In some jobs, the customers can be the best part.

But in others, customers have the power to make or break your day, your career, and even your mental health.

Unfortunately for the call center agent in this story, one customer seemed determined to break her.

But unfortunately for him, she wasn’t about to just take his horrible behavior.

Read on to find out what happened.

I finally snapped, and my department manager closed his account

I once worked in retention for Discover, and boy was it hell.

At least half of the calls were transferred from overwhelmed customer service agents that didn’t know how to handle the call – they transferred to us to close the account instead of supervisors.

This was one of those calls.

I got really good at de-escalation and understood the difference between frustrated anger vs jerks who just want to yell and be abusive.

This guy was one of those jerks.

This call really started off on the wrong foot.

The customer came in immediately yelling and swearing – he didn’t even mention why he was yelling, he was just name calling and swearing off of Discover.

When he was finally done ranting I went into my calm customer service voice, saying something along the lines of, “I can tell you’re really frustrated and I want you to know that I’m here to help you, what exactly has been going on?”

At the same time I was going over the notes, and I saw that I was the forth person he’d talked to today.

All of the agents left passive aggressive notes about him and how there was an issue with an unknown charge on his statement.

But the customer really didn’t react well to the employee’s calm approach.

The customer replied, “You don’t want to help me, I’m going to sue, you’re all scammers – all of you are going to hell!”

I replied, “Sir I want to help you. I see there’s an issue with a charge on your account, I’m on your side. Let’s calm down and address this charge.”

But he simply continued abusing me: “Oh screw you, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Disrespectful, your entire generation is useless, time to grow up and act your own age.”

At this point I was over it.

Let’s see how the employee responded to that blatant disrespect.

I knew I wasn’t going to be working there much longer and he clearly wasn’t looking for help – he was just going to keep yelling, so I got ready to hang up the call.

He also never said anything about closing his account, so I couldn’t do anything about that either.

So I responded, “Well sir, call us back where you’re ready to act YOUR own age, and we’ll see if we’re still willing to keep your account open. Good bye.”

This was right in the middle of his explosion, with him clearly not expecting me to stand up for myself and hang up.

But this situation was about to get a whole lot more dramatic.

I reported it to my supervisor, who escalated the call to the department manager. They made a decision based off of his call history of being abusive with customer service agents on nearly every call.

Apparently I got off easy, as he also had a history of being horrible on calls.

The department manager decided to close his account, which reports to the credit bureau differently rather than if he requested it himself.

As a result, his credit score would have taken a huge dive, and it was going to be on his score for the next seven years – so good luck even trying to open and another credit card.

It was sweet justice, because Discover very rarely closes accounts themselves, and it was the first time my department head had done it – I was definitely worried that I would get fired so I was ecstatic over the resolution.

Sometimes what goes around really does come around, and this customer’s abusive behavior is going to have massive negative repercussions on his life for years to come.

Good on the managers for making this decision to protect their employees.

Maybe it should even have come sooner.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit made of this.

Other call center employees enjoyed living vicariously through this story.

While others explained just how common this scenario is.

Meanwhile, this Redditor empathised with the call center employees.

No matter how frustrated you are, it’s never okay to be abusive to those on the other end of the phone.

In the end, it’s not their fault – and this mysterious charge was nothing to do with the call centre employee this guy had been passed to.

It’s super satisfying that karma got him in the end.

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