Long-distance operator took the flak for me

[taurinejunkie]

Last night I got a call from a special-needs customer via the long-distance operator, who would have taken the number from me and dialed it for the customer. So I get the info from the operator, search, and there's no exact match for the customer's request; a few close ones though, that I have to mention. I'm in the middle of that when the customer suddenly explodes: THAT'S NOT WHAT I ASKED YOU FOR YOU STUPID PIECE OF S**T AND I KNOW HE LIVES THERE, HE'S THE OWNER OF ***** HOTEL! START F**KING LOOKING AND F**KING FIND THE NUMBER YOU DUMBF**K (I'm paraphrasing, and the original stream of abuse was in french). I started my standard abusive customer spiel, speaking over him as allowed by policy. Then all of a sudden I don't hear him anymore, so I stop talking too. Then the operator's back on, sighs, and says she'll call me back. Took me a second to realize she'd muted out the customer, and would have to go back to him and calm him down. But a good thing is that as far as I remember from hearing a conversation between a LDO and an angry customer, LDOs can be a lot less polite and pleasant than we have to be, and get away with it.

Then maybe ten minutes later, I get the same customer via a different LDO. This time I made my best effort to change my voice so he wouldn't recognize me and get all pissy again. And he took the number for the hotel the guy owned.

Sidenote: It makes a lot of sense to me that someone who owns a hotel would have a confidential number, or their residence number simply a sub listing of the hotel number, with "Res 555-555-5555" as the only info. The customer never gave me a chance to explain that, and in this particular case there was no res number attached to the hotel, and that would actually have pissed him off more.