Miss Manners recounts an incident wherein a CSR took pity on her and told her he was actually prevented from offering any further help until a customer had called several times and could be described as “irate.” She then asked him if he would please put her down as having been loud and vulgar, and he gallantly promised to do so.
To identify an account, we need a few pieces of information: The username of the account, the home/mailing address it’s been set up under, the name of the account holder and their date of birth if it’s them we’re speaking to, or the name and date of birth of the person we’re speaking to (if it’s a 3rd party authority). Sometimes we’re allowed to set up a password for account access if the account holder doesn’t want to give their date of birth every time they call, but when an account is first set up that isnt’ done, so we need that date of birth…
Crazy Lady: I’m not giving out my date of birth over the phone. I gave the sales guy a password. It’s “blank”. THAT is what you have to use instead of my date of birth.
Me: I’m sorry, but the sales reps can’t add a password for you. I can add “blank” to use in the future, but first we need to identify your account and to do that I need your date of birth.
CL: No. I’m not giving it out. Anyone who knows me knows my date of birth, and they could use it to access my account!
Me: I understand that, and I understand you want to add a password instead. Which I’m happy to do for you. But before I can do that, I need to identify the account now, so I need to confirm that date of birth.
CL: You don’t understand. I don’t give out my date of birth over the phone, to anyone, ever. There’s thousands of people out there driving around with scanners, scanning phone lines and getting information from your phone!!!
Me: :smack: I’m sorry then, I can’t help you. I’m trying to work around this so you only have to give it once, and then we’ll have a password, but if you keep refusing me that information so I can do that, I can’t go any further.
CL: Fuck you! slams down phone
I guess the part that boggled me was the fact that she didn’t want to give out her date of birth “which anybody who knows me would know”, but over the same ‘insecure’ phone line she was willing to give out a password that would be specific to her account and would let anyone who was listening have access to her account anyway…
This wasn’t all that stupid, but I found it amusing nonetheless. Where I work we sell an internet site to our dealers, so they can use it to generate custom. Each dealer gets their own site, so they can put their own prices etc on it, and it comes ready-loaded with our products.
I used to work on the support line for this site, and when someone rang up with a problem, it was usually not a bug, but that they didn’t know how to set something up. In these cases, we’d log in to the back end of their site and check what settings they’d used. This is the same place that they will log in to change the settings. Each dealer has their own username and password, and there are hundreds of dealers so we don’t know them all. Every time, we’d ask “what’re your login details please?” and then we’d log in.
One person didn’t want to tell us - he said that it was always a pain in the neck to tell us, have us sort the problem out, and then he’d have to change the password and make sure that everyone at his end knew the new one. He explained this to me, and I had to admire his good internet-security stance.
I also had to say to him “sir, I can find out what your login details are, they’re stored in the database here - it’s just quicker if I ask you. And I can’t troubleshoot the problem without taking a look at these settings”. He wasn’t to know, of course, not his fault - but the matter-of-fact of it amused me.
I work at the local phone company, once upon a time one of my jobs was to fill in at the front desk. You cannot believe the number of people who would hand me a check for their bill and then refuse to give me their phone number because it is unlisted :smack: I imagine this woman is one of them.