Servicing Customers

I wish customer service didn’t include the customers. Working with the general public will make me want to throw things and even sometimes jump around and stomp my feet like a three year old. I have worked in the customer service industry in one form or another all my life, and people suck, present company excluded of course. I work for a plumbing, heating & air conditioning company which offers 24 hour service. All of the calls go directly to a lucky member of our amazing office team. There are 7 girls in our office and each of us is required to take the on call cell phones home for a week on a rotating basis. Beginning at 6:00pm until 7:00 the next morning we are in charge of 2 separate cell phones. At the end of the day the office lines are rolled to these phones and we get the pleasure of speaking with the fine people of the Greater Fresno area, as well as the service technicians, plumbers and various salesmen calling in to be dispatched. We do get paid pretty well for it, but there isn’t enough money in the world for the middle of July.

Summertime in Fresno has the median temperature of well over 100 degrees. This can last for weeks at a time! Every year, as the dreaded season draws closer, in our office there has a palpable undertone of doom. Starting in May we investigate the on call rotation calendar like a 7^th grader desperately looks at the cast list to see if she made the spring play… only in reverse. Weeks are traded like cigs for ramen in prison. “I will take your second week in August for my third week in June because my family is planning a trip that weekend”. Who has Memorial Day weekend and the Fourth of July? Lucky me,  I had both and seriously didn’t have the energy for the swapping this year. However, I narrowly dodged Memorial Day with a raging case of colitis which landed me in the emergency room that very day. My dear office manager had to absorb that phone duty for me. I can honestly say I would rather have an inflamed colon.

After hours and fielding phone calls from the prison which is my couch, the assholery begins. There is no other anxiety ridden rage which consumes my body more than an old lady screeching at me about her little dog about to expire in the heat, or her swollen feet not being able to rest in her bedroom because 1 of her 2 air conditioning systems is down. When I have the audacity of suggesting she rests her puffy peds in the living room for the night until our heat soaked technician can service her system in the morning, the ragged rant can be heard through the iPhone all the way across the room where my patient wife is standing eyebrows raised. There is a certain tone to an elderly woman’s scream that can’t be duplicated by impersonation or machine, it just never does it justice.

Another one of the problematic assholes (management likes for us to call them "challenging customers") who makes my neck hot is the Whiney Man. Mr. Whiney Man, Esquire will begin the conversation trying to be make you feel guilty that his air conditioner is blowing warm air. It could be that he is blaming his incompetent wife for running the unit too long and making the refrigerant run out (not gonna happen by the way), or he will pull out a sick kid with asthma from behind is large ass and act like I alone am making the poor thing have breathing problems. Question: why don’t you go to a friend’s house or your mom’s where there is actually air conditioning before your kid passes out? Answer: Because it’s specifically my problem and I better get his air fixed, evidently.

The passive aggressive fella will make a very distinctive “I’m a pussy but I’m going to pretend I’m kind of a big deal and threaten your company with a bad Yelp review to get what I want” tone to his voice that makes me want to punch him in the throat through the phone. In my head I am screaming “Stop whining right now you crying baby without his pacifier in gym shorts and a too small muscle shirt or I’ll make you sweat for the next 3 days!” Yet, henceforth and hitherto, I don’t relay this internal eruption. I patiently tell Sir “I’m The Only Person in the Universe” when we can in fact have a service technician to his home, and yes this is the very best I can do, and no if he calls the owner of the company who he goes to church with he will not be able to get faster service, and yes we will call him before we head over and no I don’t think he is a total jackass. He is, in fact, a total jackass.

People are mean when they are hot. Like, MEAN. I had a 9 month pregnant woman threaten my job if I couldn’t move heaven and earth to have a new unit installed the following day. She told me if I valued my job I would make it happen. I guess I didn’t value it very much, because the new unit went in when it was originally scheduled, the following Tuesday. I have been called “Stupid” and “Retarded” and have been begged to and cried to. One person actually made me cry. Of course I had been on call for a week in 114 degree heat and had only gotten up from my couch twice the whole day to pee, but it was the final straw. It wasn’t even a very big straw in comparison to what I had been dealing with for days, but it broke the camel’s back and made my wife really mad... at me! I had let them get to me, to break my spirit like a wild horse named Misty. I still have PTSD about that week, but sincerely no week since has compared to it, so that’s a plus.

Honestly, what is worse than any of the above and the many more stories I can regale my limited audience with, I think I am becoming one of those asshole customers. It seems the older I get and the more I have to deal with people in general the shorter my fuse is. My patience with bullshit decreases every year. When I get on the phone with someone, say the pharmacist at Wal Mart, my wife immediately tells me to be nice. Moi?! Well, she may have a point. Incompetence kills me, stupidity enrages me and not getting my way when I am decidedly right will set me off like a Roman candle! Soon I am going to be that screeching old lady, wielding my backless, faded pink slipper at the paper boy and pontificating about how much better customer service was in my day. And it was.