Sometimes, working with the general public can be fun.

Other times, it can be draining and extremely challenging.

But as a general rule, staying calm and trying not to take jibes personally can be the way to go.

For the tech support employee in this story though, nothing was going to save them from this customer’s abuse.

Except for the law, that is.

Read on to find out what happened.

This better fix my problem or I’ll come over and trash the place

I worked for many years as an applications engineer doing tech support in the EDA (electronic design automation) industry. My first job was in the mid 80’s with a company that sold PC Board CAD machines.

This was a time just before standard computer platforms became the norm, and the company had designed their own hardware workstation based on the Motorola 68000 processor.

The machine was equivalent to the Sun 3 work stations that came out around the same time.

They originally wrote their own OS, but eventually ported to Unix BSD 4.2 as customers demanded standardized platforms.

Let’s learn a little more about the tech this guy worked with.

The company developed a hardware accelerator for routing PC Boards that were similar to the work stations, but were headless. We called them Route Engines. They had no graphical monitor, no keyboard, no mouse and no hard drive. They booted on a 5 1/4″ Unix floppy and then routing jobs were submitted to it over the network.

A common problem was that if a job was submitted that required too much memory, the machine would hang with no indication of what was going on unless you had a terminal connected to the serial port, what we called a “debug monitor”.

And if the Route Engine wasn’t shut down properly before being rebooted, it would require a manual file system system check that could only be done using the debug monitor.

We didn’t supply debug monitors with the Route Engines, the customers were expected to source their own standard terminal. They weren’t required but were strongly recommended.

And this led to some of the most common tech support calls – but this one was like no other.

I was the tech lead doing support for the Route Engine, and so I was pretty used to helping folks navigate these supportability issues.

Most of the PC Board layout people at that time were used to doing manual layouts using tape on a light board and weren’t always very computer literate. Our work stations were touted as being very user friendly and could be used by layout folks with no specialized training.

My problem case started when I heard that a customer had been so profane and abusive to our normally imperturbable hotline phone screener (no email back then) that she had been reduced to tears.

Apparently he refused to submit to the normal case assignment and call-back process and demanded that he be provided immediate help. Normally we’d ban abusive customers, but this guy worked for a local company that our CEO had been a founder in and so my manager decided to try to work with him.

Read on to find out how working with this customer went for him.

We learned that his field engineer had been trying to teach the guy how to keep his Route Engine running via the debug monitor and how to run fsck to clean up a bad boot floppy, but he just wasn’t getting it.

My manager and I visited him and I also tried to train him to properly maintain the boot floppy.

I got nowhere with him as he was untrainable.

In the end we just made a stack of ten copies of the boot floppy and told him that if the Route Engine ever failed to boot, just try a new floppy, and if you run out let us know and we’ll make a new stack of boot floppies.

But then the client visit took an unprecedented turn.

As we were getting set to leave my manager was doing the usual thing of summarizing the resolution of the issue, stating that this duplicate boot floppy solution should resolve his issues.

That’s when the customer replied, “It better or I’ll come over and trash the place.”

My manager ignored the threat and we left.

Not long after that I read a newspaper article saying that our customer had been arrested for kidnapping his estranged wife at knifepoint. We never heard from him again.

Yikes! This guy was serious!

Sure working in customer service can be really detrimental to your mental health, but for these tech support guys, it seems like there was a real risk to their personal health and safety too.

Lucky the guy got arrested really.

Let’s see what the Reddit community made of this.

This person was shocked by the way the story ended.

While other early tech support agents felt his pain.

And this Redditor enjoyed the nostalgia trip.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter how reasonable you are, customers just refuse to be decent people.

But no one would imagine that customers would be quite this horrifying.

In a way, they’re lucky they never had to work with him again.

Good riddance!

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