A Customer Was Upset About Charges He Had On His Cell Phone Plan, But After Yelling At The Call Center Employee, He Said He Was Having A Heart Attack And Hung Up

Michael Levanduski

4 weeks ago

Unsplash, Reddit

Dealing with customer service about an unexpectedly high bill can be very frustrating, but you really need to be careful what you say.

One customer was irate about charges he incurred on his cell phone plan, and then said that he was having a heart attack and hung up out of frustration.

The call center employee in this story took his comment seriously and contacted 911 to help him, but it turns out he wasn’t having any medical emergency, and he got even madder that they dispatched 911 for him.

I’ll sue you for calling 911 for me!

About a decade ago, I was working customer service for a large cell phone company. My specific assignment was handling customer complaints, either as letters or as complaints lodged with first-tier customer service.

I would complain about that as well.

I had a case of a guy who said he had thousands of dollars of fraudulent international roaming on his account. Okay, that’s serious, so I look at his account.

Sure enough, his last phone bill was for about $5000, of which most of that was international roaming. Well, I look closer.

Well, this is very weird.

The roaming is on ALL the lines on the account. Then looking at the call histories, there are calls from the Los Angeles area. Then a gap of a few hours. Then calls from the Miami area. Then a few hours later the international roaming begins with cruise ship roaming.

So, the more I dig into it, it’s clear the guy took his whole family on a Caribbean cruise, found out they had phone signal on the cruise ship (which counts as international roaming) and phone signal on every island they went to (also international roaming) and they were constantly talking on their phones the whole time.

They should have known that this wouldn’t be free.

Well, I can’t take that charge off the bill. The most I could do would be to give $500 off as a courtesy if he acknowledged he was wrong and I explained to him the nature of international roaming and his phone plan and he understood it.

Well, I call the guy. When I try to break it to him, as politely and professionally as I could, that I cannot take those charges off the bill, he starts raising his voice at me, screaming, blustering, talking about how rich and powerful and important he is and how I better take that charge off the bill if I know what’s good for me.

Well, that wasn’t going to make me change my mind.

Oh my, that is terrifying.

He then pauses for a moment, stammers “I’m having a heart attack!” and hangs up.

Uh oh. I immediately tell my supervisor. My supervisor tells me to call 911 and direct emergency services to the customer while he tries to contact the customer.

This is sure to attract attention.

I call 911 from my workstation, which sets off an alarm in the call center. Everyone knows I’m on an emergency call. In less than a minute every supervisor and manager there is crowded around our area and has learned what’s going on.

I get the local 911. I explain what’s going on, they patch me in to the 911 in Bakersfield, CA. I explain the situation and am on the line with their 911 while my supervisor is calling every number on the customer’s account to get him.

I bet they were fearing the worst by this point.

He tries calling the customer back. No answer. He calls the other 4 lines on the account and gets the customers wife and 3 kids and tells them what’s going on and that we’re trying to see if this man is okay.

His wife says she’s leaving work now to go home and check on him. His kids are all old enough to drive, and they all say they’re leaving whatever they’re doing to go home and check on their dad.

This whole team is going above and beyond for the customer.

Around this time, I get off the line with 911, and my boss is putting the calls he’s making on speakerphone for everyone around to hear.

He gets to the last number on the account. The landline. This is usually vestigial, most landline numbers on accounts were obviously out of use, but he was checking to be sure. He calls the number. . . .

Oh good, at least he is alive.

. . .the customer picks up on the other end.

My boss introduces himself, the customer goes ballistic saying he didn’t want to talk to us.

Then why did he say he had a heart attack?

Apparently he refused to pick up when called back because he said he was too angry at us to talk to us.

Well, my boss let him know we’d called 911 because he’d reported to us he was having a heart attack.

That is not something you joke about, sir.

The guy said that he wasn’t having a heart attack, he was just saying that to make it clear how much we were upsetting him by not taking those “phony” charges off the bill.

At about this moment you can hear a siren in the background and the customer is asking what’s going on. There’s a pounding on the customer’s door that can be heard over the phone.

He better answer fast or they will break the door down.

My boss explains that we’ve contacted 911 since he reported he was having a medical emergency and we couldn’t reach him. There’s louder pounding on the customers door and we can hear some shouting in the distance.

The customer goes ballistic, saying that if he has to pay anything for this ambulance call, he’ll sue us, he shouts about how he’ll have us all fired, he’ll sue our company and us personally, and how when it’s over he’ll own our whole company and have us all thrown in jail and then he hangs up.

Wow, what a mess this guy made.

Needless to say, we never heard another word from the guy or about this incident.

And this is why you never joke (or use hyperbole) regarding medical emergencies. People have to take it seriously, and that puts a lot of balls in motion.

Read on to see what the people in the comments have to say about it.

He’ll never learn his lesson.