My most memorable call

I’m on mobile blah blah blah English is my first language so roast my typos and grammatical errors.

It was my first job, my first week on the phones, working customer service for a phone/cable company. I had barely any idea what I was doing and what to do in this situation. There were people running around helping us newbies but when I got this call they were busy, on lunch, or across the call floor.

I answer the phone and this lady immediately starts screeching at me about how her services have been turned off and she needs them turned back on NOW she doesn’t have time to be on the phone all day etc. you know the drill.

Then before I can answer, she says “be right back” and sets the phone down, and I can hear the whole conversation that she’s having while I look and see why her services are suspended. Surprise, it’s suspended because she has only paid $20 for the last three bills, each of which were well over $300.

So at this point in time, I’m just waiting for her to get back. I’m trying not to listen too much because I don’t want to invade her privacy and I’m a generally anxious person. Turns out, there’s a mass shooting that’s happening (in America so like it’s not like this is information that will identify anyone (unless she’s reading this then I just wanna say that I hate you and people like you are why I’m on anxiety medication)) and this lady is apparently the go-between between the cops searching for the active shooter and the head of the department or whatever.

She called IN THE MIDDLE OF AN ACTIVE SHOOTING while she was doing something I’d consider to be pretty important, WHILE ON THE JOB AS A COP to get her tv turned back on at home.

She finally gets back to me like ten minutes later. I tell her that her account has been disabled for non-payment and that $20 a month isn’t enough for us to keep her services activated. This also isn’t the first time she’s done this and has almost $2000 in unpaid bills that will need to get paid before we can reactivate her services (reading from the previous notes).

She of course starts yelling at me again with tons of excuses, “I have sent in payments, the check must have been lost so just credit me”, “I genuinely thought my bill was $20 a month”, etc.

Then another “hang on I’ll be right back”

So finally someone is available to assist me, I have no idea what to do at this point and this is genuinely the first time I’ve ever been yelled at by a customer and I feel like I’m going to cry. He says I need to transfer her to collections and they can discuss things with her but there’s literally nothing I can do.

Another 20 minutes go by, I’m still waiting for her to get back. She’s STILL working, trying to find an active shooter. I grab the helper again and he says to do ghost call scripting and if she doesn’t respond in a minute and a half I can hang up on her and then he walks away. I don’t even get through half a sentence before she says “I’m still here I’m just busy I’ll be right back” so I don’t hang up on her.

5 minutes later she comes back, doesn’t give me a chance to at anything, and starts screaming about how she NEEDS her cable turned back on, because, and I quote, “THIS IS A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH”

I let her yell herself out, and then inform her that I am unable to assist her and need to transfer her to collections. She starts yelling again about how I should be able to help her but then she needs to get back to work.

The helper comes by again and says “still on that call?” Yup. He sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Next time she comes back just cold transfer to collections” which was a BIG no-no, we were supposed to ALWAYS warm transfer. He even put his id number in the notes to confirm that he gave me permission since she wasn’t listening.

By the time I had her transferred, the call had lasted 2 hours. Normal call times for newbies is 10 minutes.

TL;DR lady screams about cable being turned off because she hasn’t paid the bill while she’s helping coordinate police officers to find an active shooter and tells cable company her bill is a matter of “life and death”