Nah. Too blunt and amateurish, in my opinion. The guy needs to retake Creepy Customer Calls 101.
I prefer making psychopathic statements like, “So, where do your children go to school?” or “Man, I hate the Patriot Act, it makes my mission so much harder.” You know, stuff that looks innocent on the surface, but…
good work aleq, though i hate customer reps 
but i dont tell them to die
Well, I think that’s the point. Customer probably figured that she hears “fuck you” or “go to hell” all the time (especially considering the level of service her company provides), so he decided to step it up a level and throw something more menacing at her.
I never said it wasn’t wrong, and I’d never do anything like that myself, but that doesn’t neccessarily mean that he was any more sincere than the guy that merely said “fuck you.”
Also, how do you figure out someone is on meth (if that’s what you mean by “tweaked”) from one line of quoted text?
Sort of off-topic, but I once had a suicidal woman on the line. My call centre job has nothing to do with social service work, so it took me by surprise when she started talking about her personal problems, and how lonely she was. (We do get a lot of that, actually, but this woman went into very specific detail.) I listened, and tried to comfort her (the old crisis-line worker in me) but I knew I had to be really careful because we’re monitored by three different groups of people and we are not allowed to veer outside of our script at all, and we’re not allowed to have lengthy calls (supposed to be 3 minutes or less). I didn’t want this woman’s pain to go unacknowledged, and I didn’t want to lose my job.
Then she started talking about killing herself. I desparately wanted to go into full crisis-line mode (assessing whether her statement has the potential to become reality–is she just venting? Is her plan realistic? Does she have the means to carry it out?) but I’d be fired. So, I skipped that part and starting talking to her about her reasons to go on living (her adult child), and talked to her about who she could call to talk to (she decided she would call her doctor.) I sympathized with her (I’ve been depressed before myself and I know how much it sucks) and reminded her that even though she felt this way right now, she may not tomorrow. I reinforced how important it was that she call her doctor as soon as we hung up, and she said she would. I wish I could have provided her with some resources, too, but I didn’t have any for her area and plus, I’d be fired for it.
That was almost two years ago and I still think about her. I hope she made out okay. I felt so terrible that I couldn’t be more helpful.
And I decided if it ever happens again, I will go into full crisis-line counselor mode regardless if it means I lose my job, because I still feel badly for not doing more when I was capable of it.
I think the boss believed me when I told her that I had nothing to do with him getting disconnected. She’s been joking about the incident.
He’s probably still whacking it to that mental picture.
It’s funny because, even with a bunch of people here sprouting of stuff like “it’s illegal!” and “you’ll lose your job!” the chance of that happening is suprisingly low.
What I would do, if I was so inclined, is to make my crank calls from a pay phone, at varing times and never the same phone. It’s not hard to do, and it would be untraceable back to me.
I’m thinking most people here aren’t very happy that Aleq has gone to this length to bother a customer who made such a dumb comment but lets get real, she’s not going to get in trouble unless her son does something really dumb like call his shmuck from her home line or something.
I, too, used to work in CS (in a cell phone company ironically) and have had my share of fun calls. What I personally do is record the number in my outlook reminder a few weeks later to “check up” on these folks. It’s really funny some of the notes that get placed on these people’s accounts.
I believe “I hope you die soon” is probably grounds for an immediate cancellation and notifying the authorities since it might be called a death threat (but I’m not sure).
At the call centre I used to work at, we had several notorious “whizzers”, guys who would call you to do their stock transactions while they were on the can. Most of them probably didn’t know we could hear everything, but I’ll bet some did and really got off on it. Eww!
One of my friends at the call centre once overheard this exchange between a customer and his girlfriend/wife/whatever:
Man: Hey darlin’, you’re home! Come over here and gimme some o’ that stanky!
Woman: Oh, you! giggle
What self-respecting woman would be cool with her bits being called “stanky”?!?
So let me see if I understand…our disapproval of illegal and unethical behaviour should be somehow tied to the likelihood of the person engaging in said illegal and unethical behaviour’s getting caught?
Maybe we should be appalled at wrong behaviour simply because it’s wrong, whether anyone will ever be punished for it or not.
And, just FYI, I work for a phone company and I know how surprisingly easy it is to connect harassing calls to the people who make them and quite frankly the kind of person who would make these kind of harassing calls in the first place doesn’t strike me as bright enough not to get caught.
I don’t think we can assume that it’s a shitty company or that the guy has a right to be angry. After all, if he called in the morning to get the information, and it says in the service contract that it will take 24 hours to get said informationm and then he called several more times the same day - he is not giving the comapany the time it needs to get the info.
I just don’t know if we have all the information we need to decide whether or not it’s a shitty company.
This seemed like a good place to post this
GNN customer – this is a sound file of a voice mail left by a customer for GNN, which was the dialup ISP that AOL owned before they just flat-out absorbed them.
It is most excellent.
Naah. I saw his list of porn - he was more the Fun With Bodily Fluids type.
No where did I say the disapproval was wrong, just interesting that many posters need to throw in ‘threats’ of there being trouble if aleq was to contact the customer and harrass them. Sure it’s wrong, and being in that line of work, it makes it harder for a CSR to gain respect if stories like this one crop up (AFAIK it’s fairly rare). Hell, maybe if there were more stoires of CSRs freaking on callers more often we would get more respect? 
Uh huh, surprisingly easy huh? Last time I checked, for me to get a trace done to a lane line phone call required me to first “tag” the call with a * number (costing me $5) then call the police (RCMP) to start an investigation. Same with cell phones
If that’s easy for you, I’d hate to find out what’s hard.
There’s this as well. Also most excellent. ISTR that someone here knows the backstory of this call, too.
Ooops, I see that subtlety caught me again… I figured I was being broad enough that the joke came across… Anyway, all happened as read up until the point where my boy asked for the guy’s phone number, and of course given that I talk to like 75 customers a day of course I don’t remember it. However, my flight of fancy took off and I must say I was very tempted, mostly because my son is thirty, has a basso profundo voice and a VERY scary delivery, lives a thousand miles from me, travels for a living and is perfectly conversant with call blocking techniques. My devil side kicked in and I ran with it. Factory workers in the nineteenth century masturbated on the machines at work, it’s just gotten more cerebral to go along with the computers is all…
The thing is, what spooked me so much about THIS call was that it was so incredibly out of proportion. The guy was handing me a death wish because he’d been delayed by maybe ten hours in doing something that can’t possibly be that critical. I had a couple of jumping out of sleep episodes over the past couple days hearing it again in my head, (the voices! They’re driving me MAD!!!) but it’s calming down and now I’m pretty much just laughing about it.
I suppose it says something about me as a criminal mastermind/psychobitch from hell that the best I can come up with is waking this freak up and giving him a bit of a scare! Lame, that’s me all right.
Oh, and the kind of company that I work for? The kind where you ask the second in charge of the call center what the policy is on death threats from customers and all you get is a combo deer in the headlights look/insouciant shrug maneuver. Tres reassuring, neh? I definitely need a new job…
Oh, and anybody who thinks that “grotty” and “mom” are incompatible either doesn’t believe in cultural cross-pollinization or didn’t spend much time in California in the early '70s. Just because it came back later in Moon Unit’s mouth spelled “grody” doesn’t mean we didn’t use it spelled right a few years earlier… Didn’t see THAT on VH1, didya?
At any rate, it just kinda says something that a weirdo who’s paranoid enough to accuse a complete stranger of conspiracy is still so trusting that he operates as though said stranger couldn’t POSSIBLY be nutso enough to go on some unspecified rampage when that last straw sends the Bactrian to the back specialist. Of course, if the public ever SAW the people who answer their calls, they might hold their fire a bit more–most of us are fine, but the exceptions are real pieces of work, they are indeed…
Nowhere did I say that you didn’t think it was wrong. What I said was that you seem to be equating the likelihood of being caught with the level of wrongness of the action (not to mention providing assistance in carrying out the illegal activity by suggesting methods). Like it would be more wrong for aleq and family/friends to do this if it were more likely it would come back on them.
Maybe that the way it works in the frozen north, but I’m talking about the good ol’ US of A.
I’m glad to see that the OP was exaggerating and does not plan to follow through on this stupidly ill-advised and illegal action.