Some People Take Sports Way Too Seriously

It’s been a few years since this happened in 2016, so some of the specific details are fuzzy. I was working as a floor supervisor for a satellite TV company’s technical support center. The call group I was heading up was a corporate-level team designed to handle customer situations that were recurring frequently or just not getting resolved.

The customer called in and spoke to my agent, demanding credit on his account because he couldn’t watch a baseball game that had happened two days before. On top of that, he was wanting the company to reimburse him for his ~$100 bar tab because he “had to go there to watch the game” because he got an error message. Company policy was that if there was an actual issue and we couldn’t fix it, we’d give credit for the time you were without service.

The error he was getting was a black-out message. He lived in the Chicagoland area, and he was wanting to watch a Cubs playoff game. Since he was in the local area and it was a home game, they had restricted the broadcast in his area to encourage people to buy a ticket and see the game in person. While it’s not what most people want to hear, normally, they understand. Not this guy. He asked for a supervisor and I took the call.

He immediately tore into me, cursing the company, me personally, and anyone else he could think of that might have been involved. I let him get it out of his system and asked for some more information. After he explained the situation, I confirmed that his service was working properly and explained the issue. I also asked him to call us in the future when the issue was happening so that we could fix it.

He refused to accept anything beyond a technician coming out and a full year of service, for free. Like… everything. NFL Sunday Ticket, MLB Extra Innings, HBO, all the international channels (from China, the Philippines, Guatemala, etc,), you name it, he wanted it — for free. I did the math out then, and I think it was around $3,500 in total services he was demanding. As a tenured employee, even I didn’t get all that, and I told him as much.

For some reason, that’s when he changed tactics and started crying, recounting the horrible things he saw and did while a member of the armed services (Marine Corps, I think it was). I have no idea the experiences he’d had and can’t imagine how traumatizing the things he was telling me must have been, but they didn’t change that there wasn’t actually a problem, and if there had been, we weren’t given a chance to fix it.

When crying didn’t work, he threatened to kill me and bomb the call centre. That’s when I took all his information (we had his name, address, phone number, SSN — the whole nine yards) and provided them to his local law enforcement agency. I escalated the call to my corporate security team so that they could provide the call’s recording as evidence for when he went to trial.

It wasn’t cost-effective to have me flown from Denver to Chicago for the proceedings, but I was kept in the loop when he was arrested and charged. I’m pretty sure he took a plea deal.