That time I thought I was out of a job for calling a customer a "twat"

u/FoxieBoxy ‘s story about “Fuck Jeff Day” reminded me of my own (non work sanctioned) encounter where I let fly on a customer, and then sat there for a week wondering if I’d still have a job the other side of it.

Customer called at almost midnight, obviously drunk, and irate about the fact that his Golden Oldies movie channel was saying he was not subscribed. OH NO! World ending trauma right, folks! How on earth can he reminisce about the good old days, when men were men and women were scared of them, without access to the wonderful world of black and white movies???

He started things off by ranting that someone was gonna owe him money for ‘taking away his movies’, and then refusing to confirm his identity, all while yelling and swearing incoherently.

So I just finally said back, “Fine, you have two choices – don’t tell me who you are, and put up with your service not working, or stop wasting my time and let me do my job. Your choice”.

He shut up long enough to confirm his identity, and then said “there, happy now? So go fix my shit”. I said “I’ll be happy to fix it, because it means you and I can hang up from each other sooner”. At the end of the call, I asked him to confirm his service was working, and he did and then sneeringly said, “Congrats, you dumb bitch – you did your fucking job”, so I replied, “And congrats to you too, for being a complete and utter twat about it, which meant you had to wait twice as long to get your movie channel back up and working”.

We then hung up on each other.

I knew this was possibly career ending, so I flagged the call, sent it to my TL for review, and said, “I think I may have fucked up here, so let me know if I need to pack my desk”.

Thankfully, I work in a company that would have simply let me hang up on him as soon as he swore at me the first time. The fact that I didn’t, and stayed on the line with a drunken, verbally abusive misogynist, and actually got his service back up and working, outweighed the fact that I was a bitch to him, apparently.

I did get told that, in the future, I should just hang up, and not tease the angry old men into a rage stroke.