Training The Trainees To Hate The Job

This was a few years ago now, so the details may be a bit hazy. While in university in Canada, I was working at a call center. This particular call center had a contract with an American cell phone provider.

As a true introduction to how brutal customer service can be, this story took place during my training. It was my first day on the phones in the training room with the other trainees. It may have even been my first call; I’m not sure.

The call started out with the caller already agitated. After getting his information to bring up his account, we got into the details of why he was calling. About nine or twelve months before this call, he had called to cancel his cell service with this provider, but now he had an outstanding bill that had been sent to a collections agency — thus the agitation/anger.

So, I checked the notes and saw that he had, indeed, called to cancel. However, something had gone wrong and the service was never shut off.

Normally, this would prompt a call back to fix the problem, but this upstanding gentleman, upon learning that his phone was still active, thought, “I have a free cellular plan!” This man proceeded to use this phone daily for months before it was finally shut off for non-payment. The gentleman in question would have received bills for the usage for those months (though he claimed he didn’t) but still chose to assume he didn’t have to pay because of his prior call to cancel the service.

So, obviously, being sent to collections made him a little upset. About twenty minutes into the call, this man was screaming at me. I could hear his kids in the background crying, his wife pleading with him to stop yelling, the whole nine yards. This man was now blaming me personally for everything. It was my fault his service had never been never shut off. It was my fault he had been sent to collections. It was my fault his kids were crying. He was a fisherman by trade, apparently, and I was now ruining his first weekend home in over a month… You get the picture.

This man was now screaming at me, while I was trying to apologize and get him to understand that, while we had screwed up by not cancelling his service, he was indeed still responsible for the usage since I could see calls on his bill after he had tried to cancel. After about thirty or forty minutes, the trainer had taken everybody else off their calls so they could all plug into my call to hear what was going down.

Finally, about an hour in, this fine upstanding gentleman asked for a supervisor. After the trainer (who was also a supervisor) took over, he continued to rant. The supervisor continued to try to explain that he was responsible, but he just wouldn’t listen. In the end, if my memory serves me correctly, he threatened legal action and hung up.

I never did find out what happened in the end as I quit a month or so later. And by “quit”, I mean “stopped showing up”. After they finally realized I wasn’t coming back, the head of the call center called me to tell me I was welcome to come back at any time. That’s how desperate they were for staff. And now, almost twenty years later, I still hate phone calls.