Being told not to say “I can’t help you” is one thing, but I don’t believe for a second that you’ve had one job— let alone “a number”— where your employers instructed you to make something up if you didn’t know the answer to a question.
You do seem to really enjoy making shit up, though. You’re just not very good at it.
That misunderstanding being his own mother taking a crapshoot with his birthday food.
I want to say a quick hello to future BigT when he’s getting ready to bump this thread in two or three months, having finally come up with the perfect retort to Fenris.
You say that as a joke but you know damn well it will probably happen. And then cut to snack thread.
This is the second time I’ve called you a magnificent bastard.
Dairy-free fake cheeses that contain casein are one of my pet peeves. Who the heck do the manufacturers think their customer base is? Fake cheese generally can be divided up into three categories: tastes OK, melts well, or costs only slightly more than real cheese. If you’re lucky, you might find one that gives you two out of three. So, anyone who can eat dairy will probably go for the real stuff. Anyone who can’t have milk depends on fake cheese being completely dairy-free if they want a pizza or quiche or something. So what do fake cheese manufacturers do? Put a potentially deadly allergen into their crummy fake cheese which will make it inedible to the only people who’d want to eat that stuff in the first place.
Yeah, you just had to go and turn on the Lynn signal, didn’t you?
OK, imagine your job is to answer a telephone. If the customer asks a question you are mandated to give them a helpful answer. If you don’t know the answer you’re never allowed to say “I don’t know”. Nor are you allowed to ask someone else for help. The implication is that if you don’t know you make something up because you have to answer and you’d better be right even if you’re pulling something out of your ass. No, they don’t explicitly say “make something up” but that most certainly is the subtext.
Ever wonder why, when you call customer service, no one ever says “I don’t know”? Because they’re not allowed to. They have to bullshit their way through anything you ask them, which is one way you get wrong answers when you call customer service.
You’re right about that, which is why I got out of those jobs as quickly as possible and don’t take on work like that anymore. I really suck at making up stories for customers when I don’t have a factual answer. Frankly, I think everyone sort of sucks at that, which is why such jobs have incredibly high turnover.
That aside - the allergic get no sympathy. The manufacturers know damn well casein is derived from milk so while technically it’s not milk it most certainly is “dairy”. What they do is legal but it’s deliberately deceptive and, as already noted, it hurts a significant segment of their target market. Once again, though, it’s blame the victim and not the perpetrator. Someone allergic to a food has to be 100% vigilant 100% of the time for an entire lifetime… which is damn nearly humanly impossible. The manufacturers being able to engage in deceptive labeling only makes that harder.
Is it possible that their market is the lactose-intolerant and not those allergic to milk?
I have just been on the phone with CS and got the answer of “I don’t know”, as well as “let me ask, hold on a moment please”. Maybe it’s different in whichever country where Citroën has their CSs for Spain, though.
I assure you, in the US that is not a common experience.
Bullshit. It happens all the time in the US.
This is possibly the stupidest bullshit ever posted on the SDMB, and I include the posts made by BigTard, so that’s saying something.
Maybe at the crappy places you worked that was true, but for those of us who DIDN’T work in the “10 Cans Of Mystery Food Without Labels” store, (or “corporate America*”), we find that any company bigger than a mom-and-pop outfit is much more afraid of liability and lawsuits than they are of an “I don’t know”.
Can you imagine the lawsuit fodder? "He told me outright that there were no peanuts in this jar of Skippy Peanut Butter and my BAYBEE DIED! And, your honor, my lawyer has written proof that teh evul corporation said “Don’t say “I don’t know, just make shit up for…oh, I dunno…laughs, I guess” so I’m suing for $700,000,000.23”
I spent 10 years running call centers/help-desks with as many as 2000 people answering phones and “making something up” was always expressly forbidden. An “I don’t know, let me get your number and I’ll call you back with an answer” or “I don’t know, but let me transfer you to the next tier of support, they should” or “I don’t know, let me ask someone else or my sup” was mandatory.
*By the way, 1960s era Castro called, he wants his outdated jargon back
Aren’t you the one who claims to have karate-kicked some guy and “broke his femur”? If so, it’s nice to see your crazy has diversified from “Super-powers I wish I had” to “psychotic conspiracy theories”.
Yeah, that’s pretty much exactly how I was trained when I did customer service right out of college. A friend manages a huge number of call centers, and he assures me that is still the policy at…lets call it BB&U.
Please try to control how stupid you are in a single thread. You’re embarrassing us all.
Um…OUTBOUND call centers…outbound have high turnovers–but that’s because when you’re making spam calls and people yell at you all day, it’s demoralizing as hell.
INBOUND call centers generally have decently low turnover because it takes time and money to train a new person–1 week to get them on the phone, 2 weeks shadowing someone and then another 1-3 weeks when they’re on their own but their call-times are about 1/3d the rates of others. It’s better not to have to turn over 2000 employees a year when you have a 5 week “pay them but they aren’t productive” period with each turn over.
When I left the field, our average employee stayed (something like) 4 years (3.9, 4.2, I don’t remember exactly) and they didn’t stay longer because in a call center, the structure is an incredibly steep pyramid: you can go up a few tiers, but then there’s like 1 mgr for every huge number of call-takers and no growth or promotion is possible.
Seriously, I don’t get why people are surprised by that - there are fucktons more people who are lactose intolerant than there are who are intolerant or allergic to casein. (We’re trying to figure out which is the case for my husband.)
I might feel sorry for him if the little shit wasn’t barging into every thread telling people how to be “moral”* or how to live life or what’s appropriate outside-your-basement behavior, while making his mommy shop for him and berating her and the shelf-stocker at the grocery store for not preparing his meals JUSSSSST right.
*A 40-something year old man who has to have his mommy wipe his butt for him when he makes doody doesn’t have any right to talk about how other people live.
That isn’t entirely fair. There are plenty of people over 40 who because of psychical disability can’t help themselves when they toilet and need others to help them. It’s not their fault.
Eh. At some point the unending reprisals of “BigTard, you worthless, miserable excuse for a human being!” begin to feel rather unseemly to me. Like I’m standing back and watching while some jocks laugh while they kick the shit out of someone. Yeah, the guy they’re kicking may be a totally insufferable nerd — but proportional response, y’know?