Without the Greeks we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks invented three kinds of columns – Corinthian, Doric, and Ironic. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth. One myth says that the mother of Achilles dipped him in the River Stynx until he became intollerable. Achilles appears in The Iliad, by Homer. Homer also wrote The Oddity, in which Penelope was the last hardship that Ulysses endured on his journey. Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name.
I took a call from a customer who sounded like quite a nice old lady. Querying the customer database through the serial number, I found the customer’s name to be “Carol” and her surname to be impossibly long and presumably Eastern European. Fortunately — or so I thought at first — she didn’t want tech support and was only calling to claim a free software offer that was a part of the packaged bundle. I checked on the issue and the offer had expired a good three months before.
Me: “I’m sorry, ma’am, but the offer has expired.”
Customer: “What?”
Me: “This offer has expired, ma’am, I’m sor–”
Customer: (her soprano turning into a growling contralto) “What do you mean it has expired? I’ve got the right to get my free CD! I paid for it! You will give me my CD.”
Me: (explained again)
Customer: “Oh yeah? I’ll talk to your supervisor, then.”
Sure, escalate the call, but she wasn’t going to get it. I told her so in the nicest and sweetest of the tones I’m capable of.
Customer: “I’M NOT TALKING TO YOU ANY MORE. GET-ME-YOUR-SUPERVISOR!”
Wow, talk about getting emotional. I called my supervisor who would take the escalated call and try to talk some sense into her, but he failed. The call escalated a second time as the area supervisor took the call and once more as the shift supervisor took over.
I couldn’t believe it. There we were, all four of us sitting in a row, listening to the call that — for an encore — got escalated once more. A customer satisfaction specialist took the call and didn’t do any better.
We decided to roll it around once more and patched her through another tech, who finally placed and solved the ACTUAL problem.
Tech Support: “Your name is Carol…what? Oh sure, yes SIR…sure, I’ll fix your entry in our database right away.”
Or hanging jaws nearly hit the floor. “Carol” was A GUY — even though he sounded like a Powerpuff girl — and we had all been calling him “Ma’am” all along. The whole company laughed at this for almost a week.
One time I was trying to set up a customer’s email program. I walked him through setting up an account with the incoming and outgoing server names set to “mail,” but it didn’t work. I tried again, and it still didn’t work. I was starting to right out of ideas, and then the customer said, “If my mail server name is ‘male,’ does that mean my girlfriend’s server is ‘female’?”
The photo lab is owned by “the photo company” but is right next to electronics There is a sign that says closed at 8:00 P.M. People walk over to electronics mad cause there is no one to get their photos. Sometimes I have extra time. Other times it takes 10 min or more if I have 10 customers at electronics
Then there is the worst case scenario, which happens once a week at photo. The parson’s photo’s are not in the cabnet The person gets mad at me cause I can’t find it. I search 3 times threw 50 that are by last name. I call my boss. The photos are not there. The person is mad at me, my boss and——. We rent the space to “the photo company” We get blamed for a area that we do not even own.
I had one woman tell me off on the phone. “I’m not photo, they are closed, come in tomorrow and tell all this to the photo girl. There is nothing I can help you with. ”