I worked for a medium sized cable company for a number of years and this call always stuck with me.
Was working the evening shift, so I get this call around 8pm at night. Older gentleman calling because he’s getting “No Signal” on his TV. This usually would be a fairly simple call, usually just educating the customer on how to change the input on their TV, but this guy insisted on making everything so difficult.
When I asked him to try changing the input he had to argue with me that it was never changed and wouldn’t follow any instructions I gave him. He was so insistent that the issue was with our equipment as nothing changed from his end. (Oh how I’ve heard that story a million times)
He’s basically screaming at me at this point to “zap” his box. As that’s what we always do to fix the issue. So I’ve given up trying to reason with this guy and just send the signals to reset his box but, like I figured, it didn’t fix the issue.
So now he goes on a rant about how our service and equipment sucks and demands we come out and fix it now or he’ll cancel service. I explain we can get someone out the next day, but of course that’s too long of a wait for him. Going without TV service for 24 hours would apparently kill this guy. Cue another 15 minutes about how terrible we are as a company.
Finally after he shuts up, I’m finally able to explain that if he could just follow a few simple instructions we most likely will be able to fix this over the phone.
Finally he starts playing nicely and starts going through the inputs, but we’re not getting a signal on any of them. So I hesitantly ask him if he can check the cord running from the cable box to his TV. He bitches for another 5 minutes, but finally obliges.
He puts the phone down while he does this. I hear him groan and moan about how he’s too old and shouldn’t have to be doing our job for us, blah, blah, blah.
I hear equipment and furniture being moved around in a rather feisty manner and a few swear words from him….then BOOOOOM! CRASH! BANG!
I hear someone yelling in agony. My mouth is on the floor at this point.
“Hello? Sir? Are you okay?”
I hear a lady on the phone next. “I’ll have to call you back, the entertainment stand just fell on my dumbass husband. I have to call 911.”
Click.
I actually laughed just from the way she said “dumbass husband”. This was a lady who has put up with some shit.
The Mrs. actually called back in later in the night and I happened to get her again. She called just to let me know that he was okay. He had to get some stitches in his head but she assured me that luckily there was nothing in his head to hurt in the first place. Their son stopped over to help hook everything back up and their TV was working fine now. She told me that “apparently it just needed to smash my husbands head to get it working!”. Just how awesome she was totally made up for how much of an ass her husband was! Plus, karma’s a bitch!
