Her Security System Failed While She Was Away—Then She Ignored the Tech’s Simple Fix to Blame Him Instead
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Imagine having a home security system installed at your house. What would you do if you arrived home and realized it was down? Would you try to fix it yourself, ignore the situation or call the customer service line?
In this story, one woman was in this situation, and she called the customer service number. The employee she talked to was quickly able to figure out what happened, but she refused to believe his logical explanation and kept complaining and making unreasonable demands.
Keep reading to hear the whole tale from the employee’s perspective and to see if you think the customer is being unreasonable or not.
“Yes, Ma’am, I’ll let my supervisor know how our 8 minute software update put your entire family at risk.”
So, I work with home security systems.
Like any modern smart devices, our equipment sometimes requires updates to the software so our customers can avoid known issues as we discover and patch them out.
One of the cool little features our equipment has is that when it updates, it does so in the background until it needs to reboot to install the new software.
Most customers don’t notice the reboot.
This reboot normally takes a few minutes to complete and most customers won’t even notice as the system returns to it’s last armed or disarmed state.
During those few minutes the system is rebooting, it is basically inactive.
This customer had just so happened to be coming home during those minutes and then called us to complain that her home was “completely unprotected for the entire time I was away, anybody could have broken in and you wouldn’t know!”
The system wasn’t down for very long.
I look at the system history and explain to her that according to our records, the entire process from when it started to when she called us to complain and then disarm it was less than 8 minutes.
She says that I’m obviously incompetent and don’t know what I’m talking about and demands that I pass her complaints to my manager as she feels this is unacceptable and that her home could’ve been broken into.
In broad daylight. Within less than 8 minutes. With interior motion detectors that even if somebody had the perfect timing to get in during the reboot, would have detected them once inside and sounded the alarm.
She made a demand he couldn’t fulfill.
She then demands to be CC’d on this internal email chain, which I inform her I cannot do for company policy, but I still offer to email her separately afterward to let her know her feedback was passed along.
She then yells at me and says that I can and will CC her and that she works in IT so she knows how it works and hangs up.
I keep my word and email her complaints as best as I can without laughing and still keep my promise to email her afterward.
She’s still upset.
She then emails me back that I did it wrong, and demands my supervisor and my area managers names.
Due once more to company policy, I cannot disclose any information about other employees and was advised by another sup to just not bother replying and let her call back if she really feels a need to.
I really do try not to revel in the unhappiness of unpleasant customers, but on rare occasions like this, I just can’t help the smile on my face imagining what her next irate call will sound like.
Here’s the problem. The customer doesn’t understand how it works and wasn’t informed about the reboot ahead of time when the system was installed, or if she was informed, she forgot. A lack of understanding is causing her to jump to ridiculous conclusions, but I’d be upset too if I thought my security system wasn’t actually doing its job.
Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.
This person has a theory about the woman’s IT job.
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Another person sees a problem with when the security system reboots.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman who received a work email from a place she never even applied.
This person finds the way the system works alarming (pun intended).
A lot of people think the system shouldn’t reboot when it’s armed.
He should’ve passed the call along to a manager. She has a valid complaint. Sure, the system was rebooting, but it shouldn’t disarm an armed system in order to reboot! She needed to be told this is how it worked ahead of time, but really, this shouldn’t happen at all.
There’s a bigger issue here than the customer service rep can handle.
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