Not. Do. This.

This is not clever. This is how people get the cops called on ‘em. This is how people get shot.

DWAR has now been featured on Inc. Magazine’s site, and dragged on Twitter, and I’m willing to bet has received some unwanted attention from the local constabulary.

Y’know that thing people say about all publicity being good publicity? It ain’t necessarily so. Sometimes we need to pause, reflect, and maybe ask a friend if we’re about to come off all stalker-y. The cardinal rule is simple: Don’t be creepy.

Cool? Cool. Okay. I’m gonna go double check that I locked the door.