4. Gettin’ the cops involved

I used to be a low level manager in a call centre, it paid the bills. Anyway, a customer had called us and been perfectly pleasant, giving us his account details, and business got underway. At the end of the call, he asked for one more thing that we couldn’t have done, and was informed of this. He immediately got extremely aggressive with my member of staff.

At this point her hand shot up in the air (cue me) and she handed over the headset and chair so I could view the details. I was called various other names and then we got down to the grand finale: the threat. I’m paraphrasing but here’s how it went:

Him ‘Listen, I can see your company’s address on your website, I’m going to come down there and mess you up.’

Me: ‘Good you gave my colleague your name and address details first then, I’ll make sure to hand them over to the police somewhere in the few hours it’s going to take you to drive down here. We’ll be waiting.’

5. Shut her down

I used to work in at a place, in England, as a team leader. Basically doing a manager’s job, on a bit more than checkout operators wage. Anyway, at Christmas time, for some reason, we were quite busy. We had a good 35 checkouts in the store, and 35 of those 35 checkouts were open. Yet they were still queues. Ultimately, if thousands of people decide to do their Christmas shopping terribly late, and you have every single till open, what can you do?

Anyway, this woman comes over to complain that she had to wait. I explained that the checkouts were all in use, and we could do nothing. She asked why I wasn’t on a checkout (something often asked – simple answer being that if I’m the one who has to sort out any problem in case any of the 35 checkouts break, or needs something, or a customer can’t walk the five paces to change their broken packet of biscuits – and I’m on a checkout – nothing would be done), and demanded that everyone should be on the checkouts. Which they were.

‘I want to see the store manager!’ she demanded, ‘You need to have more people working on the checkouts. Where can I see the store manager?’

‘Well,’ I replied, ‘He’s currently sat on that checkout there, because we are so busy.’

She shut up- I really don’t know what she wanted us to do.