It’s always when you go above and beyond to try and help your work that they end up telling you off for it!

But then a week later they’re running around like a chicken with its head cut off wondering why it took them so long for someone to tell them!

When this user realized one of the transfers at her call center sent customers to a dirty phone line, her boss actually yelled at her for bringing it to his attention!

Check it out!

But the transfer number doesn’t go to the right place! It goes… Okie dokie. Shutting up. You’re the boss.

Several years back I worked at a call center in its death throes doing tech support for a small primarily business based ISP.

The ISP was also dying due to terrible service, insane prices, and not changing with the times.

So one of the managers wrote up this cheat sheet that had a ton of numbers to different departments, manufacturing companies and other places we regularly had to send customers to.

It was honestly good to have as it saved tons of time searching for the numbers every time you needed them.

However, there was one little issue on the sheet that caused the agents a lot of problems!

The problem was however, that one of the numbers at the bottom that every agent used about 30+ times a day was poorly written.

Basically a 7 that looked like a 9 or vice versa.

But that one number was the difference between speaking to some boring router maker or Busty College Teens who wanted nothing more than to talk dirty to you for $3.99 a minute.

If we did what we are supposed to do, this is a cold transfer.

For those lucky enough to not know call center lingo, it’s when you transfer the call without waiting to talk to someone on the other line to explain why the customer is calling.

She said these types of calls were basically just transferring the problem to someone else…

You just transfer and end the call without walking the customer through or waiting to hear the other line.

It’s essentially a “this isn’t our problem anymore so cya later transfer.”

For about a solid month or two, about 100 agents had been transferring hundreds if not thousands of people a day to this phone *** line.

But she didn’t realize this mistake until they transferred an unlucky elderly woman to the dirty hotline!

I was on a call with an old lady and I had to transfer the call over. But I needed a few moments to finish writing my notes before the next one came in.

So instead of hanging up as soon as I heard the ringing telling me it was transferring, I just connected the call and muted myself for a second.

She was gonna have to listen to the options for about 3 minutes and wait on hold anyway, so it’s not like I would hear anything.

That’s when instead of hearing the thanks for calling so and so I heard a soft ladies voice come on the line and say:

“Hey there! I heard you like hot college girls that want you to…. Blah blah” I will let your imagination fill in the rest.

And this poor old woman was undoubtedly clutching her pearls!

I was already reaching for the hang up when I heard the lady on the other line gasp in surprise.

After laughing at the surprise when I realized what had happened, I looked at the sheet and cross checked it with the database.

And that’s when I saw the 7 was written to look like a 9 by mistake/bad handwriting.

The same sheet that was just photo copied, laminated and handed out to every employee, and which they were told to exclusively use from now on instead of the database.

I asked about 7 or 8 people without telling them why what the number for x was and they all told me the same incorrect number.

But instead of being happy that she had found this embarrassing mistake, her superiors actually yelled at her for it!

So, me being young and dumb I thought I had discovered something the managers on call would be happy to hear about.

Instead, I got yelled at for being off the phones when I should be taking calls.

They didn’t even want to hear what I said and told me unless the buildings on fire or my shift is over I need to get back to my seat and stop bothering them.

The managers even accused she of lying to them about the mistake!

They claimed I was lying and trying to get out of working. I’m here to answer phone calls and not to think.

So instead of just taking a second to dial the number and confirm the error, they decided to lecture me.

Sigh… Managers.

Surprised, I just shook my head and went back to my desk.

I explained what had happened and everyone on the floor tried it to see and had a good laugh about it.

And after being yelled at by the managers, the employees all made sure they kept using the wrong number, just like the managers told them to!

Instead of making the correction though, we did as we were told and kept using the incorrect number.

A month went by before they had finally gotten enough complaints to launch an investigation into what was happening and how this mysterious problem could be happening.

Meanwhile it was an open secret every front line agent knew.

While no one ever got in trouble for the mix-up, she said it was still satisfying to get one over on their rude managers!

Sadly no one got in trouble, and the call center shut down about 6 months later out of the blue as they are wont to do.

But at least all the front line agents got to have a good laugh at the expense of rude and ignorant management.

Whenever we had to transfer someone it was a highlight of our day because it felt like we were sticking it to management.

And at least the terrible company lost some money assigning people to investigate the problem.

This story is a classic example of no good deed goes unpunished!

Reddit was surprised there wasn’t a lawsuit because of their negligence!

Other people thought that the managers probably just didn’t care enough to fix the problem!

Finally, this user actually felt bad for the hotline girls, as they were probably swamped with questions about internet service!

It would be quite a shock to need help on a router, and end up talking to that hotline!

At least they could have a good laugh about it later.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.