When people are having technical issues, they usually want them to get fixed as soon as possible.

What would you do if you a customer called in with an outage and they wanted to talk to the billing department to get an account credit, but you could fix the issue right away?

That is what happened to the technical support rep in this story, and the customer said to just transfer her to the billing department.

I was only trying to help…

So back in the mid-aughts, I did tech support for DSL internet. I truly enjoyed fixing people’s problems, even the stupid ones.

Those call trees are hard to navigate sometimes.

One day, I get a call from a woman who meant to call Billing but got tech support instead.

She had been told a week ago that there was an outage, and she was trying to get a credit for the lack of service.

That is a very reasonable amount of time for fixing issues.

I took a quick look and saw the outage had been resolved a few hours after she called in.

I advised her that the outage was over and it was likely a quick fix. She pushed back, insisting that it was the lines down or something.

Hopefully it will be nice and easy.

I told her gently that all I needed to do is make a quick call to the big DSL hub in Atlanta and that would probably have back up right away.

She screams into the phone “B-I-L-L-I-N-G!!!”

He was just trying to fix her issues.

I politely apologize to her and get her transferred over.

My manager had been listening in and pulled me aside after. He advised that while I was right, I was wrong and just do what the customer wants next time.

Hey, if that is what she wants, good enough.

I don’t know if her service ever got fixed or if she got in a stupid loop of paying her bill and calling in to get credited.

Sometimes people don’t want a problem solved, they just want credit for enduring it.

Take a look at some of the top comments below to see what others said about this story.

Yup, IT isn’t always about fixing the issues.

This may very well be true.

Just let him fix your problem, lady.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.