Imagine working in a customer service call center, and a customer refuses to speak to your coworker just because she’s a woman.

If you were a man, would you be willing to take the call to help her out, or would you take it further than that and take the call to make the customer wish he had been willing to listen to your coworker?

In this story, one man is in this situation, and he takes the second approach. Let’s see how he annoys the annoying customer.

Customer needs a male supervisor. That’s M for Mike…

I worked for an energy company in the UK in their Website Support Team and my lovely female colleague came to me as her customer had asked to speak to a man.

She had a proper nasty guy on the phone who wouldn’t let her speak, you know the one, she started to reply and it set him off again.

The thing was she was the nicest and most helpful person there and would ‘go the extra mile’. Always getting positive feedback from customers and being told to speed up by management. The usual dichotomy of call centre work.

Seems she didn’t know anything about his problem and she should go and get a man.

She explained the situation.

As she knew of my other career path (in the week a mild mannered call centre worker, weekends a sarcastic nightclub bouncer) she asked me to talk to him.

She explained the problem was he couldn’t see all his accounts on his online account, he’d left as a customer and come back and had a new profile set up instead of having his new account set up on his old profile. She patiently explained this to me as I would usually just bang the mouse to get things to work.

The problem was that his name was spelt differently on the other profile and due to data protection she needed to confirm his details again.

He didn’t want to as she had the account number and he’d already done that.

He took the call while his coworker stood by.

Picked the headset up introduced myself and he explained how ‘that girl’ couldn’t do a simple task.

I said I’d try; so proceeded to bang the mouse and he asked me if everything was alright.

“Not really, sir, hold on a minute” turned to my colleague, didn’t mute the call or put him on hold and asked her to explain what I needed to do, 4 times, slowly. I may have overemphasised my lack of comprehension.

“Hello sir, I’ve found the problem we have 2 profiles for you and there’s been a typo so I need to confirm your details again. So on profile 1 it’s spelt (name has been changed for comedic effect) A for Alpha, R for Romeo, S for Sierra, E for Echo and so on and so on. Can you confirm that is how your name is spelt?”

He did.

Now time to check some more details.

“So on profile 2 your name is spelt A for Alpha, R for Romeo, S for Sierra, E for Echo, H for Hotel, O for Oscar, L for Lima, L for Lima, E for Echo. Should there only be 1 L in that surname?”

Yes, it should, he confirmed.

“Ok so I just need to check all the details match, your address 1 ****wit Lane spelt F for Foxtrot, U for Uniform….”

Every single detail on each profile was spelled out for him phonetically and he started to huff and puff about “can’t you hurry this up?”

He finally wore the guy down.

“I could pass you back to ‘that girl’ sir but you specifically asked to speak to a male supervisor and I’m working as fast as I am able to considering the situation.”

“JUST PASS ME BACK TO HER THEN!”

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My work there was done….

He did a great job putting that customer in his place and proving that being a man doesn’t mean you’re better at your job.

Let’s see what Reddit thought of this story.

This person loves how he handled this situation.

Another woman was in this exact same situation.

Another person who worked in tech support shares her experience.

This person shares how they handle situations like this.

Rude customers deserve rude customer service.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.