…It is my blog, after all. I don’t pretend to give a shit if this special place on the internet is 100% relevant to anything other than my own narcissism.
Gawd, my job sucks lately. Everyone in the department quit, got canned, or is busy as hell. I can hardly handle the constant stream of phone calls… “Where is my fax?” “What do you MEAN, you didn’t get the customer’s letter?! What HAPPENS to them?!” “I HATE YOUR FUCKING BANK!” “I’m suing you bastards!”
Etc. and so forth.
What really blows (but is sort of amusing, at the same time) is that this woman, who we’ll call… Flail… she used to sit across from me in the call center. She coughed a lot, really loudly, into the phone. It made me jump every time. I’d hear her say, “excuse me” after she was done hacking up half a lung once an hour or so, and wonder whether she may not be putting her customers on mute before she did that.
I found out the answer to that question once I moved to Reg E, and Flail called, and made me jump a foot in the air by coughing hysterically loudly into the phone… and said, “excuse me.”
At Wells Fargo, your ass would fail the call for coughing into the phone.
I’m having this problem lately with mean people. People are just so goddamn mean.
In addition to mean people, I have had it with customer service. I don’t give a fuck about serving a customer anymore. Not one iota of an ounce, anymore. I’ve worked in customer service for all but about 6 months of my working life (over a decade, at this point), and I have officially reached my limit. Words cannot describe how little I care if a customer closes 6 accounts with us because I hung up on them. I’m not technically considered “customer service” in the job I currently hold, but am required to answer the phone when it rings, and half of the time, it’s a customer, so… yeah.
Another thing, I’m starting to feel really bad about all the times that I was a dick to fellow employees when I was in the call center. I mean, a lot of our employees are either really fucking stupid, or they were trained very poorly, but now, having people who do the job I used to do at this bank calling me and yelling at me? That makes me so bloody angry. The branches are especially infuriating, more so than the call center. The call center has a couple reps that are just outright dicks (Flail) to us (“What are you doing with the customer’s faxes?!”) but the branches are the worst. “But I have VERIFICATION that the fax went through!”
“Oh, you do? Great, then scratch what I just said about not having it, it materialized right here, before my very eyes, at the mere mention of the word ‘verification’!”
What, do you think we hire someone to throw away every other fax we receive? Get a fucking grip! If you haven’t noticed, our bank is still living in the year 1989. We deal with the consequences of a paper-centric existence, too, and one fax machine for 7 states worth of fraud claims (the actual claims PLUS the customer’s letters, mind you) is not a fun thing for us to deal with, any more than it is for you, or our customers.
I know I am supposed to be sympathetic when a customer is broke as shit because they were a goddamn Moron On The Internet and typed their check card number at all kinds of people who wanted to scam them, and now they can’t feed their kids or pay their mortgage. But if they’re yelling at me as a result of all of these circumstances, my personal opinion is that they can all burn in a gloriously warm lake of fire.
As soon as I have a letter in my hands from a customer that contains a threat, such as, “I sure hope you can resolve my claim immediately, because I don’t want to have to withdraw all of my money and go to Chase/Wells Fargo/Bank of America/Whereverthefuck, since I’ve been a good customer with you all for 904 years,” my immediate concern is how I can figure out how to deny it.
(I’m being hyperbolic, don’t report me)
I am way the fuck past giving a fuck if a customer is upset. Sometimes, often, even, I will go “above and beyond” to help someone out, it’s true. In these circumstances, the customer is not taking out their frustration at themselves for falling for a scam on me, and they’re not yelling at me because they’re sad that someone stole their check card and paid all of their friends’ phone bills with it. I am nice to the people that know that it’s not my goddamn fault.
I am also nice to the people who understand that the bank that I work for doesn’t make up the rules I am supposed to follow, let alone the fact that I do not make them up.
I do not call any of your employers and yell at you for something that they did. I just do not do that.
If I am in a position where I need to call a call center, or talk to someone representing a company regardless, you’d better believe that I know what they are going through, and I’m fucking nice. The only time I would consider being less than kind to the person on the phone is if they were a dick to me. Period! I’m not going to take anything out on an individual who is so obviously not responsible for my problem.
…The ass holes at Comcast who systematically lie to me about the prices of the services they offer, and what is in the package I’m trying to get, until the very end of the call when they are about to sign me up, now they can get yelled at. Until I am blue in the face.
But even though they deserve it, I still haven’t done it!
Today was so exhausting, I don’t even have the energy to finish this post.
