Last place I worked at that actually banned customers was at a pizza place in a college town that did a lot of late night deliveries back when restaurants delivered their own food.
Bounced checks, being rude to employees, not being there when the delivery driver arrived were the biggest ones. After hitting a critical mass on fraternities we started banning the whole fraternity if we ran into issues and they sorted that out fast by getting their members to behave better and other people would volunteer to buy the pizza if the person fell asleep or couldn’t be found. Pretty much everyone who screwed up was given another chance by paying off their balance and the bounced check fee or apologizing to staff.
There was also one guy who never tipped and kept calling and saying is pizza was wrong so the owner made his pizza one night and delivered it himself, then banned the guy when he called and lied about the delivery. He was banned for life along with the people who were racist/sexist. The owner was a jerk when it came to his ridiculous capitalist expectations, but he did defend his employees from external assholes.
The owner was a jerk when it came to his ridiculous capitalist expectations, but he did defend his employees from external assholes.
The number of bosses I’ve had that were massive assholes, but had the mentality of “only I get to abuse these employees” is amusingly high.
I think some of them just lack people skills. I had this one manager that nobody liked and was rather prickly, but she very quickly kicked out an asshole customer and then immediately checked to make sure I was okay after. She cared, and actually did more for us than most of the rest of management, but her people skills were terrible.
Legit props to them, but my unpopular opinion: these people shouldn’t be bosses. Like, at all. At my job, myself and my coworkers do all the work compared to my direct supervisors. When my previous boss got sick for an extended time, the work still got done. When they retired, and a search process was in progress to find a replacement, the work was still done. All of it.
Management is about dealing with people and unexpected situations. If you can’t do that, why the fuck are you paid more than the people that put in the time and are literally solving the problems all day, every day!?
As someone without much people skills, I take this opportunity to say fuck your glass ceiling idea for people like me. Thank god for the free market, where if someone consents to work for me, they can.
Wow, classy. And what a lucky wage-slave they will be to get stuck with you…
It was the rare occasion of someone being so stupid that they accidentally started their own cell phone scam.
This guy could not decide on what phone he wanted. He had two plans with all of his relatives on them. Whenever someone became eligible for a contract renewal, he would buy himself a phone and give his old one to one of those relatives. He also was very picky, and would try to return his phones for dumb reasons like “I haven’t turned my phone off since I got it, and now it’s running slow.”
He would hop between different stores and customer service to get warranty replacements for his older phones, and exchanges for new ones, and because he was passing phones between accounts, a phone that he had for a year, would look like it was just bought a few days ago, so he would be offered a brand new one, or the option to try another model. When he came into my store complaining, something didn’t seem right, so I spent an entire day researching where all his phones came from and where they went. I discovered that for years, he was costing us thousands of dollars burning through brand new phones and requesting credits for his inconvenience.
The last time we told him that we couldn’t help him, he said he’d never come back, we thanked him.
I’m really glad someone out there is costing these companies money.
So many times it’s AT&T and Verizon selling you an “insurance plan” for your phone that still requires you to pay $99-$300 if you actuality need your phone replaced. That’s objectively worse than no “insurance”.
Maybe I’d feel differently about it if I had that pro-capitalist “your loss is my gain” mindset… and also owned shares in AT&T. But being a human capable of empathy and humanity, AT&T and Verizon just disgust me.
You’re not wrong. There were times I felt pretty dirty doing what they asked of me in order to close more sales. I worked with some decent people who cared more about the customer’s needs, and some shitty ones that cared more about that commission check.
This guy was a real asshole on top of it all, and he was trying to pull it off on my watch, so, no regrets on shutting him down. I’m sure he’s still pulling similar shit at other stores.
There were times I felt pretty dirty doing what they asked of me in order to close more sales.
So many companies! Back when I worked Arclight, it was a small bit of subtle manipulation: “would you like to turn that to a large for only an additional 40¢?”
I hated it, because I knew the purpose was to pressure people into buying more than they wanted.
Thankfully, the place was run like the Trump Administration, so no one really knew how consistently the company’s stupid mind games were being deployed against our guests.
But anyways! Yeah. Feeling dirty is pretty reasonable. The things we do for rent money…
This guy was a real asshole on top of it all, and he was trying to pull it off on my watch, so, no regrets on shutting him down.
What’s with that, anyways? Why aren’t real-life thieves more like charismatic, charitable Robin Hoods?
Because the charismatic ones you are less likely to notice. Also most people who work for Evil Corp know their company is evil, so if a polite charismatic person is taking advantage of the system you’re less likely to go dig out what they’re doing.
For example if in OPs story the guy had been polite and charming, he would have never gone into his account to check what was up, because it would be just a nice customer being nice. What’s to tell you that there weren’t other dozen like that that flew right under OPs nose, just because they never awoke suspicion.
At a prior employer, we noticed that there were many customers getting essentially free service ($100-200 per month) by calling customer service hundreds of times per month and asking for credits for all sorts of things. They were generally very nice and just picked up $5-10 credits until their service was free. Beyond the free service, they were costing the company the expense of the service calls.
We started routing all of them to a small group of agents and flagged the accounts so the agents would deny them pretty much every time. It was kind of funny because we didn’t tell them anything changed, but you could see that some of them noticed because they started asking which call center they were talking to. They would immediately hang up and call back over and over and just keep going back to the same place. Eventually most of them gave up.
Note: nobody here would/should feel sorry for this particular company, but I still thought it was funny to see these scammers get mad that we caught on to the scam.
One of my previous customers was a mentally ill and delusional elderly lady. She called me about a non-existent plumbing problem in her house, supposedly caused by her neighbor, who she claimed breaks in and messes with her stuff. According to her, everything wrong inside or outside her house was because of her neighbor’s sabotage. She even mentioned plans to kill him. Not exactly the kind of person you want to turn your back on, but also someone who would have been extremely easy to take advantage of. I basically talked her out of redoing the entire plumbing in her bathroom, and we finally settled on me re-aligning her kitchen cabinet doors that - yes, you guessed it - her neighbor had ‘messed with.’
It was quite sad, really. She asked me twice whether I thought her stories sounded crazy, so she was clearly somewhat aware of her condition. I just didn’t know how to deal with someone like that. I refuse to lie, but I also don’t want to tell her she’s losing it. I don’t mind senile people, but I didn’t feel safe around her.
I know I’m replying late but did you ever contact your countries adult protective services and make them aware to get her the help she needed because them stating they want to kill someone is worrying
Nah, I don’t think she was serious about it. She was a frail old lady anyway.
My brother in law is like that. He’s been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and his drivers license has been suspended after an unrelated episode 10 years ago. He’s harmless, and perfectly capable of getting it unsuspended if he puts in some effort, but he can’t because:
- His doctor is out to sabotage his life
- Someone is tapping into his phone
- This lady on the other side of town is stealing his mail
- His PC had been bugged
…allegedly.
He sometimes takes his meds, but it’s rare. Those are the days when he’s out and about and reasonably normal.
how old is he? it tends to get better the older the person gets. (quick edit as I just realized what people will think. it will not go away. I mean get better in that they tend to get better about taking medication and are less likely to go off and do the really nutty stuff)
45ish
unfortunately not going to necessarily be much better than. 20’s and 30’s are the real scary scene with that disease.
She asked me twice whether I thought her stories sounded crazy, so she was clearly somewhat aware of her condition.
Not necessarily.
It’s very likely everyone in her life were telling her it’s all in her head, she gets mad and says she’s not crazy…
Then calls random repair people, tells them the story. And asks “am I crazy” because most businesses would never say that to a client. She was looking for validation, the same way people go fishing for compliments saying stuff like “I’m so bad at my job, I don’t know how you all put up with me”. Even if it’s true and they’re dead weight, most people will be polite and reassure them.
I just didn’t know how to deal with someone like that
Tell them that they should relay their concerns to a medical professional if they’re concerned.
If they’re seriously doubting their delusions, they’ll go get help and thank you for the advice.
More likely they’ll realize you’re not giving them what they want, get mad, and often blame you for being involved in the conspiracy.
But there’s a chance they actually get help.
Any kind of acceptance of their beliefs, no matter how tentative, reinforces it and drives them further into the delusion. Depending on how involved her family is, she might have called them immediately, and after cussing them out said even the plumber agrees she’s not crazy.
I just didn’t know how to deal with someone like that.
You tell them the truth. That means if you think their stories sound crazy you say “I think your stories sound crazy”.
I know that steps outside of the typical path of politeness, but telling the truth is the only way to help someone in that state.
She wasn’t asking because she didn’t know. She was asking because she knew they sounded crazy, and she wanted to give you an opening to discuss that.
Trust me. When a person is having paranoid delusions only the truth can help them. Saying “No that doesn’t sound crazy to me”, if it does, only makes it worse. That’s because people can detect when others are lying to them. If that person is so far out there that everyone puts on a mask around them, it will reinforce the idea that people are shifty assholes. If nobody ever tells them the truth then they can’t calibrate their sense of what’s real and what’s not.
It may seem rude, but if you truly want to help them, you need to be truthful with them. That includes saying things that might not be polite, such as “I think that sounds crazy”. They will not interpret that as rude. They will interpret that as honest, and it will be an enormous relief to them to have found an honest person.
I mean I kind of agree with telling them their stories are crazy if they ask but I’m also kind of against it because what if they snap all of a sudden
Hundreds of gigabytes of horse porn, right in a folder on his desktop called “horse”. The thumbnail of the folder made it incredibly clear what the folder was and what was in it, which was made extra clear by the max zoom his desktop icons were set to. (it was like, no joke, almost 1/10th the screen).
Fun fact: that was the day I learned my state doesn’t have mandatory reporting laws for animal abuse, only csam.
Freelance welding on my days off. A customer wanted to hire me to make a fence gate, but he didn’t have solid blueprints. He had a crude sketch drawn on a scrap of paper, but no specific measurements. I offered to come by and take measurements, but he didn’t even have a fence base to take measurements off of.
Essentially, he wanted me to construct a property fence gate of unspecified size and install it to a nonexistent perimeter fence. I told him these issues, but he didn’t care. He wanted me to build this fence gate, but he didn’t know what size, what materials, and where to install it.
I fired him. A welder’s reputation means everything. I’m not about to make a thing for a customer who doesn’t actually know what he wants. I did him a favor by walking away and not taking his money.
To me that sounds suspicious like keeping kids in the basement suspicious
I don’t know why but it just does probably because gates could also be used to keep people in
I know it’s probably not this but the thought of that popped up in my head
I know it’s probably not this but the thought of that popped up in my head
Uhhh… that speaks more to where your head is than anything else.
I would have made a gate per the drawing.
To 1:1 scale.
The spite sounds fun, but giving the customer what they ask for when they want a shit job is still going to reflect badly on you. A lot of the time, potentially problematic customers should just be directed elsewhere to make their data someone else’s problem.
Whether or not you gave them exactly what they asked for, if they don’t have a realistic vision/hardware/site you’re setting them up for a bad time, and they’ll removed about you because you couldn’t translate the ephemeral concept of an idea that never left their skull into something that looked good or they wanted, and they’ll be sure to tell everyone who made the mess they’re unhappy with.
No tiny gate for you, then!
This, 100%.
I’m not about to tarnish my professional reputation just to spite a clueless customer.
He touched a waitress in a way she didn’t want to be touched.
“I told you to stop being gentle, you piece of shit!”
He was creepin’ on other customers. When he was asked to tone it down, especially when it came to talking to minors, he got mad and started yelling and shoving chairs.
Should’ve been banned as soon as they started to talk to minors
At my old company we would ban customers that were repeatedly abusive to customer service agents. Agents had the right to hang up on customers that were being abusive and if the same customer kept getting reported, eventually they would receive a letter from the legal department telling them to stop. If it continued, they would get banned.
I remember one guy was so bad that a director got the phone system to automatically route any calls from him to his mobile line and put him in his phone book. He would very politely greet him by name as soon as he picked up the call to make it clear that he wasn’t ever going to get through to anyone else.
Great move by the director
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I worked at a headshop in the late 80’s amd early 90’s.
We sold nitrous oxide for whipped cream (and to inhale). It’s a very short lived high…mebbe a couple of minutes for the average person. It came in 24 packs of nitrous cylinders for about $50 US.
There was a guy who would come in when we opened at 10 AM and buy a case (144 cylinders) for personal use, and be back in the store before 6 PM to buy another case. Eventually over a few weeks he was buying multiple cases every time. His lips started cracking and bleeding from the cold, and then turning blue. We found out he was going to our other stores in the area and finally banned him.
We had people buy crack pipes and other smoking paraphernalia too, but that one haunted me. I had never seen someone fall that hard into addiction, or that fast. He was obviously miserable and could not stop.
Had to lookup what a headshop was and unfortunately it wasn’t a store that sold decapitated heads and this was before I read the rest of your comment
Wow what a crazy glimpse into someone else’s life. So many questions about that guy…
There’s definitely something extra sad about the idea of a guy who’s too much of a drug doer to be allowed in the shop specifically for drug doers.
I used to live with a guy who went through a nitrous phase. Gave it a try a few times, and there’s something oddly compulsive about it. You’ll do one, and then almost as soon as you come down you feel an urge to do another. Maybe it has something to do with how intense and dissociative the high is, and how suddenly it wears off.
I avoided getting hooked, and haven’t touched the stuff since, but there’s definitely a real prominent “just one more” feeling to it.
Woman was clearly mentally ill, extremely belligerent, seeking tech support. At some point, store manager was saying something about trying to accommodate her and she said, “You don’t get points for trying.” Store manager turned around and said, “Call security.”
Phone support later called us to arrange help and I explained that she wasn’t welcome and would have to go to a different store. Fortunately, there are many where I live and she didn’t have to travel very far if she accepted that answer (dunno the outcome).
At the video rental store, the customer that returned a DVD case reeking of cigarettes and full of cockroaches. I had seen the customer before and always read the notes about the latest gross ass thing they’d done that flashed up on screen when serving them because all the other staff hated them and would write these complaints. Despite that I didn’t really remember them particularly or have much of a run in with them.
I happened to be the one on shift when they were to discover they’d been banned though. They tried to pick up some movies to rent and I had to explain that I couldn’t rent to them because they were banned. They asked why and I told them that it says here you returned a DVD case full of cockroaches and they responded indignantly “What!? Is that IT!?” They definitely weren’t denying it and seemed very surprised this was a bannable offence.
How awful of a living space and for how long does it take for cockroaches to just become normal… Yikes, ya almost feel bad for that guy.
When I worked in customer service, a guy kept calling in and waiting until he got a woman so he could say vulgar shit. Another guy called me a “n*gger removed” and he was put on letters only. I know he couldn’t tell what race I was over the phone, but I immediately said “fuck you” and hung up and then proceeded to panic about losing my job once the initial shock wore off. I didn’t lose my job though. 👍🏾
Wrked in a bakery with a café part to sit at. the store was in the same building as a convinence store. Every now and then a middle aged woman with smeared make up (think simpsons make up shotgun) went to the convience store the came to us, to first use the toilett and the sit down and “drink” a coffee. at least that is her story. as a worker we all knew that she never drank the coffee, but instead drank those mini alkohol bottles in the toilett ( as if we didnt see the bottles in the trash). she usually gets punch drunk till closing time. but we let her since she obviously felt ashamed about drinking, and seemed to have a hard life as is. but as she got comfortable with the workers, because we were nice to her, she started to belive/act as if she worked there too when drunk. repositioning all the tables and chairs. takeing the toilett keys home and never return them, try to make us hang out inside the store after closing. and if you ever tried to reason with a drunk person you know there is no way. after we needed to call the police the second time just to able to end out shift, and close down, she got banned.
in a way i feel sorry for her, since she was never seen in the store again. these people make me want to be able to help. but i am not able and i get paid minimum wage to keep up with it :/
A recurring customer having habit of delaying to pay the bar tab because he’s “too drunk”. Usually took him weeks and multiple asking before he paid his bar tab in full.
This time he bought a bunch of pretty girls lots of expensive drinks, at the end of the night he is so drunk that nobody can reason with him to pay (but we suspect he’s faking it as always). So we put his bill in his tab and let him go.
The next day he act like he doesn’t remember anything and refused to acknowledge that he was buying anyone else drinks even with the CCTV footage of him on that night (and of course refused to pay his tab).
This went on for 2 weeks before the head bartender get into a fight with him. The customer ended up with a black eye and got banned from the bar. He doesn’t press any charges.
I couldn’t remember his bill total in the end, but it was close to 2k.
