Last year, I spent several hours on the phone with customer support for a major online retailer after their shipping service lost a package with most of the Christmas gifts I had bought for my family, the total value of which was somewhere between $500$ and $600.

I’m pretty sure the driver looked in the package and decided to keep it. I’ve gotten packages delivered by [Company] logistics that look like they’ve been opened or messed with before.

The customer service representative was insistent that they couldn’t ship replacements out. He just kept telling me there was nothing he could do, but he would offer to upgrade me to their subscription service. It was really hard not to laugh at that since I already had [Service].

He even fought me when I gave up on that and tried to get a refund so I could just reorder everything.

After hours of fighting this guy over the phone and being put on hold for over half an hour at a time multiple times, the representative randomly transferred me to someone else without saying anything about it.

The new customer service representative picked up and had no idea what was going on, so I explained the situation to her. She told me to hold on and put me on hold again.

Five minutes later…

Representative #2: “You should have your replacement items in a few days.”

When I was nineteen, I joined the Navy as a recruit. During the first two weeks, we had to do all sorts of exercises before we could be shipped off to our respective service locations.  Among these were physical trials, the last of which was the dreaded 3,000-metre timed run. Being more of a sprinter than a long-distance runner, I hated that one. We had done similar tests in school when I was growing up, and I hated it then, too.

The run actually went pretty well for me, though. I pushed myself hard and felt the taste of blood in my mouth and my whole body aching, but I knew I was doing well. I was hot on the heels of one of my squad mates, who happened to be an elite volleyball player in tremendous shape, so even though he pulled away from me on the finishing stretch, I felt confident that I would score a good time for my run — perhaps even a personal best.

As I crossed the finish line, my body rioted and I ended up in a ditch, vomiting from the sheer exhaustion. I had pushed myself beyond the limit. Still, though. Good time. Should be worth it.

Later that day, back in the barracks, one of the training officers came to find me.

Lieutenant: “[My Name]?”

Me: “Yessir.”

Lieutenant: “I’m afraid I have some bad news. We don’t have a time for your 3,000-m run.”

Me: “What? But I…”

Lieutenant: “It seems the guys responsible for writing down the times missed you. And a few other guys. Since this is a required test, you’ll have to run it again.”

I was gutted. I felt sure I had scored a good time, possibly the fastest I had ever run that distance, and they failed to record it? Man, that smarts. (I’m actually still a bit sore about that, twenty years later, because now I’ll never know how fast I actually managed to run it).

That same evening, I went back out there to do the run again. I was tired, so I wasn’t able to put in the same level of effort this time, but as long as I ran it under a certain time, it would at least be approved. I did the best I could, crossed the finish line exhausted once again, and returned to the barracks for a well-earned night’s sleep.

The following morning, over breakfast, I was once again approached by our lieutenant, who was looking sheepish.

Lieutenant: “[My Name], I’m sorry about this…”

Me: “What is it?”

Lieutenant: “Your second run yesterday?”

Me: “Yes, I did it.”

Lieutenant: “That’s just it. We still don’t have a time recorded.”

Me: “You’re kidding me!”

Lieutenant: “Afraid not.”

Me: “So I have to do it again?! That’s three runs in two days!”

Lieutenant: “I know, I know… Look, I don’t know what to tell you. We’re not going to hold the results against you if you get a weak time; just get through it in less than the fifteen minutes required.”

At this point, I was fuming. How difficult could it be to look at a stopwatch as a runner comes across a finish line? Even if the times were slightly inaccurate due to the manual recording, it can’t be that hard to get SOME kind of result written down? Thinking the guys responsible for this must be absolutely useless at their jobs, I headed back to the barracks to get back into my sneakers and tracksuit.

Once again, I ran that dreaded 3,000-metre track around the base. Once again, I hated it. Once again, I crossed the finish line, feeling like I was going to vomit. This time, though, I had learned my lesson.

Over by the finish line was a guy with a clipboard and a stopwatch. I went over to the guy to make sure he got my time down. It couldn’t be that hard; there were only two runners on the track.

Guy: “What…?”

Me: “Just checking to see that you wrote my time down this time. I’m [My Name].”

Guy: “Oh…”

Me: “Yeah.”

Guy: “…”

He just stood there with a blank look.

Me: “So?”

Guy: “Uh… what…?”

Me: “Write it down!”

Guy: “What?”

Me: “My time! Write it down, there, on that piece of paper!”

Guy: “Uh… oh, yeah…”

Me: “You’re still not writing! That number, on your stopwatch, write it down on that line there.”

It still took him some thirty seconds to finish the simple task of writing down six numbers on his piece of paper. Honestly, I half suspected the guy was either on drugs or just completely useless. I literally had to point to the correct line on his sheet, and I refused to move until I could see that he had actually written down my time next to my name.

In the armed forces, we are sometimes given access to some really dangerous things. Like guns. Good thing this guy was only assigned to handle a stopwatch.

As my father got into his eighties, he needed more and more help with things, and one day, he called me with an odd one. His bank wouldn’t let him into his safe deposit box. He had opened this box decades previously at a smaller bank for free. Sometime later, they sent him a letter saying that they had been bought out and that his box was now at a larger bank. He didn’t think much about it. But after several more years, when we went to the new bank to get into his box, he said they wouldn’t let him in.

So, I went into the bank and found a customer service person.

Me: “Hi. I have my father’s power of attorney, and he said that he’s having trouble getting into his safe deposit box.”

The representative took my father’s information and typed for a while.

Representative: “Hmm. Your father doesn’t have a safe deposit box with us. I’m sorry. He’s mistaken. Sometimes older people forget where their boxes are. It happens all the time.”

I went back to my dad.

Me: “Dad, I’m sorry, but you’ve got the wrong bank. They don’t have your box. They looked it up. Maybe you closed it? Maybe it’s at another bank?”

Dad: “No! Here’s the key! Here’s the letter I received. They have my box.”

I went back to the bank.

Me: “My dad is sure he has a box here. Here’s the key, and here’s a letter showing the box is at your bank.”

The representative typed for a while again, getting conspicuously annoyed.

Representative: “I don’t know what to tell you, but your father is mistaken. We do not have his box. If we did, it would show on the computer. Here’s all your father’s account information. There is no box.”

Me: “Can we try the key, please?”

Representative: “No. I can’t let you go into someone else’s box just because you have a key to it. Your father is mistaken. We don’t have his box. Please go.”

And there it sat.

Then, one day, I was at another of my father’s banks. (He believed in keeping a little money in multiple places in case of a bank failure.) I was griping to the woman there, and she wrote down a name and number on a piece of paper and said, “Call this woman.” And I did. She turned out to be the operations manager for that first bank branch.

Me: “Hi. My father thinks he has a safety deposit box at your bank, but the customer service reps say no. Is there any way you can help us?”

I heard a bunch of typing.

Operations Manager: “Your father does not have a box with us. What’s the number on the key?”

Me: “[Number].”

There was more typing.

Operations Manager: “Hmm. That’s a mystery box. We have no name attached to it, it’s not assigned to anyone, and we’re not allowed to assign it to anyone in the system. How about you come in and we try the key?”

Walking into the bank, meeting the operations manager, and going into the boxes, under the eyes of the original customer service representative… Not gonna lie. I enjoyed that. The key worked, my dad’s stuff was all there, and we grabbed it fast. The operations manager told us later that they had had computer problems migrating everything from the original bank, so that’s why it wasn’t in the computer.

Lesson: computers don’t eliminate mistakes; they just allow people to be more confident in their errors. And sometimes it’s just a matter of finding the right person to help you.

I work at a pizza delivery restaurant in a high-end neighborhood. It’s a slammed Saturday night with a forty-five-minute delivery wait at least, and customers are informed that larger orders are taking ninety minutes. We also explain that takeout orders are done in twenty minutes if the delivery wait is too long.

I am getting a lot of angry calls from customers asking about their pizzas, and one customer in particular, who ordered four pizzas, keeps calling.

Caller: “Why haven’t they arrived?!”

Me: “As we explained, sir, we are exceedingly busy tonight, and—”

Caller: “We have company to entertain with no food! We live literally down the street; we can see you from our house, and you’re obviously not working fast enough!”

Me: “Uh… sorry about the wait, but we did mention that takeout was faster and you could still pick them up…?”

Caller: “No! We will wait, but this is just taking forever!” *Click*

I work in a store that sells bicycles. I get a call from a customer.

Customer: “Can you tell me about your bikes?”

Me: “What would you like to know?”

Customer: “What brands, sizes, and colors do you have? And what quality are they?”

Me: “Sir, we have over twenty different kinds of bikes in our store. If you go to our website, you can find all of those details.”

Man: “Why can’t you just tell me whether the bikes are any good? Why is it so difficult for you to tell me that?!”

Mind you, he was looking for a tricycle for his son… and failed to mention that until twenty minutes into the conversation.

He made his poor wife come in and return the trike four different times for something different. He also wanted me to magically know which customer that came in was his wife after she left the first two times.