If you start a new job, you’re often going to need to have an account created. This could involve setting up your work email and giving you access to certain software programs you may need for your job. What would you do if you started work a week ago but your account hadn’t been created yet?

I could imagine that it would be a very frustrating week!

In this story, one college faculty member is in that situation, and she doesn’t handle it well. In fact, she’s verbally abusive to the Helpdesk employee who is trying to help her.

The situation escalates, but the employee ended up satisfied with the way it worked out. Keep reading for all the details.

Have you ever had to escalate a verbal abuse issue to your supervisor?

Anyone who’s worked a helpdesk position will deal with irate customers, and every once in awhile you may even have one throw some verbal abuse your way.

I took a call for a new faculty member ( I work at a university) who’s account creation process had apparently been botched by her office manager (who was also a new hire).

Our IT department has nothing to do with the account creation process as we’re a satellite campus so the main campus actually creates the AD account etc. However we can look up the status of the account and guesstimate based on whats been done so far how far along it is.

This sounds like a really stressful situation for the student and the employee.

As soon as I started talking she cut me off and started yelling how she’d been without an account for a week and she can’t believe how worthless the IT department at this college is compared to her last one, “do you do anything up there? We’re obviously paying you far to much if you can’t get an account created in a few days. If this isn’t taken care of NOW I will have you FIRED”

(this blew me away, as a new hire who does this type of thing? Only thing I can think of is she thought we where an outside company or something).

There was no existing ticket for this, the new OM had no idea how the new account process worked and never informed us of the issue, and HR had apparently failed to check on the status of the account to finish their end of the process.

After trying to calm her down and getting nowhere I told her she could call back when she’s ready to talk to me in a non demeaning manner.

There were consequences.

I walked over to my directors office, closed the door and told him exactly what happened.

He immediately called the faculty members Dean and we all went down and had a conversation in the Deans office.

It ended up being a slap on the wrist for her (not much more needed really this type of thing happens) but it was explained in no uncertain terms that she needs to treat us with respect.

OP felt good about how the situation ended.

It felt good to know my director had my back and would support me in such a situation.

It also felt good to have a Dean support the IT department and have an understanding of how unacceptable it is to treat anyone like that.

In the end it took one phone call, a scanned document with the right information emailed to the AD guys at the main campus, and 20 minutes later she was good to go.

Anyone else had a situation with an irate user where you refused to take their abuse?

It seems like the story was resolved in a great way, but that doesn’t make up for the initial problem. The new faculty member shouldn’t have been mean about it, but I can understand why she was frustrated about her account taking so long to get created.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a hotel guest who complained about noise from an event, then reported the employee who agreed with him.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

Someone who used to work in a similar position shares an even worse story.

A former phone support employee knew how to handle callers like this one.

Another person uses the mute button.

It’s awful that this issue seems so common.

What is wrong with these callers? I can understand that they’re frustrated about whatever issue they’re calling about, but they’re not going to actually get any help by verbally abusing the person on the other end of the line, the person who did not cause the problem but may actually be able to resolve it.

I’m glad the Dean was on their side.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a man who stops speaking up in his Zoom meetings after getting constantly interrupted.