"You don’t know the harm you’ve done to our community."

I used to work for a great school uniform company in their customer service department. The company is full service, and so we were doing a run of “graduation” shirts for a year 6 class (Australian primary school leavers) and the artwork for the back had been approved, the shirts sent to the screen printers, and the customer had received her shirts. This is where the ordeal starts.

The customer (a parent, and the head of the P&C) calls in and I greet her in my chipper CS voice, and she immediately starts the conversation with “You don’t know how disappointed I am in the quality of these shirts!” I go into further detail and find out that our screen printer had reduced the size of the back print by 100mm H x W to fit on the back of the shirt because it had panels. The customer is almost crying because she says the shirts are unreadable and the print is peeling.

I calm her down and tell her I’ll get some of the shirts back so we can look at them and get a new run done, but we have to wait on one size because she took the last of the stock and we’re waiting on a new shipment.

Shouldn’t have said that

She goes off again about how she shouldn’t have to send the shirts back because the kids won’t have anything to wear (if they look shit, why would you want the kids to wear them???) and how our ETA is too long (the shirts were 6 weeks away). She ends her part of the conversation with me with “You don’t know the harm you’ve done to our community! We buy all our uniforms from you, I expect better!” Their school has 100 kids, and I’ve got schools with 1500 have to go through the same processes as I’m explaining to her.

Ends up with my manager who calms her down and we get it all sorted for that day. But it ended up being a 3 month issue of 10 size 14 shirts.

She always wanted to be transferred to me, and after I left, I heard she was greatly disappointed that they let me go.