If you’re new to this blog, hi my name is Monica and I’m now a small business owner, however I worked in customer service for a very long time.  I decided to write this post because of a recent situation my fiance encountered at one of our businesses and I flat out said, “I could’ve handled that, have you heard my customer service voice?”  The memes you see about having a customer service voice are pretty accurate.

I won’t be calling out specific companies in this post because I’m nicer than that.  However, some of these people work for companies that you use on an everyday basis.  This will be a mix of retail and working in customer service at a regular “9-5” job.  Now, let’s spill the tea, as the kids say nowadays.

Retail

Oh, the days of working retail.  I actually made two videos about working in retail on my Youtube channel, so I will add those below in case you’d rather watch a video instead of reading.  I’ll be sharing two stories that are probably the most intense stories.  Whenever I hear of someone talking about retail, I always bring these two situations into the conversation.  If you watch my videos I have more stories included.  I will say that after working in retail for 10+ years, I’ve come to be kinder to people in retail.  There should be a requirement for everyone, that you have to work in some kind of customer service for one month in your life.  Regardless if it’s retail, food, call center, customer account management, etc.  Anyway, let’s get into these stories.

The lady who threw her shoes at me

If you know me very well, you have probably heard this story plenty of times.  I used to work for a shoe store, it wasn’t some fancy department store, but y’all have probably shopped there at least once.  When I was hired, I was hired as a manager so I did have some kind of authority during my employment there.  A woman had come in to return a pair of shoes.  The policy that we had was to only allow returns for items that have not been worn, had a receipt, or still had the tags attached.  We are going to name this woman Susan (nothing against Susans, I just feel bad continuously using the name Karen).

Susan had a very entitled attitude.  She was your typical “business woman” who thought her shit don’t stank, especially because I worked in retail and was at the bottom of the food chain as she thought.  Well, I tell Susan that we normally don’t allow returns without a receipt or tags attached, but let me take a look at the shoes, maybe I can make an exception.  I take the shoes out of the bag, and they had the nastiest stench waft into the cash register area.  These shoes had been WORN.  When I say worn, I mean, she wore them every day for the past 7 years.  The style of the shoe was very old, they were beat up and had a giant gash on the one side.

I looked at Susan and said, “ma’am, I’m really sorry, but I cannot return these shoes because they have been worn.”  This is when Susan lost her shit.  She claimed to have just bought the shoes the week prior and she bought them with a giant gash on the side, and that they had not been worn.  Ladies and gents, we ALL know when shoes have been worn to the point of no return.

Susan proceeds to pick up the shoes in a rage (this is no exaggeration) and throws the shoes at me and yells “YOU WILL RETURN THESE SHOES AND I’D LIKE TO SPEAK TO THE MANAGER!”  I tell her that I am the manager, but she wanted to speak to my manager at this point.  When I told her that my manager will not be in for a few days (she was on vacation) she wanted me to call her and have her come to the store at that very moment.  Susan didn’t like my response when I firmly said no, and she continued to make a scene (at this point customers were in the store and starring at this dumpster fire of a situation).  I had asked her to leave several times because she technically did assault me, and she refused to leave.  That was until I told her I would call the authorities if she did not leave.  That was the end of that situation, and I could not believe what had just happened.  I still, to this day, cannot believe someone acted like that.  The kicker was she told me to get a real job, so that’s always a nice way to try and get your way after throwing an adult temper tantrum.

The Meatball Parm Guy

I’m going to categorize this as retail, even though technically it falls under food service.  I had worked at a franchised deli.  I worked there in my high school and early college years.  Personally, I liked the job.  I got free food, and once it went under new ownership, it was like one big happy family.  Towards the end of the night, there was a specific time that we would turn off the meatball burner.  I mean, if we didn’t, it could burn the place down, duh.  We would also take whatever meatballs were left in the burner and put them in the fridge.  Usually there would only be 2-4 left and we would take out a certain amount from the freezer to allow them to dethaw overnight.  There was a man who came in with his wife not too long before we closed.  He wanted a bigger meatball parm sandwich.  I had told him that unfortunately we did not have enough meatballs for a bigger sandwich, but what I could do is make him half and then give him a discount and he could put whatever he wanted on the other half of the sandwich.

Well, Meatball Parm Guy, DID NOT like this response.  He caused a giant scene, and his wife didn’t help the situation because she just instigated even more.  Homeboy ended up getting really close in my bubble because he had bent over the counter.  I had repeated myself about giving him a discount and he started to raise his voice and become extremely irate.  It was honestly very scary.  Needless to say, it escalated to me telling him to leave and if he did not I would call the police (we had one officer on speed dial because this franchise was his dad’s).  He flung the door open and almost broke it.  We ended up calling the owner because we saw meatball parm guy sitting in the parking lot with his wife even after we closed.  We waited inside until the owner showed up in the parking lot and escorted us to our cars.

I guess this guy was just really passionate about his meatball parms.  P.S. they weren’t even that good from this place.

The Office

Now, the offices that I worked in were nothing like the show The Office.  Although, I kind of wish they were because it would have made it more entertaining.  I will say that certain days were similar to The Office, but not all.  Anywho, let’s get into how rude some human beings can actually be.

“That wasn’t very Christian of me.”

This is a story that I will never forget.  Back in 2012, I landed the best office job that I would ever have in my adult life (at least thus far).  Well, there was some restructuring going on with the customer service department in mid 2013.  Now, this wasn’t your typical call center, what we did was more like account management.  I had taken over one of our top few biggest accounts.  To me, this was scary and exciting all at the same time.  In my brain, I was flattered that they trusted me to handle this account, but at the same time I was terrified because I heard horror stories about the woman I would be dealing with.

This woman was located in the south, so I would try and treat her a little differently from our northeast accounts, because our southern accounts wanted a more personal connection.  Meanwhile, our northeast accounts did not even care to know what your name was (which I didn’t even mind).  This woman was nice to me at first and she was “so excited to work with me.”  There was a situation that happened while I was out to lunch and I did not find out about it until my hour lunch was up.  She had a giant issue with me taking lunch and not handling this situation.  The entitlement of some people amazes me.  I apologized and told her I’d look into it right away, and she ended up calling another customer service rep, the one she used to work with and told them they needed to handle this situation because she believed I was incompetent.  She then also called the salesman for the account, along with my supervisor.  I didn’t get in trouble because everyone knew how delusional this woman was, but it was a small issue that I had no control over.  One of her shipments had unfortunately been delayed due to a giant snow storm.

The salesman later called me and told me that she said she apologized, but that she didn’t feel the need to call me herself and apologize.  She wanted him to pass along the message.  Well, this salesman was traveling with someone from my department at the time and the customer was on speaker phone.  I was told that she herself said “That wasn’t very Christian of me to yell at her like that.”  However, she never apologized to me directly, and eventually I had enough of her bullshit and I told my supervisor I can no longer work with her because I WILL lose the account.  At that point I could no longer be a human punching bag for someone who would continuously yell at me and then say that wasn’t very Christian of her.  Being religious doesn’t change the fact that you yelled at me consistently, and then never apologized.

“You almost made me lose my job, you stupid girl.”

Yes, that was actually said to me by a representative of a very well known company that we all use their products on a daily basis.  I honestly wish I could put them on full blast, but I don’t feel like being sued, so y’all are going to have to just sit there and wonder what company this person worked for.  Before I get into why this man said that, let’s talk about the dynamic of the company I worked for.  The company that I worked for made custom products for a majority of our customers.  I think maybe 10% of our customers had generic products, and 90% were all custom.  This means, there were specific lead times.  Some lead times were even up to 6 months.  Regardless of what your political stance is, when all of that stuff was going on with China over a year ago, it made it very hard for me to do my job lol.  Anyway, that meant prices went up and lead times were also up in the air.  Our managers told us to send out a letter to our customers to let them know of the issue.  I also didn’t just send a generic letter, but I did talk to each of the bigger accounts separately, to make them understand the severity of the situation.

This one representative for this account (because of the size of this company, I had multiple representatives from all over the world) was the absolute worst.  He wasn’t pleasant to deal with, he lied all the time which is why I got EVERYTHING down in writing with him.  This rep was also very terrible at keeping track of his inventory.  It got to the point where I had to keep track of his inventory for him based on his past usage.  Yes, you read that right.  I kept track of the customer’s inventory for them, even though I didn’t work for them and didn’t get a paycheck for doing his job.  Well, once all of this stuff with China happened it made it even harder to work with him.  Many times he called me and left me the nastiest messages which at one point I would honestly ignore his phone calls and let him vent to the voicemail, then I’d call him after 10 minutes after he had calmed down.  I would lie and say I was in a meeting.

He didn’t understand that the whole China thing is something that I physically have no control over.  Well, something had happened to their inventory usage that I did not know about.  They had completely depleted their inventory and this was never conveyed to me.  He sent an email to everyone in the company including the CEO and said how he almost lost his job because of me and then in a separate email to me he said the same thing again but added in the you stupid girl part.  That’s when I lost my shit.  I ended up telling my boss that if he didn’t take me off this account I would speak my two cents to the rep.  Needless to say, I ended up speaking my two cents and told the customer that it’s not my fault he cannot do his job.  I think after working with him for a year and being a human punching bag with no backup from anyone at my job, finally caught up to me.

An open statement to all of the customers who made me their human punching bag

I would like to say this one thing to you.  I hope that one day you are treated the same way you treated me.  What goes around comes around.

Anyway, I hope that you enjoyed this little storytime of mine.  I like to tell these types of stories on my Youtube channel because I want to spread the word about how some people are treated.  It’s just so unkind to treat someone like they don’t matter.  I’m a tough kid, but can you imagine if these things were said to the wrong person?  I just don’t understand the entitlement of some people out there in the world.

Let’s move on to the weekly linkup!