Sometimes being patient can be very rewarding and fruitful.

But testing someone else’s patience – especially someone who is trying to help you – can really get you in some unwanted situations.

Find out what happened when this girl had to deal with an impatient customer!

If you insist, sir, I hope you like pink.

I’ve worked my way up the ladder at the company where I work, but when I started, I was a support agent.

By the time this story happened, I was a team lead of some kind, I don’t remember which.

What matters is that I still worked directly supporting customers, but I also had a fair amount of agency.

I didn’t have to ask for permission or assistance to do anything related to my job.

They had a running product that was doing pretty well!

We’re a software company, but we used to sell a specific small Bluetooth accessory that worked with one of our apps.

It came in several bright colors and we sold multipacks. (It was the kind of device you might need more than one of, and it was a popular gift.)

One year during the Christmas season, our manufacturer messed up gloriously.

They didn’t deliver all of the inventory we were supposed to get, and worse, much of what we did get was messed up and had serious defects.

Things got worse from here!

It was a horrible mess and a serious detriment to our small company. I was on the front lines of cleaning it up.

We wound up severely backordered at the busiest time of year, having sold units that should have been delivered, but that we either never received or found to be defective upon arrival.

We had to contact people and let them know their orders would be delayed until after the holidays.

Customers weren’t pleased…

Some people wanted refunds, some people wanted their items late.

We tried to be helpful and bent over backwards to be apologetic while trying to keep this debacle from becoming a catastrophe and incentivize people not to cancel.

There was one man who wanted us to perform magic, however. He wanted his order – our largest multipack – and he wanted it now.

I don’t know how many times he contacted us, but I wound up being the only one to deal with him because he’d always be escalated to me.

This man wasn’t budging from his requests.

I told him over and over again that we couldn’t send his order even though we very much wanted to, so we’d be happy to refund him.

If he wanted to wait, there were (many) others ahead of him to get their orders.

He demanded that he get his order first, he didn’t care who else had to wait.

He would berate me and try to literally command me to do as he said almost daily for a while, no matter how many times I explained why I literally couldn’t.

Eventually, I opened the spreadsheet where we were keeping our backorders and moved him to the very bottom. (Yeah, I was prolonging my own suffering but he had me feeling petty.)

She did what she had to!

After the holidays ended and upper management waged a nuclear war with our manufacturer, usable stock started rolling in.

I bumped a few deserving or eager customers to the top of the list but mostly sent them out in order.

He’s the only one I bumped down, but I had something ready for the next time he decided to scream at me.

When he inevitably did, I told him we had stock, but others were receiving theirs, first, and we hadn’t yet gotten in the colors he ordered in his multipack.

I was sort of planning to do what I did, anyway, but he was kind enough to give me explicit permission.

Some mean customers deserve that treatment.

“I DON’T CARE WHAT COLORS YOU SEND, YOU’RE TO SEND THEM TO ME IMMEDIATELY.”

Our colors included Susan G. Komen pink.

The customer was gloriously mean and condescending when I told him we’d go ahead and fulfill his order right away. He definitely thought he had won some kind of victory.

But sure enough, the day his package arrived, he sent an email complaining.

“I know I said I’d accept any color, but really? You sent me, a man, an order of nothing but pink? I want these replaced, send me something else.”

He felt violated!

I told him that’s all we had available for him and that the conversation was over. And so it was, I never heard from him again.

It took a few years before I brought it up, but I’ve told that anecdote at workplace meetings a few times, including to my boss, the CEO.

I wouldn’t take another support job to save every orphaned puppy on Earth, but that story was worth the misery.

She has an important lesson to teach!

Always be nice to support agents. For your own sake.

He clearly learned his lesson of patience here.

Let’s find out what the Reddit community thinks.

This person knows what it’s like to wear pink.

This person isn’t sure why men have a problem with pink.

This person has a random question.

This person finds the story hilarious!

This person has some historical color theory facts!

Anybody have a problem with pink?

Maybe it’s the new black!

If you liked that post, check out this story about a guy who was forced to sleep on the couch at his wife’s family’s house, so he went to a hotel instead.