I had one of those people phone me yesterday. He was complaining because some machines which he’d hired from us broke down. Now the person who deals with this stuff was busy and had asked me not to put through any calls to him. But after the guy has been bitching a while I say I’ll see what I can do.
I go to busy guy and ask him if he’s willing to help. Nope. He’s busy. I go back to the phone and explain this to psycho customer. He’s not having any of it. I agree to try busy guy again, but busy guy is still too busy to help. I return to the phone and psycho customer is not imppressed. He asks to speak to my boss, but he’s out. He then takes my name, and tells me that he’s going to phone him tomorrow and tell him how I “refused to help.”
Sure enough, he phoned today and I put him through to my boss. My boss hasn’t even bothered to mention it to me.
Don’t keep us in suspense! Did you send an engineer out or did she let the alarm ring all night? Cause if someone called me a cunt, I might be so upset that I’d lose the engineer’s phone number and have to search for it in the white pages, starting with the A’s.
I don’t know what it is-- I’m a nut magnet. Crazy, angry, violent, or just plain mean people are drawn to me by some mysterious force. If I didn’t have a sense of humor about it, I’d probably join their ranks.
We get this crap at work occasionally. I work in an industry where the customer is not always right…to say the least.
I remember distinctly a gentleman once telling me one of my coworkers was a rude asshole to him. Why? Because she questioned him on the fact that he was giving her bad addresses. Claiming he lived with his mom when she was in the background screaming at him to get out of her house so she could lock up & leave.
I was an asshole because I wouldn’t blandly accept it when he told me he had a paper saying we agreed to waive 4 of his payments. (He refused to fax me a copy, I was to just take his word for it).
I guess these people think that we don’t communicate with or know anyone else we work with.
For those wondering about the bar’s alarm ringing for several hours, reread the OP. The bar employee was trying to set the alarm. It had gone off several hours ago (and presumably been shut off), and she was now trying to reset it so that it would be armed after she locked the place up. Or that’s how I read it, anyways.
She got her engineer eventually, but it took a while. When we called him we got no reply and with this particular alarm company you have to try the on call engineer for an hour before you escalate to the next one. It took him nearly the whole hour before he answered.
speaking of insane nut-job customers…
Years ago when I worked as a cashier at a grocery store, there was this woman who came through my line and I proceeded to ring up her items and total. She then hands me a WIC check (grocery subsidy checks for low income women). A WIC check must be presented before sale, or at least that was the procedure at this store. I tell her I have to void and re-ring and she starts pitching a fit and it got worse when I told her half the stuff she had didn’t qualify for the items on the WIC check. You can only get white milk (any variety) not strawberry milk drink, only WIC approved cereal brands not box o’ sugar brand, real cheese not Velveeta plasti-cheese etc… She then tells me she gets this stuff all the time at this store with her checks. I said that was highly unlikely. She starts yelling at me and proceeds to call me a fucking racist white bitch (yes, she was black). By this time the front end manager is over there and telling her the same stuff I did. The bitch-lady took her WIC check presumably to elsewhere to pull her crap. This kind of stuff happened all the time after that night, I quit.
At the end of my shift (closing) this was the conversation I had with my manager:
Me: I don’t think I will be in tomorrow (Saturday)
Mgr: Why??
Me:I quit
Mgr: :eek: But why?? What??
Me: I can’t give you two weeks, and for that I feel bad, but I cannot take abuse from these F-ing customers anymore. I don’t get paid enough (minimum wage was like $4.25/hour) to deal with this shit.
Next time I went back was for my final pay-check
It felt so good quitting that job.
… Just a little SPOOFE pipe-in here to say that I always try to treat grocery store cashiers or customer service operators with immense loads of respect, mainly for the reasons outlined here…
(What kind of fuckhead tries to screw over a subsidy program?)
I remember retail, Lord do I remember retail. I have similar problems now, but not exactly the same. Yet I’ve always been very good about doing my job, keeping with policy, and admitting when I’ve made a mistake.
So when I worked in the university computer store, the guy who wanted a student discount despite having no proof of being a student, the girl who wanted multiple copies of the $5/cd software that students could get only one copy of, the professor who wanted to return opened software a month after he purchased it without a receipt ( :eek: )…all these people who said “I’ll get you fired if you don’t”, I smiled very sweetly and said “Would you like to talk to the floor manager?”
And she would come over and back me up to the hilt.
It’s even less comprehensible at my current job. I tell people no, I can’t reimburse you; yes, I know the bug is our fault, yes, we’re working on fixing it. No, I can’t refund your debt. No, I can’t give you enhancements or influence. If I’m telling you your name’s got to be changed, then no, you don’t get to argue and hem and haw and say “but it’s one letter different from the copyrighted character I look just like”. And no, I’m not trying to make your life miserable or withhold service from you. I’m trying to make people like the game so they stay in it and play and send good feedback on me so my managers like me, the game makes money, and I get a bonus at the end of the year.
Back when I was in the restaurant business I had a woman who bought a bag of potato chips with her sammitch begin pissing and whining about the tiny contents of the bag and how I was ripping her off, now this was a major brand of pre-packaged chips and all we did was put them on the shelf and sell them, this POS was not happy with my offer of another bag, she wanted a cash settlement on the spot! (she was WAY overdressed and wearing about a Bazillion dollars worth of jewelry), she demanded to see “the manager” and was really pissed when she was informed that it was me!, my District Manager just happened to be in the store and witnessed the whole deal from the beginning, this little deal went on for a few weeks, her husband was some locally famous Ambulance-chaser and he mailed several threatening letters to the store impling that we were going to be “dragged into court” if a “proper settlement” could not be reached, he was informed by our company legal staff that this would be fine and the deal went away.
Almost all of them, at my store. The best thing is that WIC checks are issued monthly, and every month we have the same people telling us that we bent the rules for them last time. Every month – for the five years I’ve worked there – I’ve had the same people try the same thing, only to be declined every month. And every time, I’m a racist asshole who’s just doing it to be mean.
I work in customer service, and someone tries to get me fired every month or so. The first year, it would upset me – now, it’s just good story material.
Why??