The phone rings at about 2 AM and this woman says she can’t set the alarm system at the bar she works at. I ask her for her password and/or system number but she doesn’t know either of them. I search for her bar by name and, sure enough, it’s on on our system and the alarm had gone off several hours earlier which means she cannot set her alarm again until she gets a reset from me - but she must supply the password or system number first.
I explain this to her and tell her that , without the system number or password, I will have to get the on call alarm company engineer to do the reset for her. She suddenly changes from being a reasonable, well spoken invividual into a complete nutcase. She shouts down the phone at me:
“Fing great! Now I have to wait around for fing hours for an engineer? Thanks for nothing you FING CT!”
Then she hangs up. Five minutes later she calls back and, as luck would have it, the supervisor took the call. He told me later that she accused me of trying to hit on her and when she rejected my advances, of using offensive language to her. She said that unless my company fired me she would get her boss to cancel their contract with us.
The bastard was actually a bitch, but she called you a cunt instead of a dick, alledging to your bastard of a boss that you were hitting up on her and fucking cussing at that bitch…
What an asshole. (I’m talking about the bitch/bastard, not you legion.) I gather you’re still working there.
Could you call the police on suspicion of a crime being commited at the customers place of work, as a hostile individual is trying to get hold of the alarm code fraudulently? Or is their buisness account too valuable for your company to risk losing over a missunderstanding?
Are your calls “monitored to assure quality service”? If so then her complaints could go right out the window. Assuming your supervisor didn’t realise that it was bullshit already, that is.
I agree that you should consider further action. Discuss it with your boss. This person is particularly malevolent, since she invented sexual harrassment.
I hope this will amuse you:
I was working late in our IT department. The last person out sets the alarm system.
A colleague (since departed) didn’t check I was still there, and set the alarm.
When the alarm went off, I had to wait for the engineer to come. (Several hours, but of course I was polite.)
Nothing funny so far?
Our alarm includes a motion detector. It was 45 minutes after my colleague left before the alarm tripped. My position is that I type so smoothly that the detector didn’t function…
You know had this ended with “Thanks alot you fucking cunt…” I would have said take it with a grain of salt; because lets face it, we’re only human and having an alarm buzz in your ear for hours on end is enough to drive anybody to the brink of insanity. Especialy someone who has been working at a bar all night dealing with drunk people.
However since she had the audacity to call back and say all those things she did.
Aw, hell, it’s happened to me lots of times. If you work with the public, it’s bound to happen sooner or later.
I’ll never forget the time that a woman reported me for “cussing out” her kids. I was a cashier. I rang her purchases up, we chatted pleasantly, I smiled at the kids. She paid, left my aisle, went to the customer service desk and said I had become verbally abusive and swore at her children.
For no good reason.
When I worked in a hotel, people threatened to get me fired if I wouldn’t give them a discount, or honor the reservation they mistakenly made for a hotel room in Bangkok on a sold-out night, turn up/down the heat in the pool, or let slide their phone charges, if I made their kids leave the pool for harassing other guests, if I couldn’t find “less itchy” sheets, if I couldn’t get the power to come back on during a violent storm which blacked out the entire town, if I didn’t get their favorite channel added to the cable lineup, or if I called the police because they were beating their wife in the lobby.
[wild speculation]The answer to both these questions is because she’s the one that accidentally tripped the alarm earlier and didn’t properly reset it and didn’t realize that there was a problem til after closing time when she couldn’t set the alarm. When told that she would have to supply the # or password, she realizes that she either has to a) call the bar owner at 2 AM and admit that she tripped the alarm, or b) wait “f***ing hours” for an engineer.
I’m guessing the callback was to see if she could pull an end-around and get your boss to feel so mortified about your behaviour that he’d make it up to her by fixing the alarm problem ASAP. And probably to lay groundwork for the “crazy/unreliable alarm company” story she’s working on for her boss as to why the alarm went off in the first place.
At my old customer service job I liked profiling wanker customers. Made the night shift go by faster.
Unfortunately, this kind of thing is all too common.
I used to work for VarTec, a dial-around long distance company. I worked the graveyard shift on what we called the escalations team. When a customer asked to speak to a supervisor, he was transferred to me. One night, a CSR named Arnold transferred a customer to me who told me that he’d called in once before that night and spoken with another CSR named Susan. He told me that Susan had been very rude to him and at the end of the call had told him to go fuck himself before hanging up on him. After the call, I spoke with Susan’s team leader and Arnold, who had been sitting right next to Susan when she got the call. Both of them told me that the customer’s accusations were false and a report was made, just to be on the safe side, in case he decided to call back during the day. Clearly, he was trying to get Susan fired, just because company policy forbade her doing what he wanted (probably some kind of ridiculous credit).
I worked in the hotel industry for a few years, myself. I bet we could fill a whole thread with horror stories. And weren’t you the one who had the doughnut-wielding psycho customer at the grocery store?
David Sedaris said in “The Santaland Diaries” that when customers told him they were going to have him fired, he wanted to lean in close and say, "I’m going to have you killed.
Speaking of alarms, I was sitting at my desk yesterday when the boss of our sister company answered the phone. “Do you know who this is? [According to the boss, the caller said she did.] This is an alarm company!” The call was from ADT (a large alarm company in the U.S.), and they were offering commercial alarm monitoring for the residential price.
Isn’t there a way to come back at her? There are few things I find more heinous than lying in order to cause a major havoc in someone else’s live (having him loss his job, prosecuted for some imaginary crime, etc…). I would certainly do anything I could to have this bitting her back in some hurtful way, lawsuits included if it were possible.
My favorite is his description of his supervisor leaning over the register on Christmas Eve to say to a customer, “Oh, and don’t tell my manager I called you a bitch. Tell him I called you a FUCKING bitch. Merry Christmas!”
Your boss would never cancel the contract with them anyway. I have a system in my house, and it cost over a grand to buy and install. I’m guessing he doesn’t need to buy another system when all he has to do is rid himself of an obnoxious “alarmist” employee.
<giggle> similar thing happened to me when I was doing bank late-to-closes at Wells Fargo…called the sub list, got one answer, the son of a woman 3d or fourth down on the list. Left a message for her to call back, took the kids name, the usual. About 2 hours later I finally get the head of corporate security [now about 2 in the morning. He was not a happy camper] and he asked why the branch manager didnt handle it. So I told him that I had left a message for her with her son, and that the phone was now rolling over into voicemail.
Next afternoon when I get in to work, there is a whole bunch of amused people waiting for me. Head of security had called the woman [who was the branch manager] and she said that nobody called all night, and that they didn’t have an answering machine. So my supervisor gets the tapes from my phone out, and plays the sections of me talking to her son, and me leaving about 7 messages on the answering machine that has her voice announcing her name and that she is not in…[they get the timestamps of my calls from my account notes] and security was not amused!
I understand that they fired her instead of me…I love recorded work lines=)
LOL, did you know that even alarm companies happen to have their premesis monitored not only by a different op center of their company, but an independant alarm company? AMong other things, UL makes certain requirements as to security for the buildings housing alarm companies monitoring centers=)
[I can remember at least 3 times in 2 years when we had the cops rolled on our op center because of an alarm…giggle. nothing like going to the back door on a smoke break and seeing cop cars rolling into the parking lot…]
