When you work in customer service, you should do what you can to help customers, but only within the policies of the company.

What would you do if you had a very rude customer who was demanding to have a ridiculous number of fees reversed, and when you told him no, he got angry and threatened to close his account?

That is what happened to the customer service rep in this story, so she took him literally.

Let’s read the whole story to see how her manager reacted.

Careful what you say to your bank’s customer service.

So, I used to work in a customer service call center for a bank.

It’s a fairly large bank with thousands of locations along the east coast of the US.

Like a lot of banks, this one had quite a few shady business practices.

I’d say they had more than their fair share, though.

I certainly never would have opened an account with them.

This employee sounds like a good person.

When people would call to complain, I was expected to defend these practices.

So, when I couldn’t help and apologized for it, I really meant it.

One Christmas Eve, a guy with a business checking account calls in, and I answer politely as always.

I verify his personal information so that we can discuss his account, and then he bluntly says that he wants me to waive a bunch of overdraft fees.

That was fine with me; I had the authority to refund up to three fees (of any kind) in a single shot, but only if the customer explicitly requested it.

You can only do so much to help people.

There were many times I tried to nudge someone toward asking me to refund their fees so that I could do it, and it broke my heart when they wouldn’t ask outright.

But I could also only do it if no fees had been previously waived in the past 12 months.

This guy had had dozens of overdraft fees waived in just the past few weeks.

It was pretty extreme.

It was seriously well over a thousand dollars in fees, and it wasn’t our shady practices that caused them.

He was just continuously spending money he didn’t have.

This was the most extreme amount of refunded fees I’d ever seen, and I couldn’t fathom how it had happened.

I said that it looked like he had had a lot of overdrafts lately for which the fees had been waived, and asked him, “Is this activity on your account unauthorized? Are these transactions that are overdrawing your balance fraudulent or something?”

It wasn’t fraud.

He said no, they were all legitimate charges. “I’m trying to run a business, and I have to pay my business expenses. I can’t do that if you’re constantly charging me fees. Every time I make a deposit, it’s eaten up with fees.”

“Well,” I said, donning the grin that all telephone customer service reps use when you’re being unreasonable even though they can’t see you, “the fees aren’t causing the overdrafts. We’ve been refunding them. But your balance is still negative even after the fees get refunded, and every time you spend money that isn’t in your account, you get charged a fee.”

He has to know that not all fees get reversed.

“Whatever,” he said. “Just refund this latest batch.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” I replied. “I’m not authorized to do that. In order to stop being charged overdraft fees, you have to bring your account balance over zero and keep it that way. Even after all the waived fees, your account has had a negative balance for over a month.”

He kept rudely insisting, and I kept politely apologizing and saying no.

The customer snapped.

At this point you’re probably wondering where the malicious compliance comes in.

Well, eventually he snapped:

“I don’t wanna hear SORRY! Don’t tell me you’re SORRY if you’re not going to DO anything about it!”

So I kinda snapped too:

Wow, she really went off on him.

“Okay. I’m NOT sorry. Sometimes people call me and they’re really in dire financial straits through no fault of their own, and sometimes I can’t do anything to help them; in THOSE cases, I’m sorry.

YOU have been spending OUR money, and you have the NERVE to DEMAND that I refund you the fees that you AGREED to pay when you opened this account.

After we’ve already waived nearly TWO GRAND in fees. I’m not sorry AT ALL. You HAVE to pay these fees.

We are NOT here to give you an interest-free loan.

You are PAYING us for a SERVICE. We have already RENDERED that service, and NOW you have to PAY for it.”

Here’s how the call ended…

He was shocked that I’d told him like it was.

He stammered for a couple of seconds, and then said, “Well, this is terrible customer service. I don’t know why I even do business with you. This makes me want to close my account.”

I briefly thought about how to respond to that, and then said, “You want to close your account?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t want to do business with a bank that treats its customers like this.”

“Okay. Is there anything else I can do for you today, sir?”

“No.” And he hung up on me.

The call had been recorded.

That’s when I noticed that my supervisor was laughing on the other side of the office.

I set my phone to temporarily not accept incoming calls and walked over to her.

“That was a monitored call, wasn’t it?” I asked. (Monitored calls are the reason you always hear, “This call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes,” before speaking to someone on the phone. It’s to make sure the rep taking your call is doing their job properly.)

“HAHAHA OH MY GOD YES THAT WAS AMAZING!” she screamed.

“So I take it I’m going to get a good review on that one?”

“Oh yeah, don’t worry about it, he had that coming,” she said, wiping a tear from her eye.

She suggested closing the customer’s account.

“So, let’s go ahead and close his account.”

She was taken aback for a moment. “Well, you know he wasn’t actually ASKING you to close his account. I mean, he’s kinda getting a free ride right now, even without those fees being refunded. He’s not actually going anywhere.”

I pointed out that he had, in fact, been the one to bring up closing the account.

I had then asked him point blank if he wanted his account to be closed, and he said yes.

They were his words.

She played back the recording of the call and agreed that, yeah, he had technically told us to close his account.

Normally we wouldn’t allow someone to close an account with a negative balance; they’d have 60 days to bring the balance current before we’d charge it off and send it to collections.

She agreed to see what she could do to comply with the customer’s explicit request.

Later that day she checked in to let me know that we had closed his account early and sent it to collections.

You could say that we did him a favor, since he avoided any further overdraft fees as well as the fees for having a negative balance for an extended period.

This is going to make his business very difficult.

But any payments he tried to make after that point wouldn’t go through.

He would have had almost another month to fix things while still being able to pay for stuff in the meantime if he hadn’t tried to bluff me.

I find it hard to believe that she wouldn’t get in trouble for that, but I sure hope this is true!

Read on to see what the people in the comments on Reddit have to say about it.

Many people don’t understand banking.

Being polite but persistent can be very effective.

I wouldn’t want to do any of these jobs.

Here is someone who used to work as a teller.

This person wonders if he just didn’t understand the policy.

She really called his bluff.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.