Nothing reveals someone’s true colors faster than insisting they can only be helped by a certain kind of person.

So, what would you do if a longtime customer repeatedly hung up on your female employees because he “needed a man” to handle his issue? Would you simply take the call yourself? Or would you find a way to get rid of the customer for good?

In the following story, one business owner deals with this scenario and decides that life’s too short for people like that. Here’s how it went down.

Finally, a MAN who can help me!

This isn’t technically a “call center” because we’re a small company.

We all take calls and do our regular work. We also support a few call centers’ phone services, so we get it.

At the time, my primary role was sales and customer interface on the original setup, though I’m also technical.

I’m the only male in the building, which will be important in this story. And I’m one of the owners–also important to the story.

He was happy a man finally answered.

We got a call from one of our Middle Eastern customers who runs a motel, and we provided their phone service. Since they’d been customers for a while, someone else picked it up, since it would be a tech or change-order call.

And he hung up on her.

Another call a minute later, a different woman picks it up, so he hangs up.

Third time…hangs up.

He had to know what was going on.

Now I’m thinking something is either seriously broken, or there’s something else weird, so I pick up.

“Ah, finally, a MAN who can help me!”

I hung up.

Upset, he transferred the man to his wife.

Now he calls my direct line, not the customer support queue, and I answer.

He asks if I hung up on him, and I asked if he had hung up on three of my employees.

“Yes, I needed a man. I don’t have time to explain this to her just to have her document it.”

He knew just what to do!

I’m steaming, but I calmly said, “I can transfer you directly to the most qualified person in our company, who actually wrote your phone software.”

He was ecstatic, praising me.

So I transferred him to my wife. She did, in fact, write most of the code, and was therefore more qualified than I.

This was the first customer they fired.

He hangs up on her and calls me back on my direct line, which I let go to voicemail. We had never fired a customer before, so I looked through our ToS and saw that we could dump anyone with 30 days’ notice.

I quickly put together a 45-day notice, told him I was being gracious, and said that if he ever insulted one of our people again, we’d block him from calling us. And that if he wanted help, he could get it by filling out a support ticket, which would be assigned to the most qualified woman in the company.

Life’s too short to deal with that.

Wow! It’s so crazy that someone would act like that.

Let’s take a look at what the people over at Reddit think about the customer.

This person’s supervisor had an answer for that.

Here’s someone impressed by the number of women at the company.

According to this comment, a customer got hung up on for something similar.

Yet another person demanding to speak to a man.

It’s crazy how common this is.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.