So if you’ve worked in call centers for any length of time you know that the calls start to blend and you dont really remember 99% of them. But we all have at least one that we’ll always remember and this is mine!
So I work for an answering service so we basically just take messages and pass them along to the people who can actually help the callers, but on some accounts we do more. One such account was a car sharing company in the US, and this was the San Fransisco office.
Member calls in to report an accident, which while not exactly rare, doesn’t happen every day. However this one was involving a pedestrian which was a first for me. So I start going through the usual accident procedures because we don’t really have anything specific to vehicle-pedestrian callers. The member was really calm so I assumed that it was a fairly minor thing. So I started asking questions:
Me: how fast were you going?
Member: 55 (my Canadian brain interpreted that as 55 km/hr which while not great is survivable, so I was still treating the call as fairly routine)
Me: okay, and did you get the information from the man you hit? (We’re supposed to get the other person’s insurance info, not sure how it works for accidents involving pedestrians, especially on a different country so I figured I’d still ask)
Member: (still super calm) well, no because he’s not alive anymore.
I was pretty stunned for a bit but composed myself and finished the report. The chilling part was how calm she was, though I understand that shock is a thing. The worst part was that she was complaining that the accident report was taking too long as she was cold and had stuff to do and I really wanted to say “lady you just killed a guy, this is gonna take a minute”
So yeah, I was still pretty new when I took that call but I remember it well
submitted by /u/Chrischev
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