A cable caller from Arkansas was very upset about his cable being "messed up" for two weeks or more. He described how expertly the technician climbed his ladder to the pole, did nothing, and then came back down. "I can do that for free!" he proudly stated. He went on to say what a chore it was to reach anyone in the office. "I done spoke with people in Kansas, people in Texas, even Ohio," he said first, and then (I quote) "If I knew chinese I'd've done spoken with someone in Japan by now!" (3:17am)
The man from above called back, asking right off the bat if I spoke chinese. I ignored him and asked which city he was calling from. He replied with the country of Hong Kong. He then said that if his cable wasn't fixed immediately he wanted his service disconnected, adding that I was a worthless bastard. "You publish that!" he said before hanging up. Consider it published, sir, your wish is this worthless bastard's command. (3:25am)
Every now and again you get a call from that special someone who is so stupid they take your breath away. To start, she asked if the magnetic mattress pad would help with her asthma, and when I told her she'd need to ask customer service "at this same number from 9 to 5 eastern time, Monday through Friday" she replied with "let me get a pen to take the number down". Then almost immediately after she said "Well I want to order one," as though the thought of calling customer service had already slipped through her mind, mercurial and vanishing. "So you want to order it without knowing if it will help you," I stated, confirming that I was on the same train of thought as she was. "Uh-huh!" she answered cheerfully, as only the truly brainless can. Later in the call, I asked if she knew the call letters for the radio station she heard the special on. "Oh no!" she exclaimed, "I don't know that! They just said to tell you I heard it on radio KSUK!" I blinked. "Those are the call letters, ma'am." "Noooo, I don't know them!" she wailed. "But you just said them." "Oh, great, okay!" Understanding never dropped in for a visit. I have to say, I don't think that asthma is her greated concern. The fact that she can figure out how to breathe at all is a miracle. (7:18pm)
A woman from New Mexico called to complain that the movie she ordered (a "fuck flick," she repeatedly called it) didn't have any "pentration" in it, and she wanted her money back. It's such a refreshing change to hear people talk about the porn they ordered without being embarassed about it, but this woman bordered on being proud of her experiences. More than a little disconcerting. (8:13pm)
A cable caller from Texas complained that she had some damaged cable lines running to her house. It took a while to whittle down her evasive defenses, but I finally got to the root of the problem--her Fox Sports channel was showing something other than scheduled. "So, the damaged line to your house made the wrong show come on," I said. "Yeah, when can a technician come out to fix it?" (8:50pm)
A caller to our weight loss company wanted to know if their pills could be consumed with alcohol. When I told her I didn't know, she asked, "Do you know about marijuana, then? Or meth?" I pointed them towards customer service, who would probably okay anything from LSD to crack for a sale. (10:50pm)
A man in Kansas called to report that his cable was out. Sadly, this is all we could gleen from his five calls to us. We never got beyond our initial question of "Which city are you calling from?" Oh, he answered it all right, but if it was english, it was some severely bastardized form which I'm afraid my lack of inbreeding could not decipher. What was most entertaining, however, was how increasingly violent he became with each subsequent call. On his final attempt, I never even got to pose my question, he immediately started screaming with a sort of inarticulate primal rage, his television blithly buzzing all the while. Once he hung up, I really did hope he'd call back. I miss him. :( (2:57am)
A man in Tennessee called to complain that he had no audio on the History channel. Possibly nothing too noteworthy, but he was insistant that the operator give him credit for this outage. Yes, he felt he should be reimbursed for a single station being without audio for the night. Precisely how much money did he expect to receive for this exceedingly minor problem, I wonder? (10:52pm)
A pledge caller stated that she didn't want to make a pledge. "I just wanted to let you know that your number is wrong." I asked her what number, as there are an awful lot of them in the world. "This number I called from the TV screen," she responded. "So, you called the number on the screen and you got us?" I queried, very confused at this point. "Yes, I wanted to let you know." With all the other calls coming in, I spared myself a few seconds of thought and weeded through the morass of logic. "Ma'am, that number was for the pledge line. You've reached them," I finally stated. "Yes, I know. They need to get that fixed," she told me. Shrugging, I said I'd pass it along. (11:51pm)
Amid a maddening flurry of inexplicable pledge calls in South Carolina, a man, after stating he would like to make a $20 pledge, asked me how much it would cost him. (12:05am)
A Kentucky woman called back 10 minutes after she had placed a report complaining that her power was still out. I told her that the on-call had been notified, and in some vain attempt to ... I dunno, make me exercise my godly powers or something, said "I have a baby and need the lights." Not only was the statement redundant from a "he already knows it's out, you idiot" standpoint, but what the hell difference does it make if you have a baby or not? I'm guessing the thing's asleep at 10:30pm anyway, and if it's not, I doubt its primary concern is how illuminated its surroundings are. Get a candle and shut up. (10:34pm)
A woman called in to a local oral surgeon's office for her son, who was apparently in a great deal of pain. So much pain that the woman wouldn't shut up about the boy's father who had him all weekend, yet did nothing for the tooth. "He's almost crying!" she exclaimed, and then proceeded to prolong his agony by not letting me get a word in for the next three minutes while she bitched. As it turns out, he was not a current patient, thus they could not do anything for him after hours, and I told her so. "So what should I do? Take him to the emergency room, try to find a dentist?" I told her that I was not an oral surgeon so I couldn't recommend a best course of action for her. She replied, "What's an oral surgeon?" Finally getting through to her that she would need to seek help for her son elsewhere, the woman once more tried to appeal to me to tell her what to do for him, sounding on the verge of tears herself. "Ma'am, I don't know. You're his mother, what do you think you should do?" She mumbled something unintelligible and hung up. I feel so sorry for the boy. (10:55pm)
This was new. A man called a public radio station in Louisiana, wanting the station to give him a wake-up call in the morning. He was quite surprised that I wouldn't do this for him. I'm not sure I want to follow the train of thought that brought him to this station. (11:21pm)
A caller to our health services company was interested in the oregano oil. She wanted to know if it would cure "a fungus on my privates". I've never actually wavered in my order taking when a customer told me what was wrong with them. A first time for everything. Now excuse me while I go boil my headset. (1:42am)
We've hit a new low, folks. The company just got a new account selling a hair loss product. Seemingly innocuous, right? That's what I thought too, until I actually checked it out. Never before have I encountered a company who not only was unscrupulous, but actually demanded that we lie, repeatedly, to the caller. I don't mean subjective stuff, like their supposed sucess rate, or how long the product has been on the market. I mean shit that I, sitting here taking the call, KNOW is a lie. I quote you segments taken from the product's phone script.
"You don't sound very old - how old are you?" There is no space in which to document their answer, and regardless of how old they actually sound -- 12 or 112 -- we're supposed to say this.After this deluge of tripe, we try to get them to buy a four month supply for -- get this -- $300. If they say no (and who the hell wouldn't), we're supposed to offer them a reduced rate, under the justification of: "we are looking for opinion leaders to help us out with testimonials. I think I told you that we have testimonials on the wall here that are obtained from actual customers. You fit into a certain demographic profile because you've been losing your hair for this long." Note that we're expected to say this regardless of how long they've been losing hair. Or, in other words, there IS no "demographic profile"."We have testimonials all over the wall from real customers who call back to reorder." <looks at walls> With invisible ink and on transparent paper, apparently.
This one's the cruncher:
"On a side note, I made sure when I started working here that it was a good product, because otherwise I wouldn't be able to look myself in the mirror if I didn't know it worked so well." Do I even need to discuss what a steaming pile of rank monkey shit this statement is?
This discount drops the price to $200.
Oh, but wait, if they STILL say no, then we pretend to go talk to the manager and drop the price further to $180.
As I stated in Behind the Lines when I first started this site, I'll do many things in my job, but I will not lie. I'll be evasive. I'll state things which I suspect may not be 100% accurate. But to sit there and spout out this crap -- not just lies, but lies which attempt to state a moral standing for me while summarily raping it like a convict's boyfriend -- is too much. Take note, dear readers, my foot is down. I will not, under any circumstances, do this. I was hired to take messages. I was hired to dispatch calls. I was hired to place orders. I was not hired to be a used car saleman to the Fellowship of Bald Men. And I will not sacrifice what little is left of my self-esteem for the benefit of someone else's wallet. For the sake of all involved, let's hope these people take their fraudulant business practices and crawl back under the rock they spawned from. (7:03pm)
A woman called into the health products company regarding an order she had already placed. Her query? Since her credit card had a Mastercard symbol, she wondered if she would be charged for the items she ordered, or if Mastercard would pick up the bill. (9:21pm)
A caller to our health products company wanted the oregano oil. But, like so many other callers, she felt compelled to explain why she was getting it. A good rule in life is to not volunteer information, especially if you're stupid. "My mother used to cook everything with oregano, and when I moved to this country, I left the oregano behind. That is when my family's health became bad, with the cancer and all." No, I think that was more like the overpolluted land, air and water that did that for you, ma'am. Later, as she asked about the oregano, I explained that it was different from the oregano grown domestically, as this was grown in the Mediterranean. "Yes, South America," she agreed. "Where I'm from." If I originated from South America, you can bet I'd know it wasn't the Mediterranean. (10:08pm)
Explain this to me, please. A woman called and said, in one breath, "Yeah, I got a question maybe you can answer. Hello? Can you answer a question? Hello? Hello? Are you there?" "Yes, I'm just waiting for the question," I replied. "Well you don't have to be so rude!" she snapped, hanging up. Exqueeze me? How was it again that I was the rude one? (10:42pm)
We get notified of new accounts all the time. Our managers do this in a vain attempt to ensure that when calls start pouring in, the operators don't sound clueless. A wise move, too bad it never works. Anyway, the name of a new account intrigued me (let's call it "My children r rox!"), making me think of overproud parents. You know, the the sort who put those "honour student" stickers on their car. Opening the account, I looked at its greet phrase and the description of the company. "We sell new and used office equipment, such as Xerox copiers, fax machines, etc., at discount rates," the account's description read, while the answer phrase also referred to copiers. To top it all off, even the company's actual name was misspelled in the account index. Ironically, this horrendously blundered account, set up by a manager, comes on the heels of a series of e-mails from the management telling the operators to improve their sloppy performance, specifically noting that they should proofread all their messages before saving them. Go, hypocracy. (11:16pm)
A woman in Mississippi called in, trying to convince me to give her credit on her cable account because her power was out earlier today. Her justification being that she was unable to watch the cable, thus she shouldn't be charged for it. It was difficult to not laugh in her face, but I managed it and told her that while she'd have to take it up with the billing department tomorrow, she shouldn't hold her breath. Not surprisingly, she didn't understand why on earth they wouldn't give her credit. In an attempt to argue the point with me (a futile gesture in all respects; not only do I think the mere notion is ludicrious, but I couldn't even give her credit if I wanted to), she said, "Oh, so if a tornado came and killed us all, we'd still have to pay for cable?" "That's an irrelevant and quite nonsensical hypothetical question, ma'am," I replied, successfully gambling that she would not understand the meaning behind my multi-syllabled words. I attempted counter-proposing my own question, trying to illuminate the woman -- silly me: "If your television set exploded, ma'am, and refused to work, you would be unable to watch the cable. Would you expect the office to give you credit for this, although they were still transmitting a signal without interruption?" She either thought they should, didn't understand the question, or ignored me, as she returned to the murderous tornado scenario. Giving up, I answered every question or statement from that point out with "call billing tomorrow" until she too gave up and left me in peace. (11:22pm)
"I can't order pay-per-view!" an angry man in Pennsylvania screamed at me as I picked up the line. "Can you tell me why?!" I calmly explained that I did not, and that after hours the best I could do was leave a message for the office to check his account on Monday. "Well what the hell are you there for?!" Why, to be your sexual-frustration punching bag, apparently, I said to myself. (It's my experience that males this angry about not receiving PPV are in desperate need of porn. They usually aren't so violent about not being able to see "Me, Myself and Irene".) Aloud, I explained that we took reports of cable outages. "What does THAT mean?!" It means people whose cable is out, fuckwad. "Well I can't see PPV! It's out! So you tell me why can't I ORDER PAY-PER-VIEW!?!" I explained that I had already answered this question with "I don't know." "Oh yeah?! Well listen to MY answer!!" With that, he hung up. Oh. Oh, the wit. It burns me. Truly, I have never encountered so brutal a comeback. Please. Stop. No more. I may never recover from this devastating blow. The pain. The pain. (11:38pm)
A cable caller from Florida stated that her son answered a phone call from someone identifying himself as a cable technician. The son, not recognizing the caller ID number, ignored what was being said and hung up on the tech. The woman wanted the technician to drop whatever he was now doing and call her back about her cable problem. I let he rknow that thanks to her son hanging up on the tech, she had probably dropped to the bottom of the list. Satisfying indeed was the fact that she called 10 minutes after the cutoff time for us to contact techs about her kind of problem. (8:16pm)
A woman in Florida called, having a problem with turning her television off. She had called previously, and had been recommended by that operator that she unplug her TV. "Is that hard?" she asked me. "I usually find unplugging things fairly easy," I replied. "But there are lots of plugs," she said, as though I could solve this mystery of life for her with my ESP. I recommended that she follow the cord from the TV to the outlet to make sure she had the correct plug. She didn't understand me. I'm somehow not surprised that she couldn't get the set turned off. (7:57pm)
A man in Texas called into his cable company:
Another Florida cable caller. This one, after being told by the PPV system that she couldn't order a movie, decided to turn to another channel and order a different movie altogether. "I figured the whole system wasn't working, so it wouldn't send me anything," she said to me on the phone, trying to get me to credit her account for a movie she was now receiving but didn't want at all. "I guess I shouldn't have done that," she admitted. "That's one way of putting it," I told her, marking her message to billing as "Will call again". (10:42pm)
Are guys really that desperate? I guess they must be to call random numbers at 4:30am and try to pick up someone they've never met who likely isn't even in the same state. After a few lame attempts at small talk (which I'm quite apt at delivering swift killing blows to), he finally broached the subject: "So, what do you look like?" Rolling my eyes, I ignored his question and tried once more to steer the "conversation" back to the account he'd called. Vainly, of course. "Do you have a boyfriend?" he asked in what I think was supposed to be a suave and charming voice and came out sounding more like a thin, nasal whine. I very nearly replied "Yes, he's right here, would you like to speak to him?" but instead said "Goodnight" and hung up. (4:21am)
Rudely interrupting our reading of the Super Friend's pages, Mike received a call on the check-in line for a cable company. This may not seem odd, but when one considers that this was an unsolicited check-in for a cable company whose techs often tell us upon receiving 100 cable outages that they don't see a problem, we were a little shocked. Trying to see how far back in the account to check for messages, Mike asked the tech when he'd last checked in. There was a pause, and then Mike incredulously said "Last week?!", much to my amusement. I'm glad the techs can be counted on to provide that swift service they proudly proclaim in their advertisements. (4:27am)
A woman called into a maternity clothing line and requested a catalogue. "Maternity or nursing?" I asked. She said nursing, so I went about getting her information. Part way through she said "Will that have maternity clothes in it?" "Uhm, nooo, it'll have nursing clothing." "Oh. Well, I want maternity then." Exactly what kind of clothes did she initially expect in the maternity catalogue? (8:20pm)
Why the hell do some people try to be perky and cute and phone? Do they have no idea how additionally detestible it makes them? When I hear a grown man say things like "I heard a radio show starring a human being by the name of Bill!", I want to do nothing more than reach through the phone line, rip off his testicles, and shove them into his vacant cranium vis his nasal passages, so that the next sentence he utters will at least have some thought behind it. But the fun didn't stop there. He then went on to use the world "Alrighty!!" as though he personally had royalties on the word, and when telling me his credit card's expiration date said "February, naught 2" for 2/02. What an unnecessarily gay thing to say. It almost took me a full second to make sense of the muddled antiquity. That's a partial second I'll never get back, you bastard. (8:42pm)
A woman called into the health products company. "I was calling to order the replacement hip." I boggled. Yes, it turns out that she really wanted to mail-order a replacement hip. "Well, a doctor gave me this number..." she said, trying to convince me that her view of the world was right. "Be that as it may, ma'am, I'm afraid we do not have any replacement hips for sale." What did she expect, a home hipotomy kit? "Step 1: Remove old hip. Step 2: Snap on replacement hip. Step 3: Walk to phone in new hip and order replacement brain by mail. You need it." (7:29pm)
A cable caller had been left a message on her answering machine by the office. I told her I did not know who had left it. "I think it was a man," she stated. "Does that help?" (7:42pm)
One of several doctors who we answer for left instructions that we were to use his personal pager tonight instead of the one he shared jointly with his partner while he was on-call tonight. I paged him on his pager as he instructed, and he checked in very promptly. But then he said to repage him on the joint pager and left without picking up the call from his patient. What the hell? Who cares what pager we used (especially since it was the one he told us to use)? You got the page, now take care of your patients, you two-bit quack. (8:19pm)
A woman in Mississippi called in with a billing problem. Usually I just direct the callers to the billing department, but I just couldn't resist tonight. This woman was furious with something she'd seen on her bill. "I have a $5 late charge on this! It wasn't due until the 11th, which was a Sunday, and I paid it on the 12th! Explain that to me!!" "It was late, ma'am," I replied with a smirk. "Yeah, but ... but the 11th was a SUNDAY!" she said indignantly. "You could've paid it early, you know." At this, she paused, this thought clearly never having occurred to her in the least. Highly amused, I give her the billing department's hours and moved on. (9:09pm)
An upset cable caller in Texas was complaining about her cable being out. "I've called 142 times sine January," she declared. "142!" This is not something I would be proud of -- indisputable proof of both an obsession with cable and a lack of common sense to drop a company that just doesn't care. All too common, sadly. (9:20pm)
A woman called to request a clothing catalogue, and when asked "Maternity or nursing?" replied "Deborah." (10:13pm)
