New definition of insanity

[Fonger]

 

who said to hang up?

 

Round here "putting the phone down" and "hanging up" are one and the same, anyway I know what you mean. My favourite is telling them "My wife deals with this sort of thing, she's in the garden, I'll just get her" I then just leave the phone on the side and get on with whatever I was doing.

once upon a time, knew a person who had a mechanical wind-up phone hold music generator (you placed the pone on top of it)

 

and it was totally ear splitting.

 

too bad I don't have that now

 

but then again there's a MP3 player with Wicked Tinkers and Cozad available

Edited January 10, 2012 by Fonger

[Arthmoor]

This sort of thing isn't limited to call centers and customers either. The news media does this all the time, especially with politicians, when they don't get the answer their question was fishing for. They'll just keep asking it again, even rephrasing it, in order to try and trap someone with it.

[BlackBaron2]

I keep getting robo-calls from debt relief agencies that are probably scammers. Anyway, back to the real topic, relatives in general are good at this. I get badgered for a lot of stuff. It is not fun.

[Denina]

I spent two years working in a call center. This was back in the day when pagers were widely used and to send an alphanumeric message, you had to call a message center and tell your message to someone who typed it in and sent it. I HATED being privy to those messages. If I had a $1 for every time someone said in a loving voice, "I love you" to me that I had to type in to the pager, I could have retired in those 2 years. But that sickening sweet I love you voice. UGH! Save that for your sweetheart; don't make me hear that. It was embarrassing.

 

When we didn't answer pager calls, we had calls for everything else: doctor offices, funeral homes, hospice service, cable companies...and oh how I hated cable company calls, especially when there was an outage. We'd get 100s of calls from customers yapping about their cable being out at 2:00 AM. It would get so bad some nights that we would call the owner at home and wake him up to ask him to put a recording up telling people the tech is out working on it just to get some relief from the call load. In the middle of the night there were only two of us. We just couldn't handle that. And if only one person was out...they were even worse because we couldn't call out a tech for just one or two people. It had to be an area-wide outage. They would get so mad at us like it was our fault. So many stupid arguments over a TV. I quit watching TV for the longest time on account of that job. I hated the customers so much I decided the service wasn't worth it. I may have missed out on some good shows but I read a lot of good books.

 

I don't miss my call center days. Except for having to deal with the cable company and pager customers it wasn't so bad really as I worked with some decent people but I've gotten too cantankerous and blunt to do customer service now. I just don't have any tolerance for stupidity and meanness like I used to when I was younger. I would probably get fired within a week because someone would piss me off and I would tell it like it is and if they didn't like it that they could kiss my butt.

 

And there is a special section of Hell for the people who treat customer service representatives like they're inferior because they don't have what they call a "real" job. I will be in charge of the torture administered in that section. And for future reference, that screaming you will hear? Don't ask. You don't want to know what will be causing them to scream quite like that. Just turn around and walk away. Ignorance truly is bliss. :P

Edited January 15, 2012 by Denina

[Vagrant0]

And there is a special section of Hell for the people who treat customer service representatives like they're inferior because they don't have what they call a "real" job.

Only if there is a special section of hell for customer service reps who are grossly incompetent, treat you like an idiot, or the ones who just send out canned e-mails that have nothing to do with the issue you are talking about.

[Deleted472477User]

This sort of thing isn't limited to call centers and customers either. The news media does this all the time, especially with politicians, when they don't get the answer their question was fishing for. They'll just keep asking it again, even rephrasing it, in order to try and trap someone with it.

 

Oh aye, I know! I've seen it. Or if say there's a press conference with the local police, this will happen:

 

Reporter: So do you have a suspect yet?

 

Cop: At this time, we aren't ready to release that information

 

Reporter: But you do have a name for the suspect?

 

Cop: *repeats*

 

Report: Are there any persons of interest in the case?

 

Cop: *repeats*

 

I've seen this go on for 3 or four minutes at a time.