If you work in a customer-facing role, there’s almost certainly regulars that you remember for the wrong reasons.

Whether it’s a rude customer who won’t take no for an answer or a child who repeatedly pulls things from shelves, you learn to look out for these customers and avoid them as far as possible.

The same is the case if you speak with customers over the phone, it turns out, as the guy in this story explained.

Read on to find out how far one customer would go to fix a nonissue.

User harasses cable company to fix a harmless typo

Around fifteen years ago, I was working in tech support for a cable TV company, when a customer got in touch with an issue.

They said they were having an issue with my OnDemand: while a show said it was is 60 minutes in length, it cut out at 45 minutes and kicked the user back to live TV.

This could potentially be a legit issue, as I’ve seen titles end in the middle of the show before, sometimes even mid-sentence. So I fired up a slingbox, saw the content was indeed labeled as 60 minutes, pressed play, fast forwarded to 44 minutes, and let it play.

Indeed, the end credits of the show were already rolling, and at 45 minutes, it booted me back to live TV.

So he responded to the customer accordingly.

I told the customer that it looked like the only issue was a typo in the metadata, but since the end credits were rolling at the end before it booted them back out to live TV, they weren’t missing anything.

The customer asked if they could speak to my supervisor to get this fixed. I responded that sure, my supervisor was available right now, and I’d transfer them, but he only had the same abilities I did.

I transferred the call and though nothing of it until a day or two later.

Word was starting to circulate around the office that someone was repeatedly calling and complaining about the timestamps being wrong, and that no one can fix the issue. I wondered if it was the same guy.

And not long later, he would get his answer.

Lo and behold, a few days later, I received another call from the customer. He again told me that OnDemand was saying that the show was 60 minutes, but it kicked him back out at 45 minutes.

I explained that sorry, that’s not something we can fix. The customer hung up.

I looked at the account history and saw he’d called in over 100 times per day to complain about this.

I facepalmed that he cared so much about something so insignificant that doesn’t even impair his ability to use the service. At all.

But that wasn’t the end of things.

Again, a few days later, I got the call: “OnDemand is saying it’s 60 minutes, but it ends at 45 minutes.” I replied, “Sir, we’ve been over this, we can’t fix that,” to which he asked again to speak to a supervisor.

As it happened, my supervisor was standing at the desk right next to me, just cleaning the desk up of all the papers and junk strewn around it. My supervisor looked at me, as if hearing the customer’s request, and I saw him look at me out of the corner of my eye, and match his gaze.

While looking at him, I responded to the customer, “Sorry, I’m not wasting our supervisor’s time.” My supervisor gave me a dirty look.

I then continued, “You’ve already spoke to literally every rep we have ten times over, and every supervisor we have five times over, to try to get the incorrect running time of your OneDemand show fixed and no one could fix it. Don’t you think if it could be fixed, someone would have by now?”

Let’s see how his supervisor responded, overhearing the conversation.

My supervisor gives me the “oh, it’s that guy” look, proceeded with his business and never said anything about it.

The customer hung up of course, but to talk to every rep we have 10 times over and every supervisor 5 times over, you’d have to be calling in thousands of times.

I didN’t receive any more calls from him myself, but I kept tabs on the account. He continued to call with the same frequency for weeks.

Occasionally a rep would schedule a tech to go to the customer’s home, thinking it would fix the problem, but big surprise, it didn’t. Whatever the content was, it naturally expired a week or two later, with the typo never being fixed.

Read on to find out if finally, the issue went away.

But then came a call a few weeks later: “hi, my OnDemand isn’t working, it says that is 60 minutes, but it cuts out at 45 minutes.”

I thought, oh, ok, something different – oh, but wait, the name on the caller ID is this guy again. Again I replied, “Sir we can’t fix that,” to which the customer hung up again.

And the loop just kept going. He would complain about something insignificant, call 100+ times a day, occasionally talk to a supervisor, occasionally get a tech sent to his house, but nothing ever got done to fix the issues, because big surprise, it can’t be fixed.

When the one content expired, he’d find another.

Let’s see why exactly this was such an issue to him.

One time someone was able to ask why he cares so much about something so trivial. Allegedly he was using OnDemand as a way to have a timer for 60 minutes, and found the one program that just so happened to have wrong metadata.

So instead of finding another program that lasts 60 minutes (or, you know, use a normal timer on your phone or a clock or an egg timer) he’d hound us to fix it.

Eventually someone else thought to pitch DVR service to him, so he could see his shows and verify he wasn’t missing anything.

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He didn’t like it and hung up on people that tried to sell DVR to him. Subsequently, as soon as we saw his name on the caller ID, we’d just cut straight to the chase and try to sell DVR service, and he would hang up in under a minute.

It’s so unusual that this guy had nothing better to do with his time than harass the employees of this cable company.

The sad truth is that maybe this guy was lonely – he certainly didn’t seem to have any company, or anyone in his life to stop him from making these incessant calls.

But this must have been so annoying for the employees that endured it – even more so the customers who had genuine issues but were held in a queue behind this guy!

Let’s see what folks on Reddit thought about this.

This person agreed that perhaps the guy was simply lonely.

While others pointed out just how frustrating the fact that the issue can’t be fixed actually is.

Meanwhile, others were concerned that perhaps mental health issues could be at play here.

For the guy to devote so much time to the calls, something must be going on – whether that is dementia or some kind of compulsion, or simply a lonely guy who wants someone to talk to.

But harassing overworked tech advisors really isn’t the best way to achieve this.

While it’s frustrating that they couldn’t fix the issue, it sounds like this employee did the right thing, trying to be patient with the customer until it was too much.

This caller needs help.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.