Week Forty-One - Saturday, 30 December
Callers like this guy are ones that make our job actually a little fun and help to enforce that our opinion of humans, while perhaps biased by years in customer service, is still warrented. People are just idiots when you get right down to it. And overly dramatic ones at that.
 Floridians. They never cease to amuse. Tonight, a man called in to his cable company. The following conversation transpired after I collected most of his information:
Me: And what is your service problem?
Him: I have your cable company.
Me: That would be a statement of fact, sir, not a service problem.
Him: My cable's out.
Me: Okay. How do you spell your last name?
Him: Oh GOD, I can't go through this!
Me: Spelling your last name is that great of an ordeal?
He hung up at that point, so I noted down that spelling his last name did indeed seem to be that great of an ordeal in a message for the office and went back to my book.
Week Forty-Two - Tuesday, 9 January
Every week, it seems we encounter a person less able to think for themselves than the last person. I keep hoping that it won't happen, that we've finally hit the depths of human ignorance, but then another call lights up my board, and I realize that we're all spiralling down a bottomless pit of despair and that there really are no limits to how dumb our species can be. But take heart. One day, we won't hear from them anymore. Because they'll all eventually starve to death at a stop sign because it never told them they could go again.
A woman in Oklahoma called, furious that she had been on hold for, according to her, quite literally an hour. Now my first instinct is to say that this is bullshit, as we'd had that company's lines since 8pm, and I've been sitting here and haven't seen anything of the sort in the system. But okay, let's assume she managed to slip through a system crack somewhere and was stuck in computer limbo. It's not outside the realm of possibility. The part that makes this noteworthy is the fact that the woman sat there for 60 minutes, getting angrier and angrier, but doing nothing about it. She demanded to know why she was on hold so long. I had no answer for her, sadly, but couldn't help but ask her why she didn't just hang up and call back like a normal person. "...it kept telling me to hold and someone would be with me shortly," she replied lamely. Surely there's a cut-off time in which it's no longer "shortly" and one moves on. Surely, it comes long before an hour has passed.
Week Forty-Three - Friday, 12 January
I'm sure you know about the old cliché about a fool and his money and the swiftness with which they seperate, but it seems to me as though there are more than enough fools out there still determined to hold on to every last penny until it screams. I'm all for money myself, it's one my favourite things, but there's a definite line between being "thrifty" and "miserly". I think this woman passed the line a good few miles back and kept on running.
One of the hundreds of Floridians calling to report their cable out was most disgusted in the service. What she knew of it, anyway. "I don't usually watch TV at night, is this normal?" she wanted to know. "Because I don't want to be paying for service that I'm not getting." Yes, that's correct -- although she had constant, uninterrupted service whenever she wanted to watch the cable with the exception of this night, she wanted to be prorated for all the times in the past that it might have been out and she just didn't know because she wasn't watching it.
Week Forty-Four - Tuesday, 23 January
What else to say about this woman? Damned if I know. Read the entry for yourself, I think it says everything just fine without an introduction.
A woman in Texas called saying "It won't come in." You can likely see this coming, but the trick with this call was in discovering just what "it" referred to.
Me: Which channels have this problem?
Her: They do.
Me: Yes ma'am. Which ones?
Her: It was installed yesterday.
Me: Right. And some channels are out?
Her: Yes.
Me: Which ones?
Her: Yes.
Me: It's not a yes or no question, ma'am. Is is the premium channels--
Her: <interrupting> Yes.
Me: --or all the channels?
Her: Yes.
Me: It can't be both, ma'am.
Her: ...no?
Me: No. Can you see basic channels?
Her: Yes.
Me: So they're not all out.
Her: No.
I went with "premium channels are out" in the end, but I have my doubts that this was an accurate description of the service problem. I could feel my IQ dropping, however, and was in a hurry to move on, so accuracy become something of a secondary concern.
Week Forty-Five
The winner for this week was easy, if unavailable for reading. It is our entire place of employment and every last incompetent piece of shit that works there. Fuck all of you.
Week Forty-Six - Sunday, 4 February
Behold, the poster child for the Ignorance Is Bliss movement. This woman was more eager to please than my dog, and considerably less intelligent. She was so bewilderingly stupid that you could almost see her bobbing her head up and down with delight when the conversation was going well. I almost envy her more than pity her ... almost.
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.
Week Forty-Seven - Tuesday, 13 February
Selecting this week's fuck was so easy that as soon as I encountered it, I knew it was destined to be enshrined here for all eternity. I've never been quite so insulted by my employers, not even when I was working in the fast food industry. At least the management there has enough respect for its employees to not put them in a position where their frail and hollow words could be so easily shot to pieces by a caller with even a thimbleful of a functional brain cells. Never before has this place's attempt to get us to say whatever we have to to make a sale been so blatantly deceitful. I didn't have a whole lot of respect left for my workplace, but what little remained has been flushed down the toilet. Exactly where they'd rather my morals go.
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.
"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?
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".
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.
Week Forty-Eight - Friday, 16 February
How much stupidity can one person have? Let us count the ways...
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.
Week Forty-Nine - Sunday, 25 February
It should be obvious why this guy won. Anybody who tries this hard to be clever deserves a whole lot more than a FotW award. Gee, thanks for clarifying the species of the radio speaker. Without your guidance, I might've thought you were calling for the products being plugged by the barrel of radioactive ooze instead. Boy, would my face have been red!
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.
Week Fifty - Friday, 2 March
This one wins just for the sheer weirdness factor. I've heard the placebo doctors proclaim a lot of miracles with magnets, but I've never heard this sort of thing before. Of course, that probably just means they hadn't thought of it yet.
Another caller to the health products company. The product of choice this time was the magnetic mattress pad. "Will it pull all the toxins out of my body?" she asked. "It would have to pull them through your skin, ma'am," I informed her. There was a pause, and then she brilliantly stated, "Ohhhhhh. Well, what about the evil spirits then?" I held back my comments about high-iron diets in evil spirits and just told her no. Disillusioned with her prospective pad, she said she would discuss it with her son and hung up.
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