He Demanded an Immediate Cash Refund for the Wrong Toner Cartridge—Then Claimed Locating His Account Number Was “Impossible”
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Some days at work go without a hitch – yes, even when you’re working with the general public. Because even though customers have a prosperity to be unpredictable, emotional, and a little wild at times, there are days when things feel unnaturally chill. Of course, those days don’t really balance well against the majority of hectic and emotionally exhausting days working in customer service, but they are real, and they do occur every once in a while at least.
For the customer service worker in this story, this was not one of those days. It was after lunch, everyone was getting a little tired, and the queue of slightly grumpy customers seemed never-ending. Regardless, when one customer insisted on putting his foot down about something that he was blatantly wrong about, he stayed patient. But in the end the fact that he was proven right was the very best medicine for a frustrating situation.
Read on to find out what happened here.
“Sir, that’s not a zero,” and other things I didn’t think I’d have to say out loud at work
I work at a mid-sized retail chain that sells a bit of everything, but the front end is mostly returns, online pickups, and people insisting the app is “broken” because they can’t remember their own password.
This happened last weekend during the after-lunch rush, when the line is long and everyone is already annoyed at the concept of waiting. A guy in his fifties comes up with a small box of fancy printer ink and slaps it on the counter like it personally offended him.
He says he needs a refund because “it doesn’t fit,” and when I ask for the receipt he proudly holds up his phone with a screenshot and says, “I have the code.”
Cool, no problem, except the screenshot is a blurry zoom of an order number where half the characters are cut off.
Let’s see how this store worker responded.
I ask if he can pull up the full email so I can scan the barcode, and he gets this wounded look like I’ve asked him to solve a math problem. He starts reading the number to me, very slowly, like I’m the one struggling.
It’s something like 8O1O7B, but he keeps saying “eight zero one zero seven bee.” I repeat it back and ask, “Is that an O or a zero?” and he snaps, “It’s a zero, obviously. It’s a number.”
I try it, system says invalid. I try it again, same. He leans closer and says, louder, “ZERO. Like 0. Not a letter. Why would it be a letter.”
The line behind him is doing that shuffle where people pretend they aren’t listening but they are, totally. I keep my voice calm and say, “Sometimes order codes have letters, can you tap the order and show me the barcode?”
Well, the customer really didn’t like that.
He sighs like I’m wasting his valuable time, then scrolls dramatically and shows me the same screenshot again, just bigger now. That’s when I see it clearly: it’s not a zero, it’s the letter O, twice, and the font just makes it look round.
I point at it and say, as gently as I can, “I think those are O’s, not zeros.”
He goes red and says, “No. I typed it. I know what I typed.” So I do the only thing that works with this type of customer. I turn my screen slightly and say, “Okay, can you type it in for me then?”
I hand him the scanner keyboard and he pecks at it like it’s contaminated, still muttering. He types 80107B with zeros, hits enter, invalid. He stares at it, then at me, then at his phone like it betrayed him.
But as this worker knew, patience is a virtue.
I don’t say anything, I just wait, because sometimes silence is the safest customer service tool. He squints at his screenshot again, and I watch his brain do the slow, painful recalculation. Finally he says, very quietly, “Fine. Put O.”
I type it with O’s, it pulls up instantly, and of course the return goes through. Instead of being relieved, he pivots straight into blaming our system, saying we should “make it clearer” and “not use confusing fonts” because it’s “basically a trick.”
I just nodded and said, “I’ll pass that along,” because what else do you do? When I handed him the refund slip he snatched it and then, right before walking away, he said, not looking at me, “You could’ve told me sooner.”
Like I didn’t try. Like I wasn’t telling him the entire time. The next person in line stepped up and whispered, “For what it’s worth, it was totally an O,” and I laughed a little harder than I meant to.
Genuinely, for anyone wanting to truly understand the weirdness of humankind, a stint working in customer service is a must.
This guy clearly didn’t actually know anything about how the systems worked, but he claimed to be an expert.
And instead of being grateful when the retail worker helped him out? Nope, he just couldn’t take being wrong.
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Let’s see what the Reddit community made of this.
This person thought that including Os and 0s in the code was really stupid.
While others agreed, but thought the customer shouldn’t have been so stubborn about it.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a burned-out employee who finds a way to ease his stress with an extended daily lunch.
Meanwhile this Redditor could definitely empathise!
Genuinely, using these extremely confusing letters and numbers in codes that customers and employees might need to read to one another is never a clever idea. Because even to the most intelligent of folk, these digits could be indecipherable, so for everyone else, this is just a confusion waiting to happen. So it’s easy to have a little bit of sympathy for the baffled customers – or it would be, had it not been for the way he behaved.
Genuinely, when you approach an employee like this, you have to accept that they’re the expert, not you. And if they think that they are the letter ‘O’ not the number ‘0’ then maybe you could at least entertain that idea? Because if you’re stubborn like this guy was, you’re only going to look like more of a fool when they are proven right.
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