Week One - Sunday, 26 March 2000
Easily one of the most obnoxious callers I have ever heard in my entire life, I think it will be some time before we manage to top this loser as a FotW. Oh, sure, it was the Academy Awards. If you don't see it LIVE! and AS IT HAPPENS!, you know there's just no way in hell that you'll ever find out what went on. And when you put it into that perspective, doesn't it make wishing for a woman's child to bleed to death because you're missing the show perfectly okay?
 Cable in Florida. Customer had a cable outage and wanted to watch the Academy Awards. He refused to give any information apart from his phone number. The operator who took this call recorded the later part. What follows is an exact transcription of the call, sans the customer's name and number.
Week Two - Sunday, 2 April 2000
I find it amusing that this, the second FotW award, is given to a deserving individual who made our lives hell on a Sunday. And I bet both of these people pretend to be "good christians," too. However, that's a rant for another time. This week's Fuck is another cable junky, and one of the saddest kind. It was tie between this woman and the run-around I got from the technicians on the same night, but what pushed this caller over the top into true Fuckdom had to be her FCC threat. I just can't resist people who toss around things to sound impressive or intimidating, and yet have no earthly idea what it is they're saying.
The cable in a semi-major Florida city went out at approximately 11:16pm. Over the course of an hour, we had fielded about 100 or so outages. One such lady called (again) to report what we aalready knew. As this was her third call, she also knew that we knew, but obviously, that was irrelevant. In any case, the caller was an exceptionally rude old woman, and after two to three minutes of blatant verbal abuse, I was no longer in the mood to just let her comments slide away without some of my own.
Caller: Well what do I have TV for?
Me: I give up, what DO you have TV for?
Caller: To watch! To be entertained!
Me: Well, guess what? It's out right now, which means you'll have to find some other method of entertainment this evening.
Caller: I don't want to! I can't think of anything else!
Me: Sounds like this could be a blessing in disguise then, ma'am. A wake-up call to get a life, perhaps?
Caller: But I want my cable ON!!
Me: Yes, and I want peace, harmony and freedom from idiots, but sadly, I left my magic wand at home tonight, so I'm afraid I just can't wave it and give us both what we want.
The caller then attempted to resort to threats so I would tell her when the cable would be back up. As I had no idea and refused to quietly be her new form of entertainment, she said she would report me to the FCC. I wished her good luck and hung up.
Week Three - Tuesday, 11 April 2000
This week's Fuck is particularly sad because it preys upon my natural instinct to help the elderly or those who genuinely need assistance. Nikki has often advised me that, in our job, that's a lost cause and to go the extra mile in most cases generally causes us more grief and less appreciation than we would receive by just taking the call and being done with it. I rebuff her each time she says this, but she usually winds up being right. In this case, she was very, very right.
An elderly cable caller wanted to know how to pay her bill. Despite having many, many years of check writing experience under her belt, the combination of billing statement, blank check and return envelope was apparently too much. To further matters, she wanted me to guarantee that they would not reject her check (they had apparently done so in the past). I could make no such guarantee, not having anything at all to do with billing matters. She complained bitterly that there shouldn't be a help number if people couldn't help. As a coup de grace, when given the daytime hours she could call, she responded with "What, when I've been sitting here all day? You're a dope," and hung up. The feeling, ma'am, is mutual.
Week Four - Sunday, 16 April 2000
I have nothing against those unfortunate people who are born or
otherwise become retarded or brain-damaged (unless it's due to their
own actions like trying to scratch that itch in their inner ear with an ice pick.) That's an important preface to a critical gripe such as this one. What I do often detest is the outright stupidity found in your common garden slug who thinks that because it looks like a man, eats hamburgers, and drives a pickup truck that it is indeed a man. There are telltale signs that someone is just flat-out stupid and should be shunned. One of the best, and the one most evident below is the "Uh" ratio. The Stupidest Man in the World's "Uh" ratio is approximately 3 "Uh"s per other word. "Uh" ratios above 1:1 are usually candidates for eventually winning a Darwin Award, and I wouldn't put that past this person at some later date.
We were blessed with multiple calls from a man whom I dub as "The Stupidest Man in the World." This is not a malicious insult, merely a statement. During repeated calls to a cable company's billing department he made such statements as "You were supposed to come pick up my flag on Saturday" and "It's dark outside. I have a flashlight." (both statements refined from their less intelligible original utterances.) Amidst numerous "uh"s and ramblings on every topic under the sun, we eventually dispatched the man a third and final time, the collective useful result of his calls being a message for the billing department to the effect of "I sent my bill for $900 for an additional account. I wrote my name really big on the back so you know it's my account. The little truck will pick it up tomorrow."
Week Five - Friday, 21 April 2000
Repeat callers are always fun. I mean fun subjectively, of course, as in "It's fun to visit the dentist" or "It's fun to have a railroad spike hammered into my skull". In the case of this individual, however, he took the repeat caller to a whole new level of irritation. This man managed to push a small handful of my buttons, all at once and with very little effort. It likely goes without saying, but I have a Zero Tolerance policy when it comes to idiots who place far too great a value on their own self-worth, and this guy surpassed those limits the second he opened his mouth. Suffice it to say that this man was rude, arrogant, patronizing, thick as a brick and, basically, extremely irksome. In other words, he was the perfect Fuck of the Week.
A caller for a company which provides remote long distance asked to be patched to the home of an employee as if it weren't the middle of the night. This act is doubly annoying because he did it once before a while back and his assured voice fooled me into thinking him an employee and patching him through. Not so, this time.
No, most definitely not so this time. I received this individual on his third call within a five minute period. He interrogated me as he had done with both Mike and the other operator unfortunate enough to receive him, attempting to bully me into putting him through to somebody's home at 3am. I told him that I would not do that under any circumstances, and that the tech had been paged, which was all I was authorized to do at that stage of the call. "I've been paging him too, and he's not called me back yet," the man said. "Well then, when he can, I assume he'll respond to at least one of us," I replied. He hung up.
On his fourth call, the man seemed quite familiar with our procedure and struck right to the point of asking us to break it. After being informed that we would not call the technician at his home until a reasonable amount of time had passed he began to badger me about the definition of "reasonable amount of time." At this point I was quite tired of him, and Nikki seemed willing to handle him once more, so I turned him over to her tender mercies.
Almost immediately, I was privvy to a slew of threats and supposed guilt trips. I heard many mentions of the world "sue." The man demanded a call back within the next 10 minutes or he would take his business elsewhere. Apparently, he is the god of the long distance world, as he assured me most vigorously that his leaving would be A Very Bad Thing Indeed. I listened to his ranting for a good few minutes, and when the tirade had ceased, I once again informed him that we, as the company's answering service, had a set of instructions which must be followed. The office had not once expressed that this individual was exempt from those procedures, so he would have to wait for things to progress like everybody else. The man told me that those procedures stank and that I should tell the office to change them. As it is not the answering service's place to tell the office what it should have the answering service do, I suggested that he present these ideas to the office on Monday. He was not amused. Neither was I at this stage, to be quite honest. After some more ranting, I once again attempted to explain that this particular section of the universe is ruled by order instead of chaos and that he wasn't anywhere near charismatic enough for me to even remotely consider breaking procedure, but sadly, he hung up on me before I could get that far. Interestingly, not long afterwards, it was indeed time to call the tech at home. Which I did, and after waiting 3 to 5 minutes for said tech to become coherant enough to understand me, was told to call somebody else. I did, but not before shaking my head and grinning quietly to myself about the whole thing.
On his fifth call, our friend asked if there had been any progress made, in a tone of voice which indicated he clearly felt there wouldn't be, which leads one to wonder why he called in the first place. I placed the man on hold to find out the call's status, and when I picked him back up again, I informed him that we had reached the point in procedure where we called the tech at home, and that someone should be contacting him soon. My reward was several seconds of silence, which even my prompting for a response could not break. So I hung up, and that was the end of him, thankfully.
Week Six - Sunday, 30 April 2000
I actually have great admiration for the disabled. Their ability to adapt to the shoddy hand life has dealt them is a source of great inspiration. In most cases. Tonight, we see the darker side of disabilities. This FotW felt as though her impending amputation entitled her to preferential treatment in an unrelated area, not to mention granting her the right to be a total bitch when things didn't go her way. To her, I give a muchly deserved boot in the ass. With both of my fully functional legs.
There is no length to which a cable caller will not go to try and magically get their cable back. Never before have I encountered such a heinously-placed guilt trip as this evening, when a woman in Colorado pointed out that she was handicapped, that the television was her only companion, and asked me "Do you know what it's like to be told you're going to lose your leg?" My soft-hearted side won out and I refrained from my first impulsive response: "Just like being told you're going to lose both legs, only half as bad?" People who bring their irrelevant problems into situations like these are even more pathetic then everyday idiots because they know better.
A woman called from Colorado. Checking the computer records after the call was completed, we discovered it was the same woman Mike had spoken to earlier. She reported again that her cable was out, and I told her the same thing Mike did - that I would let a tech know and that was all I could do for her. The woman responded by telling me to take money off her bill to cover the seven hours she had been without cable. I replied that I could not do that and she would need to call the billing department tomorrow. Or, rather, I tried to. She interrupted me part way through, yelling "YOU WILL DEDUCT THIS TIME FROM MY BILL!!" "No, madame, I cannot do that for you. You need to speak to billing." A moment passed and then the woman said "You know what? You are a stuck-up little bitch!" I complimented the woman on her stunning wit and hung up. Still, I was quite taken aback. I know myself well enough to know when what I'm saying could legitimately be interpreted as "rude", and in this case, I wasn't even close to that. Brr, scary old handicapped woman.
Week Seven - No Winner
Sadly, while there were a great many irritatants during the week of Friday, 5 May to Tuesday, 9 May, none stood out enough to be worthy of the muchly coveted Fuck of the Week award. Could it be that people are actually getting better? Nahhh, of course not. Just that all the really juicy calls must've been routed to other operators this week.
Week Eight - Sunday, 14 May
Every now and again, we're fortunate enough to handle a caller who shines brighter than any other, blinding us all and making it abundantly clear that they, and no other, will be the Fuck of the Week. Such was the case with this woman who called this Sunday night (perpetuating my theory about Sundays, but anyway) with an apparent multiple personality disorder, sounding sweet and kind one moment and like a demon borne the next. All in the name of cable. It's one thing to call a few times and be angry. It's entirely another to call non-stop for almost an hour, demanding things, lying, threatening, and, essentially, being a fuck.
We were besieged with calls from an irrational, unreasonable and demanding cable caller in Indiana. The cable in this area had been out for over 24 hours (Although after checking through our computer records, we had no reports of a cable outage in that area last night, which I find a little difficult to believe knowing the cable-obsessed customers we deal with, but anyway), and this is understandably annoying, but none of the other thousands of cable viewers in that area felt the need to be as unrelentingly badgering as she. By "besieged," I am referring to the 30-40 calls placed by this woman in the space of forty minutes. During this time, she informed us that we would call our bosses at home at midnight, that we would patch her to the execs of the cable company, that we would have her cable fixed, and that she WOULD be satisfied.
Such claims always amuse me, personally. And I laughed in her face when she tried them on me. "No, I won't," I replied through gufaws, and when she refused to let me get a word in edgewise as to exactly WHY she would get nowhere with this attitude, I shrugged and put her on hold. She hung up almost immediately (I don't blame her, the hold music is atrocious), and it was then that I knew I'd found our solution - as soon as we realized it was her, put her on hold. I spread this method around to the rest of the staff (all three of us), hence her managing to make 40 calls to us in as many minutes. I might grudgingly conceed that she's tenacious, but I also conceed that she is a freaking looney.
The woman refused to take the hint. She would call, be put on hold, hang up, call, be put on hold, hang up, call again... The woman was like a moebius strip, seemingly without end. Among her interminable faults:
- She had no sense of reality. I should have asked to speak to the cable gnomes instead.
- Belief that telling us she was recording the conversations would scare us into doing what she wanted.
- Inability to accept the fact that the reason the cable company hires us after hours is so that their staff can go home. Yes, this includes the company's mangers.
- Complete lack of any life whatsoever. "If you were without cable for twenty-four hours, wouldn't you be upset?" "Yes, ma'am, but I would realize that calling the company thirty times in a row would not make my cable come back on."
- Terminal stupidity. Getting desperate, she called us, claiming to be a friend of a person in the afflicted city. Giving us THE SAME NAME she had been giving all evening. "Ah, so you're Mrs. Joan Smith calling for your friend, Joan Smith?" "Right."
Eventually, however, even she began to wear down, and as our call volume was slowing, we decided to have some fun and actually start taking her calls. When it was my turn, she told me, yet again, that her cable was out.
Me: I know.
Bitch Demon: And what are you going to do about it?
Me: Same thing I told you at least 10 other times tonight - report it.
Bitch Demon: You know I'm going to keep calling all night until it gets fixed.
Me: That's fine. When we get bored with you again, you'll just find yourself continually on hold.
Bitch Demon: I don't care. I'm going to keep calling.
Me: Suits me, ma'am. If you have so little else going in your life that you have to call the cable company every five seconds, you go right on ahead.
She hung up on me without a word, and when she called back and got the third operator, she said she was going to bed and did not call back. Hallelujah, lady. Maybe sleep will fix that personality problem of yours.
Week Nine - Sunday, 21 May
On occassion, as I sit in front of my little computer for hours on end, pondering on humans and the paradox that allows us to be both the smartest and stupidest creatures on the planet. Then I get a call like this one, and I stop contemplating the whys and concentrate more on the how-to-permanently-eliminates.
Tonight it was my "pleasure" to deal with a seemingly rabid old woman calling for information about a brain-enhancing product. She seemed largely incapable of coming to any kind of logical conclusions, so her product choice was a good one, but she could not seem to break through the brain-dead haze to take advantage of it. She asked how much came in each bottle. "Each bottle is a two month supply," I replied, but she wanted to know HOW MUCH EXACTLY. Not having anything more specific, she began ranting. I'm still not wholly sure what about. She then wanted to know if it came with an eyedropper, and when told that the product was in powder form, she regressed further into her dark and twisted mind, trying to bridge the insurmountable gap between powder and eyedroppers. Ultimately, the woman decided that I was a thoroughly unhelpful and malicious person after I grew tired of answering the same question, rephrased three different ways and told her so. ("Madam, you can rearrange each of the words in your question an infinite number of times and it will not even remotely change the correctness and certainty of my answer." Maybe she just got angry that I used multi-syllabled words.) After a long speech presumably engineered to strike fear into my heart or solicit some kind of apology (it did neither), the woman threatened to report me. "Okay," I responded cheerfully. "My name is Nikki, and I'm operator 30. That's three-zero." This was apparently a mistake, as it launched us into a five minute bout of utter confusion as to exactly what "three-zero" meant. It did not mean 3030, nor did it mean 33030 or 362 or 251 or any other obscure numerical sequence the woman pulled from the bowels of her cerebellum. Even such statements as "No. Listen carefully. The number is 30. It is the number between 29 and 31. It is a two-digit number. Those two digits follow immedately: Three. Zero." "230291?" Some days, it would be preferable to be on unemployment.
Week Ten - Monday, 29th May
This gentleman was neither rude nor particularly bothersome, however he is deserving of the Fuck of the Week award for terrifyingly cro-magnon-esque in his stupidity. Grab your blankie, folks, this one is scary.
Sad people proliferate. If you gain nothing else from this site, I hope it's this truth. Here is yet another example with this cable call.
Me: Crappy Cable, which city are you calling from?
Man: <much mumbled deliberation>
Me: Are you in a hotel?
Man: No.
Me: Okay, I need your city.
Man: Cinemax is out. Is there a problem here?
Me: Where is "here"?
Man: At my home.
Me: Which is located exactly where?
Man: By a lake.
Me: ...in which city?
Man: I don't know.
Me: And it's your house. You live there.
Man: Yes.
Me: I'm sorry. I can't help you without knowing where you are.
Man: Well, is Cinemax on everywhere?
Me: Sir, at the after hours service, we cover all 700 or so cities for Crappy Cable.
Man: Do any of them have problems with Cinemax?
Me: I have no idea, and before you ask, no, I won't check all 700 for you.
The call ended with my insistance that the man somehow obtain his position in this country into one which I could recognize. He didn't seem too confident in his ability to do so.
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