- Joined
- Oct 11, 2014
Sad but true.
I have an annoying situation to share. It's not retail, but it is customer service. Without going into too much detail, I was doing election related work. Not for a campaign, but for state government. My job was to answer voter questions.
Most people that called had simple questions. Most of them were friendly or indifferent. However, towards the end of this job's run I got one of the worst calls ever. I'm not surprised that call was a Karen. A piece of shit, narcissistic, entitled middle-aged cunt who thinks the world will stop for her. She had no sense of personal responsibility and expects other people to solve her problems for her. When that doesn't work, she does the typical Karen thing and complains to the manager.
She wanted me to explain what certain laws on the ballot meant. I explained that I am not allowed to interpret, define, or explain the law. Really, I'm not. I'm neither qualified nor allowed to do that. Never mind that she's had over two weeks to read up on this shit. Apparently, she's "disenfranchised" because she didn't have the Internet. Never mind that she could easily go to the library. Also, according to her, I'm a government employee so therefore I must not only know the law but I'm obligated to explain the law to her. Then she has the nerve to tell me I'm being paid exorbiant amounts because I work for the government. Nah, I was minimum wage.
Before I transfer her to my supervisor, who ended up telling the same things I did, including that she needs to contact her legislators if she wants the election laws changed, she assumed I must be in my early twenties because I was doing something a person in their twenties woul do. Joke's on her, I'm in my thirties.
So yeah, even in the context of public service, I had to deal with a stereotypical Karen who refuses to listen to reason or learn anything. On top of that, she tried to get in me trouble even though I was polite, friendly, and professional. I told her what she needed to know, not what she wanted to hear. Yet she still thinks everything is like McDonald's or Walmart, where she can throw a tantrum and get her way.
I feel ya, fam. Many years back I worked about a year for a call centre of a cell phone provider who is no longer in business. Before moving into the far more fun and interesting fraud department, I started in the 'order support' department as a grunt CSA. Our role was supposed to be helping people who had ordered phones find out where their phone was if it hadn't been delivered or help them to prepare an order for a return.
However, the Telesales department (in another province, took orders by phone instead of retail or web) had developed a chickenshit practice of whenever a customer placing an order over the phone fails the credit check and are either outright rejected or required a security deposit, DIDN'T tell the customer that, told them their order was being processed, and to contact Order Support if they had any problems.
So this ment a good 50% of our caseload was telling angry people who have been waiting a week for their phone to arrive that the phone was never shipped because they have shit credit or need a deposit first. BUT we didn't know that was the case until after we said 'I cannot find your order sir/madam, let me put it through for you" and tried to re-place the order using the same system the sales team used. Sure enough, order stopped at that point because they needed a deposit or were rejected outright. THEN we had to tell them the truth and OMG you never heard so many entitled Karens (and...Kens? whatever the male form of a Karen is) fucking well RAVING about "all the time wasted", "wtf do you mean I don't have sufficient credit! Push this through you little cretin!" "Gimme your supervisor, you reetard, you don't know what you are doing!" etc.
I recall one woman now who literally just shrieked into the phone in her frustration after a few minutes, she had been 'depending' on that phone arriving was about the last coherent thing I heard from her before she dissolved into shrieks. The ultimate chimp-out. Literally, it was apes at the zoo kind of wordless shrieking. One of very few times I had no choice but to terminate a call. Customer service fucking SUCKS.
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