My wife has a friend who’s come round for company, going through a bit of a tough time.

Me: “Coffee?”

Her: “Yes please.

Me: “How do you like it?”

Her: “Black. Like my heart.”

Me: “Heh. Sugar?”

Her: “No thanks.”

Me: “Oh okay, black and bitter then. Like your heart.”

Her: “Heh.”

This happened a while ago. I had taken on a big sister role to a young girl and would take her trick or treating every year as her father was usually working. I believe this took place when she was 9, or maybe 10, but no older.

We are passing by one of the local pubs when one of the bar staff, a friend of mine, steps out. He is wearing a typical Halloween nurse outfit, mini skirt and all. This is normal for my friend. We have a short conversation and move on. As soon as we’re out of earshot…

Girl: was your friend a boy or a girl?

Me: he’s a boy.

Girl: but he was wearing a dress.

Me: yes, he wears dresses sometimes

Girl: why?

Me: why not? He likes to wear dresses.

Girl: OK! Let’s try that house.

And off she skipped to knock on a door. As she’s grown up, she’s become friends with the same guy and is a tolerant and kind young lady that I am so proud to know.

I’m a trainer in a callcenter responsible to train new hires to di their job.
We have multiple clients, mostly shopping channels and orderlines who contracted us to take orders from their customers over the phone as well as do trouble shooting if something goes wrong.
We are a remote-only callcenter and all workers work from home. Trainings also are done all digital in a virtual trainig program which allows the hroup to interact, work with a test program similar to the real one and try all tasks on fake customers before they have to do it in the real databank.
Usually since we can choose between applicants from all over Germany because of us being completely remote, our workers are pretty good at what they do and our recruiters do an amazing job. But now and then one slips through that is… lets say a less desireable member of the team. This one takes the cake though. Lets call her Jane.
I just showed a new qroup how to send a customer a postal label for free shipment in case they want to return a faulty item and how to mark the item in the customers acvount and write a note to the quality team so they have a heads up.

Jane: What do we do to ensure the item is really faulty and it’s not just claiming so.
Me: we don’t. If the customer wants that label they get it. The shipment goes to our quality team and if it isn’t faulty the customer has to pay afterwards.
Jane: but why don’t we control the customer? What if they’re lying?
Me: we can’t control the customer. That’s impossible over the phone. The quality-team does that once the item is shipped.
Besides, I’ve shown you the statistics in the introduction of our client. They barr dishonest customers pretty quickly and are known for it. We don’t get many bad customers and you’ll see those we do get are usually much nicer and honest than you might be used from other clients.
Jane: you only say that all the time to appease us. I don’t believe it. All customers are (slurr)
I’ve heared a lot as a trainer but I must admit for a moment I’m speechless.
Me: that’s a very inappropriate way to talk about people you don’t even know! Please refrain from such comments! Also this is beside the point. Let’s get back to the task on hand. As I said: if the customer calls for a shipping label you just send them one… (I go on explaining the process and showing them in the system what to do. We come to the end of the process)
Me: here at this point you’re almost done. You’ve hopefully choosen the right order, you’ve written a short text for the attached correspondece, you have written a note for quality about the claims the customer had, now you just press either the email button to send it digitally so the customer can print the label or you press the mail button to send ot a letter with the label in it. Are there any more questions?
Jane: I think you didn’t explain this correct. I have no idea what has to be written into the note. How am I supposed to know what to put in for quality?
Me: as I already explained, you put in what the customer tells you. Whatever that is. They’ll tell you why they want the label and which item they send back. If they don’t do it voluntary you just ask them.
Jane: but how do I know they don’t lie?
Me: you don’t and you needn’t know. Quality will find out as soon as they have the item. You just send out the label and put in a notification what the customer wants to return and why.
Jane: but how do I know that?
Me: you ask the customer!
Jane: why aren’t there templates? Why don’t you just tell us what to write into that note?
Me: our client ships hudrets of completely different mercendise which can have thousends of faults. It can be damaged during sipping. It can have a flaw from production. It can be almost everything imaginable. The only one who knows why they send it back is the customer once they get the item, so you simply ask. The only way to find out if it’s true is to physically inspect the item which is what quality does.
Jane: I still think you should just tell us what to write! And how do we know if we semd the label by email or by letter? You didn’t tell us.
Me: you ask the customer how they prefer to have the label send. They’ll tell you.
Jane: I can’t believe you tell us anything. How are we supposed to know what to do if you don’t tell us! How shall I know when I’m allowed to send a letter and when to use email if you don’t tell us?
Me: you are always ‘alliwed do send either a letter or an email, the customers decide how they want their label send.
The only difference is the time it arrives since an email is faster, and that they have to print it themselves at home or if it comes in a letter after one or two days and the customer gets a pre-printed label.
Jane: but I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do! Why don’t you just…
At that point I would have intervened and put that nonsense to rest but another of the new hires beats me to it.
Other trainee: for f** sake, she explained this pretty clear! You. Just. Ask. The. Customer! Then you *** do what they want!
Jane: but what if they lie? How am I supposed…
Other trainee: that’s none of your business! You don’t need to control anything! That’s not our responsibility! Now shut up do we can try this.
Thank god she finally shuts up. I set the trainees up in the test- databank where they all have already set up their own fantasy customers and also already ordered for them (whith those tasks Jane had no proplems at all) so now they can pull up their fake orders and process a retoure just like I’ve shown them. After that I use roleplays with everyone where I repeat the topics we’ve already trained and let them present their screens to look if they now get through the process the right way and know how to deal with it. I decide to have Jane do it last in the hope she’ll get it when she sees and hears her colleagues do it on screen. Till this point I’m rather puzzled what caused all that fuss since she was quick on the uptake and rather pleasant on all of the former tasks and assume she just had a bad case of brainfart.
When it is Janes turn, I let her present me her screen and start the roleplay.
Me: hello! My name is Melanie Regular and I want to return my lamp. It doesn’t turn on.
Jane has greeted me just fine but now she doesn’t reply.
Me: hello? I’d like to do a return?
Jane: (completely out of play after she watched four other peopke do it right) stop harrassing me! You know I can’t do it! You didn’t explain this properly! The others didn’t do it right either and you just did nothing to correct them! I can’t…
She now losses it completely and starts screaming and berating me how I ecplained everything wrong, how I have no idea what I’m doing etc. etc. till I know nothing else to do than mute her! I’m completely stunned. I have trained several hundred people for this project so far and even the slowest ones never had any problems with this simple process!
I say into the compleye silence that I won’t let her berate me. If she wants to complain about me she can do so to her boss.
Meanwhile she finds the unmute button and cuts into me, now berating me that I try to silence her complaints and don’t want the group to hear that I’m doing everything wrong. I mute her again and demote her in the system so she can’t interrupt anymore while alarming her supervisor in another chat to get her out of my training and have a talk to her.
Since everything happening in a digital training session. The whole thing is recorded and I trust her supervisor to rewatch the part of the session and deal with it accordingly.
I finish the training without her just fine. The other trainees seem rather relieved she is gone and work very well. The program we’re using is pretty userfriendly and till the end of the day they learnned everything concerning taking orders, processing orders, returns, exchanges and we are ready to moove on to financial disputes and payment the next day.
After the training is finished Janes Supervisor and their responsible manager call me. They have reviewed the session, talked to her and decided she wouldn’t come back to my training, they assure me I was not at fault but since her application showed she had lots of experience and her good performance during the training before the incident they decided to give her one more chance with another trainer who starts his training the next day.
I agree to this and honestly I’m glad I won’t have to deal withbit anymore.
Somehow she managed to get through training with my colleague who’s just a little bemused when she tells him how relieved she is to finally have a trainer who knows what he’s talking about. He tells me that later on and we both laugh. It was possibly his best decision not to tell her that I had trained him as well just a few month prior. At that point I come to the conclusion she probably couldn’t endure being trained by another woman.
Cue a few weeks forward.
Janes manager calls me regularly to chat with me about my trainees and their sucess so I am in the loop about the quality of my trainings. As usual everything is mostly fine and we discuss only minor adjustments during changes in policy of some of our clients.
Out of a whim I ask about Jane’s performance since the incident really stuck with me.
Manager: *laughs* you know how the client regularly makes announced test calls and asks our workers questions abour policy and proper handling of orders and customer requests?
Me: yes I know that. I alway tell my trainees up front to expect these and how to adress the client.
Manager: yes we know you do. Your colleague does too. Well she got one last week.
Me: and?
The manager laughes openly now: at first she berated the representative of our client and accused him of pranking her, then she pulled her team leader into the call trying to make her deal with that, let me citate that: moronic idiot who thinks he can prank honest workers. Then, when her team leader told her that the representative wasn’t a prank caller and had every right for a test call she ranted about your colleague and you for not telling them and finally she tried ti ‘correct’ our clients representative when he tried to explain to her that the answers she’d finally given to him where wrong. She then tried to explain to him why it didn’t matter that one answer she gave was the opposite of what she was meant to do since the policy they have is stupid anyway. At this point our clients representative ended the call just to call me and demand she was pulled off that moment!
Me: so she’s..
Manager: fired! Yes she is! Whe had her under surveillance already but she might have gotten off with an additional training since she was mostly not that bad but after this we couldn’t keep her even one second longer! Should have let her go when she pulled that stunt during training really.
Me: well I couldn’t believe it either. She was totally ok at first! When she got all fired up that day I felt as if I’d been sucked into some kind of twilight zone. I thought she had a bad day.
Manager: that’s what we thought too, especially since she did fine with your colleague again. But we I think we dodged a bullet here, her timed contract was almost over. My guess is she restrained herself to get her permanent contract and then it could have taken a year to get rid of her while she’d run rampage with our clients customers!

Considering the strict labour laws in Germany I guess we’ve been pretty lucky she was such a crazy nut she couldn’t even hold it in for six month! After that with her permanent contract it would have taken three written warnings and several chances for retraining and coaching to send her on her merry way. A year would have been a possible amount of time we would have been stuck with her unless she’d been so stupid to cause a data security breach or work time fraud.

(My boyfriend and I are lying in bed together. He is alternating between using my hand to hit himself in the forehead and kissing me passionately. After a while, he stops and looks up at the ceiling while I cuddle up against him. Note: we are both ADHD, but I have medication while he does not, making my mind seem normal when I’ve taken the medicine. We often tease each other when the other shows off their ADHD. His lack of medication sometimes results in interesting conversations especially when he has been drinking, like tonight, though that doesn’t happen often.)

Boyfriend: You know what I kept thinking about? Castles?

Me: Castles?

Boyfriend: Yeah.

Me: You are so ADHD!

Boyfriend: It was only when we kissed though. It was like the castles in a fantasy world. There was a white-haired protagonist. He was an adolescent… like 12-13.

Me: Why the f*** were you thinking about that!?

Boyfriend: *already giggling* I dont know, but he’s destined to do great things!

(We both started laughing hysterically, even to the point of tears. After we had calmed down, his mind went in a completely different direction so I dont know what great things the protagonist is meant for, but he has got some things to do apparently!)

So this is stems from a mistake I made. In my defense, I had a lot going on. My job had told me that because of the pandemic I was being let go at the end of the month. Since they didn’t have a policy of paying severance, I was expected to continue working until then. I’m aware that I could have fought it, however I decided against fighting it since I would rather have references for job hunting. That being said I was more preoccupied with figuring out what I would do for health insurance and job hunting and I missed some stuff.

My job was to help coordinate shipments. This particular shipment was going from a 3rd party to my company’s client overseas. They changed the courier service three times on me. The third one was not one I’d worked with before, and the initial email I got from Person A was, “Please confirm the pickup time and date.” My mistake here was taking that at face value and not remembering to send over our shipping documents.

A couple days later right before the pickup is supposed to happen, I get an email from Person B with several people from my company copied on to it asking about the documents which I immediately sent over. Not even a minute after I had sent it, Person A sent an email with everyone still copied on it saying “[My Name] hasn’t sent the documents to us.”

I will fully admit I made a mistake but it was one that could be quickly fixed and I feel that calling me out by name was unprofessional and rude. Maybe I’m just being too sensitive.