Hold The Line Until The Train Line

Years ago, I was working the tech support evening shift on phones, with a team of about six people.

I was essentially acting as a second pair of eyes for people calling in (“there’s no option to send!” “Did you try clicking the big green send button?” “No one told me that!”). You get the deal.

As a tech support technician, I helped with… tech. One thing I did NOT handle was accounts, billing, contracts, etc. Even if I wanted to, it’s not something I had any level of access to see, much less perform. Users had to email or call their account managers, who worked 9-5.

Everyone who used our service had annual contracts, paid either yearly or (more commonly) month to month. We had a pretty idiot proof method of ensuring accounts didn’t go delinquent. Daily emails, voicemails from the account manager, and a huge banner across the tool that cannot be dismissed, stating exactly how many days they had until their account was suspended due to nonpayment.

Enter this caller.

He calls in at 19:00 EST, or just exactly past midnight in London, where he was based, screaming the site was down (it wasn’t). I look up his account, and see it’s suspended due to six months (?!) of nonpayment. I inform him of this, and he’ll need to backpay, plus late fees, in order to restore service. I inform him he’ll need to call in tomorrow during business hours to settle this with his account manager.

In a word? Explosion. 

Ten minutes of him screaming that no one told him, our system is terrible; he deserves free months for his ordeal, the usual. I pulled up his history and can see email read receipts showing he clicked on the delinquency emails, as well as login history, showing he was logged into the system and had seen the banners. I didn’t even bother bringing this up.

He doesn’t accept the answer that no one is in the building except me and six others, and demands I reset the system, which I cannot do. Then he demands I call the account manager’s personal phone number (which I do not have, I don’t know them!) to wake them up to process it. 

He hung up and called back, but I grabbed him out of the queue so no one else had to deal with him.

At this point, he states that he will not get off the call until this is resolved. Admittedly, he had me a bit here, since we are “under no circumstances” allowed to hang up calls unless they threaten violence or legal action, which he has not done.

It was also 20:00 at that point, and I needed to make the last train home, so I did the only thing I could think of and transferred him to my cell (hiding the number).

I packed up, walked out of the building, and walked across to the train. When he heard the noise, he asked what was happening, so I just replied:

Me: “I know you’ve said you’re not ending the call, and I know I’ve told you the solution, which is to call your account manager when the business opens. I need to start heading home, so I figured we can multitask and go over these options as many more times as you need to understand, while I head home. Now, which part would you like to go over again? How long until an account is suspended?”

I think I broke him. I got a solid thirty seconds of silence, followed by screaming that he understood it but didn’t accept it. Blah blah blah.

So, I started my hour-long commute home with this guy. The train was super loud, so I had to keep asking him to repeat himself (and sometimes I did it for fun).

Me: “Sorry, the train is super loud, can you repeat? Are you asking me why I don’t know a stranger’s cell number again? Well, your account manager is not someone I know; I’m not friends with them. You have their email to contact them yourself!”

I sound super peppy the whole time, talking to them like I was explaining shapes to a toddler.

He finally lost it halfway through, said he was suing me personally, and I finally got to hang up.

The account expired three months later, and all the data was deleted. Last I heard, it had gone to a UK collections agency.