My coworker M. is a confident, cheeful, intelligent woman. She has almost always been more than happy to answer any of my questions, and she is very entertaining in water-cooler talk. In short, she is usually a great person to work with.
I’m a customer service rep. That means I deal with customers a lot … end-users (clients of my company), not resellers (business partners of my company). M. is chief of the reseller section. So I get a call from a reseller who has a request I don’t have any clue how to deal with. I go and find M., who unfortunately is chatting with C., one of those coworkers who is not as pleasant as untreated sewage. Anyway, I ask M. if she has any idea why I would have gotten a call from a reseller.
“Well maybe it’s because I hung up on him!” Mutual giggles from M. and C.
“Do you want to talk to him?” I ask, uncomprehending.
“No. He’s someone you should deal with since D. [the reseller admin] is away from her desk.”
“Oh. Okay. He wants to order a bunch of equipment and his account number didn’t seem valid - I usually order stuff through the appropriate sales representative … who would that be for a reseller?” Obviously a very stupid question.
M. could be barely stop her giggling enough to explain that a couple of people in her department were sales reps. C. hollered at me (she only ever speaks in hollering) that everyone already knew that so-and-so were the sales reps and blah blah blah.
“So you want me to treat these two like I would any other sales representative?” despite the fact that it isn’t their job titles, they don’t have sales account numbers, and they don’t report to the sales manager.
I can’t remember if one or both of them said it, but it was made clear that I should.
Later on I checked this up with the boss, and she said, no, I should just take a message for D., since I’m not on the right side of the operation to deal with resellers, or even to figure out what they’re talking about (he had ordered a bunch of equipment I’d never heard of).
Why was M. trying to make an exception in the rules? Could it possibly be that it would be good for a few laughs? Would M. have laughed off a substantial order like that if C. hadn’t been around? I can’t picture that.