Imagine working in customer service at a call center when a customer refuses to speak to you simply because you’re a woman. Would you go find a man for him to talk to, or would you insist that you can handle his problem?

In this story, one woman finds herself in this situation, so she finds a man for the customer to talk to. Keep reading to see how her coworker handles the situation. It’s pretty hilarious!

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.

She came to OP for help.

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

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.

He agreed to talk to the customer.

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.

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.

He decided to make a point.

“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 over-emphasized 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.

He really made it take as long as possible.

“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 F 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 successfully made his point.

“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….

That’s hilarious! I love how he proved “that girl” was completely competent and able to help him.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

A former retail manager weighs in.

Another person shares how they’ve handled similar situations.

Yes, he handled that really well.

Here’s more praise for the malicious compliance.

He really helped his coworker out!

If you liked that post, check out this post about a rude customer who got exactly what they wanted in their pizza.