Sometimes doing someone else’s job once is enough to haunt you for years.

A customer remembers one employee covering another department briefly and decides that apparently makes them the permanent expert.

Instead of accepting a referral, they keep pushing for answers and even try to book an urgent half-day workshop.

Check out this conclusion to this one.

How do you professionally say: “I cannot help you, leave me alone”?

A few years ago, I was new to my job and had some free time on my hands.

One of my colleagues from another department got sick and went on a longer leave, so I took over their role for a little under two months in total.

But this confused one of their more difficult customers.

Fast forward to last year: a customer, who more or less all departments are in exchange with for one thing or another, tried to ask me questions about my colleague’s product.

I politely told them that I had only helped out for a short time years ago, and to please ask the people in charge.

But this wasn’t an acceptable answer in the customer’s eyes.

The customer wouldn’t have any of it and point blank told me that they’d be asking the actual people in charge in case I couldn’t answer all of their questions—but would like me to try and answer first.

They even tried to pressure me into a half-day workshop on the same day because it was “urgent.”

They knew they weren’t qualified to lead the workshop, so they refused to be harassed into accepting.

Of course, I told them I had no clue about any of their questions since this wasn’t even my department, but they didn’t care. They wanted me.

I ended up declining the invite and told the actual department in question what was going on. They took care of it.

Until this day, I have no clue what the customer’s insistence was about.

My guess is that they wanted someone to blame for a missed deadline or something. Idk.

To this day, she doesn’t understand what the customer was really after, but luckily for her, she doesn’t have to find out.

What did Reddit think?

This commenter would have chosen to say something like this.

This user found themselves in a similar predicament.

With customers like these, it’s best not to over-engage.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who was denied a raise for “not being dedicated enough,” but then went on to discover what was really going on behind the scenes.

Other times, customers just need to be told what they want to hear.

OP repeatedly explained that the product was no longer their responsibility and redirected the customer to the actual team.

When the customer kept pushing, OP declined the workshop and let the correct department take over instead.

Helping once should not come with a lifetime subscription.