Accents can sometimes make people difficult to understand, but that doesn’t mean you can be rude to them.

What would you do if you had a client who called into your department regularly, and every time she spoke with your Asian coworker, she was extremely rude and impatient (among other things)?

That is what the guy in this story experienced, so he began intentionally taking every call from this person and making sure that the calls went extremely slowly, so that she wouldn’t meet any quotas that she had set. Eventually, she was no longer there, and he thinks that he got her fired.

Whether he was responsible for getting her fired or not, it was good revenge after the way she treated his coworker. Read through the full story below and see what you think about how he handled it.

A call center worker was rude/racist to my coworker, so I bullied her until she quit/was fired

My coworker is a very sweet little old Asian lady. She speaks with the accent and grammar of someone who spent most of their life speaking a language other than English.

You can’t like everyone you interact with at work.

She also happens to be incredibly smart, kind, and good at her job as well as a consummate professional. I, however, am not a consummate professional… as you’re about to find out.

We had been dealing with this phone rep that we had to call as part of our job. Of all the reps, this lady was the hardest to deal with. She spoke with a southern accent that was so thick it was nearly impossible to understand (even for me, and I am a native/lifelong English speaker. I don’t bring this up because there is a problem with having an accent, but rather to highlight the hypocrisy of the situation).

This woman sounds awful.

She asked a multitude of extra questions none of her counterparts asked, and required extra steps for us to look up things for her. She also wasn’t the nicest. She was snarky, terse, and generally unhelpful. I complained about her a couple of times, but nothing was done about it.

One day, my coworker had her on speaker phone, and I overheard the way she was talking to her and hooooooo boy. I was not happy.

She is just insufferable.

Somehow, my coworker could understand her better than I could, so tell me why this chick was talking to my coworker like she was the dirt on the bottom of her shoe?

It was in the way she repeated things verbatim if my coworker didn’t give her exactly the answer she wanted (answers that she oftentimes already knew, but still asked for just to be a pain), sighed and groaned like she was in abject misery, refused to answer my coworkers questions, and the tone of utter disgust and disdain in her voice.

Now it is becoming clear.

This lady was obnoxious to me and to others who I’d talked to about her, but downright repugnant to my colleague.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized; everyone else I worked with, except my one Asian coworker, sounds white/American on the phone, and none of us had received that level of disrespect.

What does he have in mind?

There was a pattern. I determined that this lady was being racist towards my coworker, and that even if that wasn’t her motive, that she was a piece of trash for talking to literally one of the sweetest and most competent people I know that way.

Thus began my campaign. I knew I couldn’t prove that she was anything but generally bad at customer service, and nobody seemed to care about it enough to do anything about it.

I bet she hated him.

Therefore, I set out to make her job as hard as possible. I started taking all the calls that had to go through her when I was on shift, and I would drag the calls out as much as I could.

I would put her on hold, pretend I was fumbling around for information, speak over her and give her more information than she asked for, but really really slowly, go on deranged and off topic tangents, and anything else to waste her time. And always with the sweetest and cheeriest tone I could.

Wow, it sounds like he got her fired.

She went from snarky and mean to anxious and desperate (I assume they had turnaround times to meet). I also continued to file complaints about her inefficiency and rude demeanor, and discreetly encouraged others who worked other shifts to also slow their calls with her down.

This week I discovered she no longer works at that call center when I went to file another complaint and was told that she’s no longer being supervised by the person the complaints were being routed to.

He won’t miss her a bit.

No telling whether or not she left of her own volition, or was transferred to another department. It explains why I haven’t had to deal with her this week.

Either way I call it a victory, and hopefully it was a learning experience for her.

You have to wonder whether he actually got her fired or if she just moved on herself. It could even be that she got a promotion. Regardless, at least this team won’t have to deal with her again.

Read on to see what the people in the comments have to say about this story.

Here is a comment from a call center worker.

This person doesn’t think she learned her lesson.

She was definitely a racist.

This person loved the story.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a manager who wonders why productivity dropped after he banned overtime with no exceptions.

It doesn’t matter if she learned her lesson.

Whether he got her fired or not, it was great revenge. One would hope that she will learn her lesson, but I really doubt it.

In reality, sometimes revenge is just for revenge, not to teach a lesson.