A woman submits an email ticket for help accessing her account. Okay, easy stuff.

Me: “Can I have your username, please?”

Customer: “[Username].”

Me: “I can’t find that username in the database. Can you please verify that it’s correct?”

Customer: “Yes, it’s correct.”

Me: “Okay. Can you please send a screenshot of the error notification you’re receiving?”

When she does, I notice she’s trying to login into some random website I’ve never even heard of. I have no idea how she ended up with our contact information.

Me: “The site you’re trying to access isn’t a product of our company. You should reach out to their customer support.

I then close the ticket.

But alas, that’s not the end. She calls in to the support line, and I happen to be the one to answer the phone.

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

Customer: “Is this the [My Name] who refused to help me get access to my account?”

I immediately know this is going to be a fun call.

Customer: “It is your job to get me access to my account!”

Me: “Actually, it isn’t; you’re asking about a product we don’t even sell.”

Customer: “I’m not hanging up until you help me!”

I relent and Google the software, find their customer support number, and attempt to give it to her. After I recite the number, she goes silent for a couple of seconds, and then says:

Customer: “What do I do with this? I called you for a reason! Why are you trying so hard to avoid doing what you get paid to do?”

Me: “Ma’am, what hospital do you work for?”

Customer: “[Hospital].”

I do notice that they have an account with some of our products, but the product she needs help with isn’t one of ours. I tell her this and she just isn’t grasping it.

I finally get pissed off.

Me: “Ma’am, this is not a product we sell. There’s nothing I can do aside from pass of their contact number.”

Customer: “Well, we’re going to sit here all day, because I’m not getting off this line until I’m helped”.

I chuckled a little to myself and hung up.

She immediately called back. I saw it on the caller ID and decided to just let it ring for a bit to see if she’d give up. I alerted the other techs, and after a good laugh at her expense, my manager picked up the phone. He told her the same thing I did, and again, she insisted on “being helped”. After she whined some more, he told her there was no assistance we could offer with a product we didn’t sell and hung up, again.

That was the end of her tirade, right?

Nope.

She then began spamming the chat. I closed the first one immediately and she opened a new one.

I finally called the hospital she worked for, and thankfully, someone else picked up the phone. I asked to speak to a manager and told her what was happening, and she apologized and insisted it would stop. The lady immediately quit spamming us. I hope she was immensely embarrassed when she finally realized she was an idiot calling the wrong number. Her final sendoff was giving me a one-out-of-five rating on the initial email ticket she submitted.

Legend has it, to this day, she has yet to gain access to her account.

My boyfriend works for IT help desk at his company. He was on the phone with a customer. I couldn’t hear her, but I did hear him and then he relayed the whole thing to me.

Boyfriend: “Thank you for calling [Company]. How can I help you today?”

Customer: “I need help installing a printer on my computer.”

Boyfriend: “Okay, can you open your Internet and go to [Company] dot com? I will see what I can do!”

Customer: “How do I get to that?”

Boyfriend: “You need to open your Internet browser.”

Customer: “Is that Google?”

Boyfriend: “Yes, you can use Google Chrome. Just let me know once your webpage loads.”

Customer: “What’s the website again?”

Boyfriend: “[Company] dot com.”

Customer: *Saying what she’s typing out loud* “C O M P A N Y D O T C O M.”

Boyfriend: “I’m sorry, did you spell out ‘dot’?”

Customer: “Well, you said, ‘dot,’ so don’t I spell it out?”

[Boyfriend] then pulls off his headset, shakes his head, and promptly hangs up the phone.

Me: “Why did you hang up on her?”

Boyfriend: “If she doesn’t know how to type in a website, then I can’t help her.”

I work in a small IT shop with low traffic, and today, an old person asked me to show him how to use Facebook, Skype, and the Internet basically. I help elderly people with these things almost every week, so there was nothing unusual with his request. Because of the shop’s low traffic, there’s always time to teach the older generation.

My usual tactic with old people is to have them take notes and not only watch me do everything but also try it themselves. After we’re finished, they take a small “exam” where I ask them to do the things we talked about, but with me just observing and not helping. This method has always worked so far. Some of them even got the courage to try new technology stuff themselves and returned just to proudly show off their new tablet/computer/phone skills.

Customer: “I’ll understand everything by watching you doing and explaining it. I’m a fast learner!”

He even refused to take notes. I didn’t want to force him into anything, so I just slowly showed him everything, asking, “Is it okay so far?” from time to time. He always said yes, he understood everything, and that it was not that difficult. We sometimes had breaks to let the information sink in.

We spent an hour and a half going through everything slowly. I honestly believed him that he understood everything. Then, he said:

Customer: “Could you please write all of this on paper? I don’t have my glasses with me and haven’t seen anything on the screen, and everything you were saying seemed difficult, so I didn’t really pay attention.”

I asked him several times during those ninety minutes if everything is all right, so it’s not like he didn’t have a chance to tell me to stop — especially when we were having those five-minute breaks. I understand that he might have felt ashamed for not seeing well or not understanding things, but if that was the case, where did his shame go when he casually said he didn’t listen?

I work in IT. My mentor always said to start with the obvious first, because about twenty common things will make up 50% of all the calls. I had just gotten my coffee and sat down when the phone rang in with a call from the queue. The call handler sounded confused and asked for confirmation of the default software password. User manager, password manager, it hasn’t changed for the twenty years that we’ve sold the product.

Call Handler: “Well, I have a customer who just installed the product who can’t log in.”

I grabbed the case thinking, “Easy kill. I bet he has CAPS LOCK on.” Ten cases a day was considered a solid day’s work. I had gotten one already, and it wasn’t even 9:00 am yet. As soon as I had verified the customer’s details, I asked him to verify that the caps lock wasn’t on.

Customer: “I’m not dumb. I checked that first.”

So, we went through the routine, and nothing worked. The database was there, and the install sounded clean. What should have worked just didn’t.

As an hour dragged to two, I finally asked the customer to uninstall and reinstall, which took half an hour. Still nothing. We tried pasting the account and password and spellcheck didn’t bark. I did a quick check by installing the same version. It worked fine. So, we did an install on a new PC at their site at hour three. Same issue.

Finally, I heard him say:

Customer: “Are there two A’s in ‘manager’? I’m in! Thanks!”

This was followed by a click and dial tone.

I stared at my phone in mute shock. He had misspelled the same word the same way for three hours.

I went back to the queue because I was behind, muttering, “Two A’s in ‘manager’.” It became an internal meme for our group for stupid errors.

Customer: “My Wi-Fi keeps dropping out.”

Me: “I’m sorry to hear that. Let’s see if we can figure out what the cause is.”

Twenty minutes of troubleshooting later, the line is fault-free, the router is running correctly, setup and positioning are correct, and I’m drawing a blank on the cause. As a last-ditch, I boot up a mesh analysis tool.

Me: “I’m seeing some signs of interference. It looks like there’s a device broadcasting quite a strong five-GHz signal on the same frequency as your router. It’s coming and going, so it’s likely a mobile device. Have you bought any new wireless electronic devices lately?”

Customer: “No, but my neighbours have just had the vaccine.”

Me: “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

Customer: “Obviously, the 5G tracking chip in the shot is interfering with my Wi-Fi!”

That was where I had a self-defensive stroke, made some vague comment about changing frequencies, and hung up. I had to take a long break to recover from that one.