One of our regular clients may slowly be losing her mind due to stress, but I’m finding sympathy difficult.

One of our regular clients reportedly (as in, she was one of our subscribers before I got hired) used to be easy to work with. Fairly nice, wasn’t too much trouble, struggled a bit with our software, but was generally not difficult.

Ever since last year, the only stories I’ve ever heard about her from coworkers have been swaying towards the negative. I haven’t talked to her much, but the few brief calls with her I’ve personally had always had her being snippy and easily ruffled.

However, since we’re in an open office setting, I do overhear when she calls in and gets a coworker. Basically any call with her has two or more of the following going on:

• She’s easily frustrated, keeps cutting you off when you try to answer her questions.
• If she isn’t quite grasping something (hence the easily frustrated bit), she gets unnecessarily cruel. Made one girl cry at one point by screaming that it’s her fault she has to be stuck on the phone with tech support instead of being able to take care of her two sons with cancer. Has also made other below-the-belt types of comments to others related to stressors in her life, but the cancer thing hit my coworker hard since she’s had to go through that herself.
• Claims nobody in the company helps her or replies to her voicemails or emails….except she’s hard to reach whenever someone tries to call her. But it’s our fault that she’s never there when we call somehow.
• *Every* call with her has to include a 5 minute tirade about her personal life. Sick family members, some minor inconvenience, money, ect. But she’ll still get increasingly impatient and snappy over the course of the call even though she’s the one dragging it out by ranting.
• She’ll start crying hysterically halfway through some calls.

It sounds like she’s had a pretty bad string of bad luck in life, on top of other stressors, which is nobody’s fault. The woman needs a therapist, or someone to talk to, because she sounds like she’s one panic attack away from a complete breakdown.

But the only reason why my sympathy for her sort of ebbs and flows is because she lashes out so cruelly to anyone here who, in her mind, is making her day worse. Even though we’re as patient as we can and as helpful as we can when answering her questions.

I’m not trying to sit here and dictate what she should do with her life, but at the point where most of your calls to tech support feel like you’re just out looking for someone to hurt, I think it’s time to reevaluate your priorities.