You don’t need a power cord?

I used to work at a well-known cable company answering phones for customers that needed troubleshooting assistance.

One evening, a man called me because his cable box wasn’t working. He was an attorney and had the attitude to go with it. After a little bit of troubleshooting, it was discovered the cable box did not have a power cord. This man started to argue with me that he didn’t need a power cord and never had one. I thought he might be using his own cable box even though my system showed it was one of our models. Sometimes people have a TiVo and we simply provide them with a card to get our service on it. So I verified with him that it was one of our cable boxes. He said it was. I told him we did not provide cable boxes that work on batteries; they all require power cords.

He tried to argue with me further asking me how it was possible it worked previously without a power cord. I pointed out that it couldn’t have. I also asked him if he had a cleaning lady that may have misplaced it. Of course, he did not think this was a possibility.

He continued to argue with me about this, insisting it never had a power cord and worked fine, which isn’t possible. It was extremely frustrating because no matter how much common sense I used, he was not comprehending that it had to have a power cord to work.

Then he started talking to me about his job, how much of a big-time lawyer he was, how much money he made, how big his house was, and how an attorney chooses clients. At this point, I was just getting angry because he was talking down to me as if I was a five-year-old and didn’t understand the basic concept of only choosing clients that can afford to pay him.

I quickly moved towards having a technician visit his home. I was trying to avoid this because I absolutely did not want to foist this consumer on another person unless I absolutely had to. Unfortunately, this attorney was an idiot and I had no choice.

I would’ve loved to have been a fly on the wall for that visit.