Some customers are completely unreasonable!

Imagine a customer hiring you to move their items out of a storage unit and into a moving truck. If you knew it was impossible to carefully move the items in the amount of time the customer gave you, would you take your time and move everything carefully even if the customer complained about how long you were taking, or would you aim for speed and not worry if the items got damaged in the process?

This guy shares how they handled a difficult moving job when a customer threatened to write a negative review.

Check out what happened.

Customer thought we were moving her stuff too slow and wearing her tone, so we hurried up.

So I work as a mover for a very small moving company.

My boss, let’s call him Mike, is a really nice guy. It’s really just a two-man operation, with me working as a subcontractor under him with a few regular guys we call in for bigger moves.

It’s really physically demanding work sometimes, but typically our customers are super nice and the pay is pretty good.

They know how to navigate through the work load.

Most people are just happy to have someone else to lift their heavy stuff and get it into a truck. And we’re always super careful to not cause ANY DAMAGE to the buildings we’re moving in and out of or the items we’re moving, which most people appreciate.

Not this lady. Let’s call her Darcy.

So Darcy booked a move with Mike, and told him she had a small storage unit she wanted us to load up into a 20 foot truck.

We said “no problem!”.

As the date of her move approached, though, so did a huge snow storm.

This is where it gets bad!

Days before her move the news started reporting that the weather was expected to take a severe turn for the worst. Not uncommon for the time of year in our state, but also something not to be trifled with.

We called Darcy a couple days before the move to see about rescheduling to avoid the storm and she said she absolutely HAD to move that day, no other days would work.

A lot of (probably much smarter) movers would have cancelled, but after talking, Mike and I thought it was no big deal. We move in the snow all the time. Just meant we would have to dress appropriately and be extra careful not to injure ourselves or damage any property.

UH OH…

Cut to the day of the move.

We get to Darcy’s storage unit, expecting a 10x10x15 standard storage unit full of your usual stuff based on what she’d indicated on the phone, and load it into a 20 foot truck.

That’s a pretty easy job to get done in the 2 hours that she’d already prepaid for.

As we pulled up the snow was already coming down pretty heavily, and the first thing that made us nervous was the truck.

Instead of a 20 foot truck, there was a HUGE 26 foot truck.

Darcy greeted us by the truck and showed us the storage unit.

Darcy: Okay! So, this is our unit. We shut down our businesses and I’m moving it out of town to pursue other opportunities, and I need all of this loaded up in 2 hours. The last movers I had got it unloaded in about that long.

That’s INSANE!

Mike said something about the truck being bigger than she told us.

Darcy: Yeah, it’s the biggest one Uhaul had. Last time we used a another company and it was much bigger. I’m worried about getting it all, but you guys will have to figure it out. I need all of it.

This was a HUGE storage unit. Like the kind you’d store a few cars or some farm equipment in.

When we opened it up it was filled with what appeared to be the contents of a couple of pretty decently sized businesses. A dozen of those huge floor-to ceiling filling cabinets, several desks, office chairs, some really huge glass tables.

And all of it was incredibly heavy.

Now, our company safety guidelines for weight limits are 100lbs per person lifting an item, but there’s no real practical way to enforce that in the field, so we usually wind up using our best judgement, even if the item is over that limit.

They could have easily done that!

Nearly everything there was over limit, but we had our equipment and we were pretty confident we could handle everything, weight-wise. Mike and I are both pretty strong.

But in my estimation, this was definitely going to take a bit longer than 2 hours.

Mike told her that we would do our absolute best.

To be fair, he should have leveled with her then and there that it would take a bit more time, but he probably wanted to see if we could just get it busted out as quick as possible and see where we were at before getting the customer needlessly worried.

It got worse!

Darcy sat in her truck nearly the whole time we were working, so she could stay warm. Perfectly understandable since it was -2°F outside and the snow was coming down pretty hard.

Though she’d occasionally roll down her window to offer up critiques. Mostly about how much time we were taking going up and down the metal ramp of the truck, which was now COVERED in ice and snow.

About an hour and some change into the move, Darcy gets out of her truck and starts chatting with Mike about her previous movers, and how they did cause some damage to her stuff, but they were SO fast.

It was weird.

She was being really mean.

She went back and forth between complaining about them and praising them for their speed.

And she kept referring to them as “the professional moving service I hired”, which really bugged me, because the way she said it seemed to be implying that because we aren’t a big national company like Mayflower, then somehow Mike and I weren’t professional movers.

Despite the fact that this is literally our full-time jobs.

Now we’re far enough into this move that we could tell this was going to run long.

Mike decides it’s a good idea to let her know that it’s probably going to take a half hour or so longer than expected (which was still a feat, considering how much there was to move and how well-packed this truck was. I pride myself on playing a mean game of Truck Tetris).

Darcy was NOT having this.

She was all over the place!

She started to get upset and started saying how we were just trying to get more money out of her, and we were “Dilly Dallying” (yes, those words actually left the mouth of a grown woman).

Then she starts in on how “the professional movers got this same stuff unloaded in 2 hours, it should take the same time to load it!”

Mike explains to her that unloading always takes less time than loading, because you’re moving it into a bigger space and you don’t have to pack and pad the stuff to fit into a truck.

I also mention that there’s literally a blizzard coming down, and we’re only going to go a little over.

She gets quiet and seething.

She’s being unreasonable!

Mike can tell how angry she is and let’s her know we won’t charge her for any extra time since it’s not her fault the weather is crappy. He also brings up that they damaged her stuff, and we’ve done a pretty good job.

Darcy: I don’t CARE! YOU SAID TWO HOURS, I EXPECT IT DONE! JUST GET IT DONE! I’m going to leave you guys a TERRIBLE review!

She stomps back to her truck without saying a word.

I’m usually pretty chill, but I was already getting increasingly mad at this woman.

Her yelling at my boss and calling us lazy when we were risking our health and safety to move her stuff in a blizzard was just too much for me.

Mike thinks about this for a moment.

He knew he had to do something about it.

I know customer reviews are super important to us as a small business. The booking site we use highlights the last handful of reviews, so a bad one takes FOREVER to stop showing up as basically the first thing people see when they click on your page.

So I’m expecting Mike to try and keep her happy, but instead he just grins and turns to me

Mike: F it. You heard her!

Cue malicious compliance.

She wanted it all loaded in 2 hours? That’s exactly what we’d do.

The front half of her truck was loaded up neatly, with everything padded and stacked tightly floor-to ceiling to keep it from moving on the road. I pride myself on my ability to load a truck properly and safely without wasting any space.

They second half of the truck would be different.

The second half of her truck was the worst, jankiest truck I’ve ever loaded in my life. We’re talking huge heavy office furniture haphazardly stacked on top of each other at the weirdest angles.

Heavy stuff on top of light stuff, anything to just get the storage unit empty and the truck door closed. We even stacked REALLY heavy office chairs on top of glass table tops.

By the end of it, the truck looked like you’d asked Escher or Giger to draw you a picture of an office.

I just wanna be clear, we’ve never intentionally damaged a customer’s property, and we never would. We pride ourselves on our professionalism, courtesy, and specifically our ability to get your stuff where it’s going safely.

That’s RIGHT!

But the particular combination of unsafe conditions and this lady’s outright disregard for our safety and feelings was just too much.

And technically we didn’t damage anything. Nothing was broken when we closed the truck doors.

But literally the first bump in the road or decently tight turn was definitely going to cause hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars in damage.

We closed the truck door and walked over to Darcy’s truck and let her know.

Mike went to her truck.

She wasn’t being nice about it at all!

He told her that we were done and that he wasn’t going to charge her at all for the move.

She insisted that “She’s not poor, and doesn’t need charity” and Mike just said that it was clear that she wasn’t happy, and that he didn’t need her $150 (that’s right, we charge $75/hr, so the extra half hour we needed to do it right would have cost her a whopping $37).

He cancelled the job and refunded her what she’d already prepaid.

As we drove away in Mike’s car, I looked at him.

GEEZ!

Me: You realize that by the time she gets where she’s going, she’s looking at a LOT of damaged furniture, right? She’s going to hit us with a bad review and maybe even try to sue.

Mike: She was worried about paying an extra $37. I doubt she’ll risk more money on hiring a lawyer. And besides, you can’t leave a review on the site if the job gets cancelled. We just gave her exactly what she wanted. And besides, it’s worth losing out on the money I would have made just to see her face when I said I didn’t need her $150.

When he dropped me off he still paid me for my time because “F that lady”. My boss, Mike, is a really nice guy.

YIKES! That was a creative way to avoid getting a bad review!

Let’s find out what folks on Reddit think about this one.

This user would have stayed back to see her reaction.

This user wants to know if she was screaming.

This user wants to see what the inside of the truck looked like.

This user has a funny take on the story.

This user thinks this woman has a lot of nerve to complain like that.

That customer got exactly what she asked for!

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.