You didn’t write this one, did you? This crazy has gone viral!
I used to work in my hometown’s tourist trap. It was a museum that was based on the city’s history, but since the city was also known from TV and movies, people were often disappointed that it didn’t look like they’d seen it on the screen.
One summer we had to keep people out of certain parts of one of the buildings during a renovation, and they didn’t like that, and we had them get pretty upset about that.
We wore period costumes and after a couple of annoyed tourists waited to accost the costumed as we were leaving, they started allowing us to change into street clothes before we left. Usually it was nothing too scary; mostly they were just wanting to tell us how unhappy they were, but we did get some strange ones here and there who you wouldn’t want to be able to pick you out as you left just in case.
This place was a lot like the Frontier Town field trip or whatever it was in the Super Fun Time episode of South Park.
Oh yes! We have a guy here who was being stalked by some crazy woman. She did get in once, by telling the receptionist she was his wife. I was very angry at him for not calling the cops.
I worked for a criminal attorney. Surprisingly, I was only threatened with physical violence a few times. One of the few was a woman whose husband had been jailed for some reason. She was really upset because he hadn’t yet been released on bond and I could get hold of the attorney responsible for doing so.
She told me, “Look, honey, you sound like a real nice girl. Much nicer than that bitch who normally answers. But I just gotta come down there and beat you up. It ain’t nothin’ personal. I just need to hit someone, and unfortunately, it’s gonna have to be you.” I was on the phone with this woman for almost an hour, trying to convince her not to come beat me up, when she finally apologized, said she’d see me in a few minutes and hung up. I tried to get hold of the attorney and he wasn’t answering his cell phone, so I finally just ran downstairs and locked the door, then went back upstairs and got ready to call 9-1-1.
The attorney apparently got my messages, because he called me back to tell me he’d gotten hold of her and I could unlock the door.
Two years ago, while I was running our nightly processing cycle, I had a customer call because she wasn’t seeing her balance on our website. I explained that while everything was processing, balance information wouldn’t be available, but that when the cycle finished, the website would update and everything would be normal. Told her to check again in about an hour.
About an hour to the minute later, she calls back. I wasn’t at my desk, so she left a voicemail. She was yelling that the website was not showing her balance still and demanding that I do something. By the time I get back to my desk and pick up the message, processing is done, and I check the website and it’s updated like I knew it would. I choose not to call her back, because, well… I didn’t really want to hear it.
I get home about 45 minutes later and my husband asks who Bob* is? I haven’t got a clue who or what he’s talking about. He hits play on the answering machine and this ugly, ugly voice starts yelling about his account balance. It’s the woman’s husband. And he’s pissed. He starts in on how he just knows I’ve taken off to Tahiti with the money in his account and how he’s going to come find me… Also included were the requisite threats to talk to my supervisors.
He’d left the message only a few minutes after his wife had called me at work.
He had gotten my last name from my outgoing voicemail message. Which then led him to my home phone number in the phonebook.** Which also has my address listed.
He never showed obviously, and the next morning after I talked to 3 different bank officers, his account was closed and he and his wife were presented with a cashier’s check and instructions to go find a different bank. I got a note in my file.
My last name is no longer on my voicemail. I no longer have a landline, so I’m not listed in a phonebook. I don’t even include my last name in my email signature. I was really paranoid for a couple of months, but not so much any more.
*name changed to protect the idiots
**the only listing in the phonebook
I don’t necessarily worry about someone hunting me down after work, but I have worried a few times about being safe AT work.
I’ve been the front-line manager at several different places, and have had very irate people screaming at me in all of them.
Only twice have I thought I was going to be in a fight, and one of those times, I actually was hoping it would happen.
He was an abusive husband/father who flipped out on me while getting his family (scuse me, the SONS in his family, the wife and daughters didn’t get any) icecream one night. He was a semi-regular, and we all hated him. He always dragged his wife around by one arm, and she and his older daughter had that kicked-puppy look that just makes your heart bleed. One of the servers pissed him off that night, and he was calling for the manager. I told him that was me (I was like 23?) and he was NOT HAPPY about that answer. He tried to come across the counter at me, but the other guy he was with pulled him down and dragged him outside. Other guy even threw me his own credit card to pay for the order, which was nice. I still wish he’d let the asshole punch me tho - I could have had his bastard ass in jail that night.
The other one was more recent, and I really was afraid that day. He was this humongous dude, and something I did (still don’t know what it was) set him off totally unexpectedly. It was like instant personality shift. He was crazy psycho raging; throwing potted plants in the foyer and literally spitting (I always thought that was a figure of speech) and incoherent with rage. I had that emergency police call button pressed SO FAST. I thought I was going to die that day. I still get shaky thinking about him. He is barred from the premises, but I do worry about him sometimes… not really, but just what if.
I assume it says “Note to police, if SylverOne is found dead, talk to this guy first”
Well, probably something more along the lines of “SylverOne received verbal threats at home from this person because his wife could not get her account balance on line during processing” but I think it carries basically the same meaning.
There was one guy who had me worried. Older guy, not computer literate, not smart, aggressive, impatient, unable to bid you good morning without casually dropping three obscenities into the sentence and far, far worse when riled up. Also had a hair trigger temper, so he was riled up constantly. He bought a laptop from us, then brought it in daily asking questions about how to use it, abusing us when he couldn’t get it to do what he wanted. We spent dozens of hours with him teaching him how to use the damn thing. He expected constant, on-demand, one-on-one support for his bottom-of-the-range laptop and because customer service is so emphasized by our employer, we did our utmost to help him with everything from how to check his Hotmail to how to install software he hadn’t bought from us. We endured his abuse and always treated him with politeness, even when that was very challenging.
Anyway he shows up one day in a fine old mood because his “computer guru” friend has been helping him with the machine at home and young guru has managed to slide (ram) a CD between the CD-ROM drive and the chassis of the machine with enough force that there’s not a millimetre of CD sticking out that you could grab to pull it out. We spent about an hour trying to get it out for him but we’re purely a retailer, not a service centre, so we don’t possess any tools and we don’t want to do anything that could void his warranty. We had to admit defeat in the end. The only way that thing was coming out was if the CD drive was unscrewed from the machine and that’s something we couldn’t do for him. He was there the whole time demanding it be fixed under warranty because it was a “design flaw”, but I can’t make that determination, only the manufacturer can (I did warn him that I thought they’d be unlikely to agree). With that in mind I gave him the manufacturers phone number, copped a torrent of abuse about how expensive phone calls are (it’s a free call number but he only has a mobile phone and his mobile carrier charges regardless - I advised him to borrow a friend’s landline or use a pay phone because it would be a free call that way - more abuse) and he went away.
The next time he came in, he bee-lined straight for me and went right off. The manufacturer had kept him on hold for 90 minutes and then referred him to their local service agent. He had blasted the service agent for the hold time and they told him it was my fault - that I’d deliberately given him the manufacturer’s number knowing the hold times were excessive so I could get rid of him because I couldn’t be bothered helping him myself, and that I should have given him their direct number. They said I was lazy, incompetent and untrained and had acted out of malice. They said it was standard operating procedure for our store to take your money and then offer little or nothing in the way of after-sales service, and that we had shafted him because we just don’t care about our customers. This guy.- this unpleasant, stupid and unstable guy - lapped all that up, and became enraged with us, the people who’d spent so many hours teaching him to use his computer at no charge, and at me in particular. I think the service agent deliberately got him stirred up about us so he’d forget that they refused to cover it under warranty and had charged him $110 to undo two screws, and it worked. He was so fired up at me, I was quite scared. He screamed at me for about 10 minutes before he stormed out in a rage. I was afraid all day that he’d come back and commit an act of violence but he didn’t. In fact, the only up side has been that he hasn’t been back since. I wonder who is supplying his free tech support and training now… Guarantee it’s not the service agent.
Not good, but not a reprimand… It just stated that if I had contacted the customer after the first message, the situation may not have escalated. Which might have been true, but as close as I can tell, the idiot called my home just a few minutes after his wife had left the message on my work phone, so I think it would’ve been too late regardless. Either way, lesson learned.
Pretty much… The guy kept denying everything until he was told that we still had both voicemails. Then he shut up, took his check and left.
I have a very long story that ends with me having to explain to a not so bright employee that if he’s going to threaten to kill another coworker (one hit on the others girlfriend), he can’t do it via voicemail. He really shouldn’t have waited until he picked up the phone of he saw him face to face.
I had kind of an inverse moment while working retail where someone who’d previously made a (half-hearted) attempt at killing me later came into the store I worked at.
Years ago, I lived with a girlfriend for a few months, and her ex-roommate was infatuated with her. The feelings were not reciprocated, or so she told me - but she left me to marry another ex-boyfriend, so who knows? He and I had several run-ins while I was dating her, mostly just bullshit with him threatening me over the phone, but there was an episode where he swerved his car onto the sidewalk while he saw me walking - he was only going 10mph, so obviously he just wanted to scare me, but I got the impression he wouldn’t have minded if he ran me over.
Anyway, several years later, after I’d gotten dumped and then met my wife, I was working at a Sears store, and a guys came in, looking for a clock radio. He looked awfully familiar, but I couldn’t place him until he handed his credit card over, and I saw his name - then I had a very quiet, self-contained “ohshitohshitohshit” moment. He didn’t seem to recognize me at all (despite my nametag), so I rang him up, handed him the receipt, and he left. Then I went on a very long smoke break to make sure he wasn’t coming back to drive his car through the front doors.
I had a few assholes while working at the mall, including con artists and their crack babies trying to grift me, but I was never scared of them – I pretty much played dumb, so they were more frustrated than pissed off, and I assumed if they were bothering me they were bothering all the shopkeepsm and likely wouldn’t remember my face (and never got my name).
The man who watched me for months, hiding when I saw him, asking to photograph me? I had my back up for a while.
When I worked at the local call center that did outsourced tech support and customer service calls for a variety of companies. I remember one guy getting so angry that I wouldn’t give him a new printer for free for his out-of-warranty years-old laser printer he threatened to fly down and kick my ass. He actually lived in the same city as me, although he didn’t know that.
Later that day I heard security had had someone at the front desk wanting to get inside for some reason but had held him until police arrived. It could have been a coincidence, or not. We made lots of people angry there
+1! This is awesome! No, I didn’t write it, but I wish I had! This woman must live under a bridge waiting for goats.
I don’t read reviews before writing my own, but I have in fact received responses along these lines, just not so vitriolic or persistent. “Just look at all my great reviews on Amazon!” And then I look at the people writing the reviews and find that every one of them has written exactly one review – for that book. And gee – they’re all five stars!
