I took customer service calls for Verizon Wireless. I wasn't employed by Verizon, but by a third party company that specialized in inbound call centers.
You have no idea what hell is until you work on the phones for a month.
A few of my memorable calls:
A woman called me and immediately started yelling because her answering machine message at her house had changed to a message she tried to leave on her machine while she was on vacation. Because she used her vzw phone, she blamed the change on that, and wanted me to fix it. Not something I can do, since I don't have magical controls over the electronics in her house.
Another woman called requesting that I download a Michael Jackson song on her phone shortly after he died. She wanted it set as a ring tone. I politely told her (with a supervisor standing right next to me) that I cannot remotely download anything to her phone as SHE has to personally accept the terms and conditions. She exploded at me, telling me that the person she had before did it for her. I again reminded her that it's not possible (and it really isn't) and offered to walk her through it. By this time, she was screaming for a supervisor. My friend was standing next to me and could hear every word she said. She took the sup call for me, during which the woman told her that I was extremely rude and that I had lied to her. She ended up hanging up before anything could be resolved. Funny thing was, I looked back in her history, and she had called before requesting a ringtone and been told that it couldn't be done.
I took another call from an extremely frantic woman who was being questioned by the cops in relation to text message harassment. This woman had changed her number some months before because she was receiving harassing calls, and someone that she knew had been given that number and was using it to threaten the lives of children. And I mean saying things like they were going to go in and shoot up a school. She was at the police station when I talked to her, and she wanted me to tell the cops that she didn't have the number. I told her that I'd be happy to, but the cops wouldn't take the call. They needed to hear it from vzw's legal department, and it just so happened that it was a long weekend and they weren't going to be in for a few days. The call ended with the woman bawling about how they were going to take away her kid because they thought she was a threat to her.
The most interesting thing I witnessed, though, was a series of calls a friend had. He called an elderly woman probably 20 times over the series of a month, helping her straighten out her plan, find a phone that she could use, and anything else imaginable. They ended up having such a rapport that the woman wanted his address so that she could send him some things for the baby he and his girlfriend were having. Against company policy, he wrote down her address, and as far as I know, they still keep in contact.
My main problem was the incessant bitching. I'm a really sarcastic person, and it was extremely hard for me not to make snarky remarks to people when they were being utterly stupid. In the end, it turns out that there are some things that you cannot pay me to do. I was good at it (our calls got scored for quality control, and even though I was new, I was in the top 10% in the building) but the stress of having to take abuse and not give it back got to me. I was actually physically ill for a while, and decided that I had enough.
