The Bad Customer / Bad Client Thread

If you work for humans, you've got stories of bad customers. (Maybe even if you work for dogs, and definitely so if you work for felines, those ungrateful furballs...) Post 'em here! Vent! Rant! Give us hilarity!

I expanded the thread idea to include "clients" so people who don't work in customer service can play too.

Just, um...mind your NDAs (non-disclosure agreements), kids. Just because you hate part of the job doesn't necessarily mean you want to lose it, so change some of those details to protect you, the innocent.

Have fun!

 

I do housekeeping at an inn. During the good weather months, people like to come up from the city and get married there. They rent out the whole inn to their family and friends and usually at the wedding reception everyone gets wasted drunk. We have these houses at the bottom of the hill that we also rent out. That's where the really big after party is. There's been times where people have puked on the floor, pissed the bed, filled the bathtub full of beer cans and beer bottles, smeared food all over the windows, put holes in the walls, broken mirrors, ripped the stairway railing out of the wall, spilled beer all in the carpet, threw cigarettes butts all over the ground outside, and trashed the place so bad that when I walk in there all I can do is stand there in the doorway thinking, "Where do I even begin?" And do you think they would at least leave a tip?! Hell no! Wedding season starts at the end of April and we are booked every weekend for weddings until November. God help me.

 

Nice idea for a thread by the way! I'm really going to need this! Haha.

 

I can't take credit for the idea but will accept your thanks on their behalf. Someone suggested it over in another thread a while back when we were swapping customer service horror stories, and I happened to have a few seconds to get it started.

 

I had a parent ask about the reward system at the place I work at twice. Both times he stated that he had enough junk at home already. Sorry, dude. The kids did well for the week and deserve a reward.

[We have a system where the kids all have a friendly competition and each week the winning group gets a small prize. It's nothing big and it gives the kids a small incentive to behave because K-5th grade isn't usually prone to behaving appropriately.]

 

Issuing documents in comic sans. Requiring me to return lengthy, essay-style responses... in Excel.

 

That is some super-human drunk strength, right there. (Or, possibly another substance or two.) That is insane!

I always felt bad for Housekeeping when I'd read the various Motley Crue members' books. One of them used to pee in the corner of the hotel room on a regular basis as if it were nothing because he could never remember where the bathroom was in the middle of the night.

If I owned the inn, I'd charge a mandatory gratuity for wedding parties, and every cent of it would go to you. You more than deserve it.

 

All of mine have to do with interpreting.

Typical day for a 'terp...

Spoiler: Scenario 1

Scenario 1

Client - "Please ask Mr. Pérez his date of birth."

*I interpret*

Mr. Pérez - "Well, you see, there was this guy named Christopher Columbus and he came to the new world.... discovered the west coast.... did you know that most of that area used to be Mexico... Spanish-American War.... WWI... WWII... the 60's were an intense time... "

Client (directly to me) "What did you ask him?"

Me - "His date of birth, ma'am."

Client - Do we have it yet?

Me - "No."

Spoiler: Scenario 2

Scenario 2

Client - "Mrs. Fuentes, your check and the new bill must have crossed each other in the mail. Your account shows a zero balance. You are completely up to date."

*I interpret*

Mrs. Fuentes - *repeats the same 20 min rant about how her bill shows two months owing and she already made the payment and she's going to call the police. Its nearly word for word what she said last time*

Client - "Mrs. Fuentes, your check and the new bill must have crossed each other in the mail. Your account shows a zero balance. You are completely up to date."

*I interpret AGAIN*

Mrs. Fuentes - *repeats the same 20 min rant about how her bill shows two months owing and she already made the payment and she's going to call the police. Its nearly word for word what she said last time*

This happens two more times before Mrs. Fuentes finally says she understands, says thank you, and hangs up.

Spoiler: Scenario 3

Scenario 3

Client - "You used the word quickly here in this paragraph. Could you change it to hastily?"

Me - "No, I cannot. The original Spanish says rapido. Rapido is quickly, not hastily."

Client comes back with dictionary - "It says here that quickly and hastily are synonyms. Can you please change it."

Me - "The word hastily carries with it the connotation that whatever was done was done with little thought or in a careless manner. It's not the same as quickly, Mr. Webster's opinion notwithstanding. Nowhere in the original is that idea mentioned."

Spoiler: Scenario 4

Scenario 4

Client - "Interpreter, I need you to say what I say word for word, and I speak some Spanish, so I'll know if you're off track."

Me in my head - *Yeah, because language is just a plug & replace paradigm where all languages function in the same manner and just use different sounds. Now that I think about it that way, I wonder why my profession is even a profession at all. Computers should have replaced me, like, in the late 80's.*

Spoiler: Scenario 5

Scenario 5

This is from when I first arrived at the SCIF in Berlin. Don't worry, there will be no breaches of security.

My new sergeant - "Airman Fuentes, this will be your station. This is your headset. If you want to put something on it to indicate it's yours, that's fine, just nothing crazy (I had a little blue bandana tied around the top of my headset). You'll be using this, this, and this, which you'll remember from training. Don't turn this past ten, or this past fifteen, or flip this to the red position, for the safety of your hearing.

I meet the rest of the flight and then get to work because I am a gung-ho little airman

Thirty minutes into the shift I turn to my new pal, a really friendly buck sergeant named Roger. "Dude, I can't hear shit over all the background noise."

Roger smiles at me, "Yeah, all that shit he said not to do, you have to do it or, you know..." He shrugs.

Most people who did what I did in the military have some degree of hearing loss later in life.

 

Scenario 5 above: Remember the OSHA briefing we got that said that the two most common workplace hazards in our profession were hearing damage and tripping over headset cords?

Yeah, no Purple Heart there

 

Yes! Have I told you lately how much I appreciate you being here as a confirmation that I did live this life once?

 

I would say scenario two is pretty common in my work place, I usually have to go slowly or ask my Spanish speaking co-workers to explain (My Spanish is very limited to basic words). Oddly enough despite being a retail pharmacy, my store doesn't have to many bad customers (though most are regulars as it were). But some of my favorites.

Scene 1:

Me: Alright Mr. Smith here is your medications that will be .50 Cents.
Smith: Wait... What, my medication is free. Did you run it through my insurance.,
Me: Yes and that is what your insurance is charging you, we do not set the price.
Smith: Can you run it again.
Me: It's going to be the same price.
Smith: Then I don't want it, (Smith then storms out over cushion change on his life saving maintenance medications)

This really only happened early on, when I first started... most of those cheap sake customers have pretty much left.

Scene 2:

Me: "Alright, now may I please get your signature:
Smith proceeds to use the stylus over a block of text telling him to sign below.
Smith: Nothing's happening.
Me: You have to sign in the box, Sir.
Smith: Oh, damn modern tech.

Scene 3:

(I apologies for my bad Spanish spelling)
Me: Speaks relatively good Spanish (According to my co-worker she knew what I was saying)
Garcia: Oh, sorry, no speak english.
Me: second attempt to speak spanish, which wasn't bad.
Garcia: No understand.
Me calling over co-worker who basically says what I said and the customer understands them.... Ow Vey.

Scene 4:

 

When I was still freelancing regularly, I once had a client give me a poor review via the service I worked through for "copying from wikepedia". They still accepted the work, mind, so they clearly didn't mind that much -- they just wanted to smear my record over it.

I was furious because of course I didn't plagiarize, but calmed down by telling myself that it was a very short piece and there were only so many ways to phrase the material, so okay, I might've inadvertently used the same wording. The client wouldn't know that I was legit.

Then I checked the wikipedia article. Absolutely no similarity. And no way to contest the poor review through the freelancing service, of course.

 

It sounds like the client just wanted it for free, people can be real piece of shits. It's also why I don't trust online rating systems.

 

I used to do prototyping for all sizes of companies. I dealt with a lot of engineers, and most appreciated a call telling them their tolerances would prohibit function and whatnot, but some got real angry. I would then mess with those engineers. I repeatedly built the same part for the same engineer who worked at a now very famous electric car company. This piece was $300+ each time, and it was always the same file, not a new revision. After building it a couple times I called him and told him he could get the exact same part made out of sheet metal at the local hardware store, he told me he couldn't. It became one of those sticking points. He would submit a job, I would call him and tell him to go to the store and buy it, he would insist it was only his design and command it was built. After the spent a few thousand dollars having the same part built, I stopped by the store on the way to deliver the part. I bought the part off the shelf and delivered it too. After the satisfaction of seeing the shock on his face, I told him I would cover the $2.50 cost.

I worked in tattooing for many years, even traveled internationally for it. I really wish I had written down customer and tattooer interactions daily...I would have had volumes of funny stories. One of my favorite was when a drunk couple came in one night, obviously a first date scenario. Before getting tattooed you had to fill out a form absolving the shop of any problems, and answer a few questions about your health. Most people got tripped up by 'communicable' in 'Do you have any communicable diseases?'. Long story short- Drunk guy, being loud and drunk, asked what it meant. I replied that it meant did he have any disease that could be spread to others by body fluid. He thought hard for a moment, then declared very loudly "Herps! Who doesn't!?!' (He actually said 'herps', like it was a childhood friend.) I told him I didn't, and the woman he came in with told him much more, then got up and walked out with a partial tattoo. He didn't end up getting tattooed that night.

 

I wrote this for my coworker today. She's on vacation and I was missing her today. I wrote it when I was on the clock so "Shh!" Haha.

When I wake up in the morning, I can't wait to come to work.
You and I make a better team than Spock and Captain Kirk.
There's stained towels in the basket and mice dying in the walls.
Sometimes coming to this place is like a hard kick in the balls.
There was a party at the houses and the guests pissed in their beds.
We worked our butts off for no tips! Those cheap ass newlyweds!
There's shit stains in the toilet and on the towels too!
But what makes it all worth it, is that I get to work with you!

 

OMG @izzybot that sucks!!! I hate people.

Your post made me remember something similar I'd forgotten about!

I was the editor of a niche publication. We were niche enough that thanks to aggressive promotion, we were often used as a source by mainstream journalists for research. Because of that, we had a phone number so journalists could call the "office" (a landline with call forwarding; usually to me) to get a live voice when they were on deadline.

Phone rings, it's an angry reader. "You guys are impostors! Your article about [xxxx] is cut and pasted straight from wikipedia!" This guy rants on for like 10 minutes before I can get a word in.

The article was by our top writer, who was an expert working in the field and was an instructor in the subject at a well known university. I couldn't imagine her cutting and pasting or otherwise plagiarizing anything. With the reader on the phone, I pull up our article and the Wikipdeia entry the reader is ranting on about.

Yep, there was the article text in the wikipedia entry, word for word.

"Sir? I do see that the text looks identical to the Wiki piece but--"

"See? Bunch of frauds!"

"--But if you'll scroll down to the bottom of the Wikipedia entry, where the sources are listed for the Wikipedia entry? You'll see that the Wiki page used our article as a source."

 

I got really pissed off today.



My wife got three calls in a row saying there was something wrong with her computer. She called me and I called them back, obviously it was a scam so I told her to ignore it, but I was curious (she doesn't even have a PC, she has a mac.) I created a virtual PC and let them talk me through installing TeamViewer, which is the software they used to remote control your computer (legit software, I use it all the time.)

TeamViewer is supposed to work by you giving a support line a code that is generated that allows them access to your computer, but there is also a two-way communication mode. For some reason, that's what they decided to use to access. They had me log into their computer to set up the sharing session. I assume they did this because just plain viewing doesn't allow you to upload anything to the other computer, where two-way does (they were probably either going to upload ransomware.)

I opened Wireshark and got his public ip address. When he asked me to click on a button to allow him to see my computer, I pretend to click around like I didn't know what he was doing and opened his Start menu just long enough to see what his username was, then I let him into the virtual PC to do whatever he wanted while I did a port scan on his ip to see what kinds of software he was running.

I saw port 3389 open, which I knew was remote desktop. Normally, that's disabled by default, but he'd enabled it for some reason (not uncommon for a work computer, though his ip mapped to an apartment complex in New Dehli.)

Teamviewer is a screensharing tool, so anything we did to each other's computers the other could see. This is not the case if you use Remote Desktop. RDesktop will literally disconnect you if someone else logs into your account. So when I logged in, he got logged out. He seemed completely confused and told me to hold on while he was "looking at the viruses on my computer." (By this point I had already signed him out so he wasn't looking at anything but his own login screen.)

I realized the account I'd just logged in with was the admin account on the computer, so I opened run and navigated to "shell:startup" I created a few batch files in there. Some are pranks that I'd already had laying around (like his CD drive will now pop out every thirty seconds, on the hour, his desktop background will change to a picture of rick astley) then I also wrote several that'll do nothing for 45 minutes, then start deleting different parts of the operating system. Then I shut his computer down and hung up, all of those scripts will run as soon as he turns it back on.



Lessons: 1) If you're gonna scam people with programs like TeamViewer, know how TeamViewer works. 2) Don't use the same password for everything, if his teamviewer password wasn't the same as his account password, it wouldn't have been as bad. 3) Don't ever use your administrator account to do anything, ever. Why would Microsoft even make this the default? 4) Don't be a scammer piece of crap.

 

^^^^That is the best!!!! I laughed for a good five minutes over that! I really wish you could done something with sound, though. "Never gonna give you up..."

 

Don't fuck with anyone from 'Jersey! (I have an ex from Hackensack.)

(edited because my first version of this sentence made no sense)

 

Why I am quite the tough customer.
Using vulgar names such as Sir or Ma'am,
and harsh language like Thank You.

 

I must make a rude employee using the same verbiage, sir, ma'am, and thanks.