Texas firefighters turned away from Dairy Queen. Was it a parking situation or was the fire truck bad for business?
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In Harris County, Texas members of the Ponderosa Fire Department say they were turned away from a Dairy Queen. The owner calls it a misunderstanding over parking in their small lot between the fire crew and the owner of another DQ who was filling for him on Wednesday evening. The firefighters tell a different story.
Six members of the Ponderosa Fire Dept. made the three mile trip from their fire station in the 17000 block of Rolling Creek Dr. to the DQ in the 2000 block of FM 1960.
They wanted ice cream, but say the owner told them to leave because it was bad publicity for their fire truck to be parked in the front parking lot.
“We kind of were hurt in a way. We just wanted some ice cream. We’re firefighters. We try to do great for the community and here we are being asked to leave from a restaurant,” Dickerson told KHOU 11 News.
Owner Pooya Hejazi told the TV station the issue was traffic flow being blocked by the rig. Hejazi believes if he had been there the whole thing would have been handled differently. He is trying to make amends. After being contacted by KHOU-TV Hejazi called the Ponderosa chief, apologized and invited the firefighters back for a meal on him.
By the way, from what I see the DQ owner gets an A+ from STATter911.com in trying to turn around some bad publicity. Mr. Hejazi addressed the issue directly in the initial story and did not stretch it into multiple days. He took responsibility and did not put the blame on firefighters. When contacted by the TV station he immediately reached out to the Ponderosa Fire Department with an apology and an invitation to help change the firefighters’ image of his store. He also invited the reporter and camera crew into his operation showing some transparency and that he was not hiding anything. While it appears things could have been done better at DQ on Wednesday night, the handling of the situation on Thursday was damn near perfect and should provide a lesson to us all.
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