Imagine working from home as a customer service employee for an online retailer.

What would you do if you had to deal with a customer who yelled at you like you were personally responsible for a problem that was outside your control?

In this story, one employee had to deal with a lot of customers like that, but one in particular was quite memorable because of the way the call ended.

Let’s see how the story plays out.

“Transfer me to anyone else!” Whatever you say ma’am

During the summer of 2020 I worked customer service for an online retailer.

It is the worst job I’ve ever worked.

While most people were polite, kind and understanding, I had to deal with many people who were (often justifiably) upset about a problem with their order, but even then most people would be sure to say their anger was not directed towards me.

Faking sympathy for these people was hard enough, but then there would be people berating me personally as if I had something to do with whatever problem they were complaining about.

There was a huge problem.

One day, the system we used to track peoples’ orders was down. I wouldn’t be able to cancel orders, check when the shipping date was, change the shipping address, nothing.

The supervisor told us to tell the customers to call back in an hour at which point the system would hopefully be back up.

Again, most people were understanding that there was literally nothing I could do to modify their orders and said they would call back later.

One lady wasn’t understanding at all.

This one lady calls me and is upset about something and wants me to cancel her order.

I tell her I apologize for the inconvenience but I can’t at the moment, and that she should call back in an hour.

She was not happy with the response. She starts going off about how that is unacceptable, she doesn’t have time later, take down her information and do it later once the system is back up, this is horrible customer service, etc.

I constantly have calls coming in so I can’t be dealing with her problem at the same time as speaking to another customer, and more importantly, my shift was going to be finished in 20 minutes and I sure as hell wasn’t waiting around for the system to be back up and doing overtime to cancel this lady’s order, especially with her rude, entitled attitude.

Working from home makes it a little more difficult to get a supervisor.

Eventually, she decides that she has had enough of me, and asks to speak with my supervisor.

Summer of 2020 is peak COVID, so I was working from home. I explain the situation and say I can’t just pass the phone to my supervisor but what I can do is escalate the issue by putting in a ticket and a supervisor will call them back in 24-48 hours.

Of course this is not good enough for her.

This is funny!

She is yelling at me at this point, going on and on about how awful this customer service is, and she is not accepting that there is nothing I can do at the moment.

She decides she doesn’t want to speak to me anymore and screeches at me to “Just transfer me to ANYONE else, I don’t care. I don’t want to speak to you anymore!”

I say okay, just give me a moment.

As I’m thinking in my head “You did say ANYONE”, I transfer her to the Spanish customer service line.

She got what she asked for, but I’m sure that didn’t solve her problem! That was a funny solution. I love it!

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person knows exactly what to say to an angry customer.

This is funny!

Another former customer service employee shares what they used to do.

Hanging up worked for one company.

She got exactly what she asked for!

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.