It’s All Greek To Me

(I work in customer service for an Internet service provider in Cyprus. Our systems give customers the option for Greek or English before connecting them to an agent. We are having a relatively quiet day, and then I get this call.)

Me: “Thank you for calling [ISP]. This is [My Name]; how may I help you?”

Caller: *sounds annoyed* “Yeah, my Internet’s down.”

Me: “I’m sorry to hear that, sir. Give me a moment to check on that.”

(I glance at the phone number he’s calling from and I see way more numbers than there should be.)

Me: “Sir? Where are you calling from exactly?”

Caller: “What? My house! What kind of question is that?”

Me: “I mean what country, sir.”

Caller: “Are you stupid? The USA, of course! What the h*** is wrong with you?”

Me: “You called an ISP in Cyprus, sir. That’s a European country, and I’m sure we don’t provide you or anyone in the USA with any kind of services.”

Caller: *yelling* “How dare you lie to me to get out of doing your job? I can hear you! You f****** sound American!”

Me: “I studied in the USA, though I doubt I still have the accent. That doesn’t change the fact that you called the wrong number and country. You need to call your ISP; I don’t know how you got our number but—“

(He cuts me off and goes on calling me names, saying I’m lazy and a liar, saying that I created a made-up country just to get out of doing work, and so on. I’m getting really annoyed, so I talk over him. Normally this would be a big no-no for my manager, but I risk it since there’s no chance this guy is or ever will be our customer.)

Me: “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you. I doubt anyone can, so I’m hanging up now, but if you ever get your Internet back I suggest you Google where you called and maybe learn something.”

(Later I found out he called back several times, getting more and more annoyed with our agents until someone connected him to our manager. Turns out he went out to find a connection then he somehow ended up on our website, figured, “Eh, an ISP is an ISP,” wrote our number down, and gave us a call. As far as I know, he still thinks we lied to him just to get out of a bit of extra work.)