“Thanks for calling the support desk, my name is Rutherford… how may I help you today?”
Heh. Grover would be even better.
Maybe have Joe Wilson contact the guy?
And have them think you are a Muppet?
Super Grover was one of my mom’s nicknames when she was in college.
Very true! You certainly deserve your chance to gloat to yourself though.
Don’t skull-fuck him though. As the usual resident of that skull (the brain) appears to go a-wandering from time to time, you don’t know where it’s been or what nasties it brought back with it!
Which is why you don’t suggest how they handle their staff*, you note the significant problems that Mr. Jones caused, and let them decide what to do. Not only did he call without the relevant information to fix the problem, he refused to get that information for the tech, was unprofessional on the phone, and lodged a bogus service complaint.
Dealing with service complaints costs money, bogus claims make it difficult to fix service problems, and may be reflected in performance metrics that are important to maintaining a working service relationship.
*even though this is exactly what Jones was doing
Cheesesteak, I think the point is that it’s not the OP’s place to even make those observations. If anybody’s saying it, it should be whoever’s in charge of managing that particular client relationship, **not **the tech who was on the call and has a personal interest in seeing this guy get shown the door.
True, I didn’t think of it as the OP personally making the statement, as much as his company’s representative making the statement.
Did the second call get recorded – he one where he lied about what you did on the first call?
Play the two in sequence for his boss. Ask how “we” can prevent these incidents in the future.
Boyo Jim: I like it.
Yes, both calls were recorded.
Mr. Smith saw us at 10:30 this morning. He was slightly concerned to have three of us see him, and request a meeting on such short notice.
Mike, our Regional Service Manager, laid out the situation and played both phone conversations off of his laptop. Mr. Smith seemed floored.
In a nutshell, he apologized on behalf of IniTech, explained that he was aware that Mr. Jones was recently under a lot of personal stress, perhaps manifesting itself in such behavior, that he and all at his level are extremely satisfied with our products and support, and have no intention of switching service providers in the foreseeable future. He personally apologized to me for the incident. We never saw Mr. Jones.
My immediate boss and I sat there through the meeting, me with my mouth shut, trying to pull off “attentive, mildly concerned,” for the duration. When Mr. Smith apologized to me personally, I smiled and we shook hands.
We left on good terms, and Mike bought us lunch at Denny’s on his way to the airport to fly home.
I’m back at work, trying to line up all the niggling little details for a project I’ll be starting on next week.
All’s well that ends well, I suppose. I know the “better part” of me should feel bad for Mr. Jones* and his curent situation, whatever it may be, and hope things get better for him soon. And there’s a small part of me that does feel this way.
There’s another part of me that’s thankful my employer takes sufficient precautions that I was vindicated almost instantly, and that there’s no backlash on me whatsoever.
But overall, I’m having a hard time getting past the point that he lied to try to get me disciplined, or fired. I don’t take it personally; I just happened to be the guy that wandered into his “crosshairs” on an really bad day. That doesn’t mean I have to like it.
But as they say, “c’est la vie.” It is done.
Onward.
I wonder if the “under a lot of stress lately” is sort of a face saving move by the Initech boss.
I’m glad it turned out well, at least for you.
You have a really good boss, ExTank. Above all in your story, his behavior is what impressed me the most.
It’s heartening that your own employer went to such lengths to go to bat for you. Sure, it wasn’t just for you, but for the corporate relationship as a whole, but still, they really stuck up for you.
Your mom sounds like she was probably pretty cool.
I’m guessing his stress level is going to be increasing in the near future as he searches for a new job…
Ah, but the company will sell his firing to him as an opportunity to reduce his stress levels…
Yeah, I agree.
Not only did he shut down Mr. Jones attempt to poison the well, he found a great, subtle way of letting Initech that your company won’t be willing to tolerate this kind of behaviour from their clients.
Damn fine, but you left out the important part.
What did you have at Denny’s?