Good Ol’ Stan.

I work for a large American credit card company call center. I’m in a department where we are partnered with an airline. Our clientele (according to literally every department) are the worst. They’re mostly toxic, stuck up, and major assholes. With that, our department tends to attract the clinically insane people.

We seem to have a regular that calls in on a normal basis, we’ll call him Stan. When I say normal basis, I mean everyday for the last 7 years. I also mean normal as in, all 130 employees in our department have spoken to him at least between 1-4 times. I have been very fortunate to only have gotten him once in my two years with the bank.

The issue is no one knows what he actually wants. I think he is in his late 70’s, and the first thing he always asks is “DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?” You can’t even finish your intro without him acting crazy. He is so well known by our supervisors, they tell us to just transfer him straight over. Apparently he just rambles until someone finally hangs up. At this point, it’s definitely a running joke in our department. If you even say “Yeah, I got Stan today.” Everyone is just going to groan and wonder why we don’t block his number and make him send letters. But it always makes the day more interesting when he does call. Usually you’ll know someone got him when the agent stands up and is flailing their arms at everyone in the pod. Puts a smile on our faces knowing we all have something funny to say later. Its the small things that can make us all a little bit more joyous. As annoying and frustrating it is when Stan calls, hes the reason why we all get to have a good laugh at the end of the night. Thats why our department is the closest compared to the other ones.