Last minute? Forget special arrangements.

[Twotall]

Customer called today, and wanted to have some special arrangments made for him, and him alone. Edited down quite a bit for length, he was very persistent. Every time you find a (...), it means I was interrupted by his shouting:

SC (In thick accent): "I'm leaving for my home country tomorrow morning, I want you to suspend all my monthly bills 'till October"
Me: "Umm, I'm not sure we can do that, but I'll check with my supervisor"
*checks, gets a negative, as expected*
Me: "No, I'm sorry, we can't delay billing for that long. However, if you get an e-billing solution..."
SC: "What! No, no, no. I leave tomorrow, why you can not do this?"
Me: "Because, we can not just 'suspend' billing for anyone who calls in and says they want it. It would not be good business"
SC: "But I'm not going to use anything! Why you have to send bill for things I don't get?!"
Me: "Our services will be provided regardless if you use them or not... "
SC: "Why is this so difficult! I want you to not send me any bills for three months, then, in October, send me bill for everything! Last year, this was not a problem! I called, and you set it up!" (Complete lie, there was no record of any such thing, and it is not done in any case)
Me: "Like I said, I cannot do this. We simply can not stop billing you at your convenience"
SC: "If not, you people have to work out a solution for me!"
Me: "I'm trying. Right now, the only solution I can think of is if you get an arrangement with your bank that we can draw the bills directly from your account..."
SC: "No! I live in small island! There are no banks here" (this was actually true) "I can't get to the city in time to go to bank!"

In the end, I had to hand him over to my supervisor, who told him the exact same things, rolling her eyes all the time. And he did not get any arrangements from us.

What I wanted to say through the entire conversation: "Hey, d*ckhead! Maybe if you made your arrangements early, in good time before travelling, you would not have these problems!"

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Good for you. A lack of planning on his part does not constitute an emergency on your part.

[Jack T. Chance]

What always pissed me off, back in the days when I managed a furniture store, were the people that came in just ASSUMING that we would be able to deliver the furniture the same day, or at least have it available for them to pick-up that day. Not always a problem, if, say, they came in at 10 or 11 in the morning during the week and IF they were willing to drive at least an hour (1 way) to get to our warehouse to pick-up the furniture. In at least some of those cases, they COULD pick it up the same day.

But oftentimes, I'd get some complete moron who'd come in at 5 or 6 at night (at which point the warehouse had been closed for 2-3 hours), wanting a bed for his kid, just assuming that I magically had stock in the back room, ready for him to take it right away. When I informed him that this was not the case, he'd then reveal that he'd already gotten rid of the child's bed, and give me that typical attitude of "Well, what am I supposed to do now?" At which point, I'm thinking "Learn how to use a phone for starters, moron! And next time, DON'T get rid of the old furniture until you have the replacement on-hand at your house! DUH!!!" "Okay, buh-bye now! Ya gotta go! Buh-bye! Door's to your left, genius!"

[pbmods]

They're your memories; treat them with care.

Remember all those computer lUsers who get mad at the tech support guy who wiped their hard drives, and they never backed up their files?

So at my work, customers come up to use our kiosk machine which reads images from a memory stick, USB drive or CD and then transfers them to our hard drive, from which we can print the images.

You cannot guess how many customers will load the pictures into our system, and then immediately delete the pictures from their camera. And then they get upset with us when we inform them that something didn't transfer properly and could they please try again? (it doesn't happen often, but then hard drives don't explode very often either, but you still make backups, right?)