My Apple Has No Vegetables

Me: “Good morning, this is [My Name]. How can I help you?”

Customer: “I need to talk to [Assistant, who is at lunch].”

Me: “I’m sorry, he is not available at the moment. Is there something I can help you with?”

Customer: *gives me a very long-winded account of what I assume was an extremely long conversation she had with the assistant the day before* “So I need him to do whatever he was going to do so I can get to my stuff.”

Me: “Okay, if [Assistant] has already discussed this with you then they will know where we are in the process and they can assist you when they return from lunch in about an hour.”

Customer: “So will you ask him to send me an email so I can send him an email back explaining all this?”

Me: “Would you like our email address so you can send him an email? That way he will see it as soon as he gets back and we can get you what you need more quickly.”

Customer: “No. I know your email address, but I just can’t use it.”

Me: “I’m sorry; you cannot use our email address?”

Customer: “Yeah. It doesn’t work or I don’t have all the right buttons or something.”

Me: “I’m not sure what you mean when you say you don’t have the right buttons…”

Customer: “I just got a new computer and I don’t think it has a reply button or at least I haven’t found it yet.”

Me: “The reply button should be on the screen when you are logged in to your email, not on the machine itself. What kind of email are you using?”

Customer: “Just regular email.”

Me: “I mean, are you using Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo—”

Customer: “OH. I don’t know.”

Me: “Well, what is your email address? A lot of times the part after the ‘at’ is the type of email.”

Customer: “My email address is CARROT-A-B-C-A WITH A CIRCLE AROUND IT…”

Me: “I’m sorry, did you say carrot?”

Customer: “Yes.”

Me: “So your address is C-A-R-R…”

Customer: “No. Not spelled out. Just a carrot.”

Me: “Like, the vegetable?”

Customer: “Yes. There is a carrot at the beginning and at the end.”

Me: “I have never heard of a carrot in an email address. Could it possibly be a V or another symbol?”

Customer: “No. I know what the letter V looks like!”

Me: “Okay, but I cannot send you an email to an address with ‘carrots’ in it because there is no key that I can hit to make a carrot show up in the address bar.”

Customer: “So your computer doesn’t have all the buttons either, huh?”

Me: “No, ma’am, my computer does not have a carrot button.”

Customer: “Well, then I guess I’ll just have to call back and talk to [Assistant].”

Me: “That sounds good. Have a nice day.”

(Later, as I was telling this story to the assistant, I pulled up an email that we had sent to this customer and figured out what she was talking about. The email address showed up inside < > brackets, which she was referring to as carrots.)