Customer: “I’m looking for a book.”

I refrain from observing that this is a bookstore.

Me: “I’m happy to help you. What is the name of the book?”

Customer: “I don’t remember. It was about vampires. I read it in school.”

Me: “Okay… Interview With A Vampire by Anne Rice?”

Customer: “No.”

Me: *Trying to figure out if school was ten years ago or five.* “Twilight?”

Customer: “No.”

We go back and forth with a few more titles. I take her to our horror section, nothing. Fantasy, nada. I finally take her to the paranormal romance section and strike out again.

Me: “I don’t know where else to look, and without more information, I can’t help you.”

Customer: “That’s really unhelpful! How stupid do you have to be to not find a simple vampire book? Why don’t you just have a vampire section?”

Me: “I could collect all the vampire books from all the sections I’ve already taken you to, and you’d still be looking at all the same books. I really can’t help you.”

She makes a sound of disgust and storms away. She eventually comes back and shoves a book in my hand.

Customer: “See! You did have it! I had to find it myself!”

Me: “That’s The Crucible. That’s the book of the play, and it’s about witches, not vampires.” *And not even real witches.*

Customer: “Bah! They’re the same thing!”

At least she made a purchase?

It’s the early to mid 1990s, and I’m in fourth grade. One of my teachers has recently started to focus on our handwriting (it was all cursive back then) – he sets homework where we have to write an essay that he will then grade for content AND looks. I generally enjoy this type of homework (nothing pleases me more than to talk about the stuff that interests me), but this teacher nearly manages to make me hate it.

Our teacher does not collect the homework but instead walks around the room and looks at everyone’s work, reading a paragraph here and there. He stops at my desk, takes out his red pen and – without even reading a single word – crosses out the page.

Teacher: “Unacceptable. How is anyone supposed to read that chicken scratch? You need to write more legibly – I will not check your homework until it is up to my standards.”

So, I go home and write out the whole essay again, trying really hard with my handwriting. It is very much legible (not that it wasn’t already), which I know because I took a survey of all my classmates who could read the essay without problems. But to no avail – the next day the same thing happens. He takes a look, crosses it out, and tells me to redo it.

After nearly two weeks of this, I am incredibly fed up because I’ve copied this essay so many times, I nearly know it by heart, and on top of doing the regular homework for this class. Still the same thing happens.

Until one afternoon when I am copying that essay yet again, and I am so frustrated that I burst into tears and throw my notebook to the floor. My mom, of course, notices this, and I tell her the whole story. She takes my notebook and flips through the past two weeks. She tells me I won’t have to write it again and that I can go play.

Happy again, I head off to play, and when that teacher later comes into the room for the lesson, he doesn’t even come near my desk. He doesn’t ask to see the essay (or the current homework), doesn’t speak to me, doesn’t look at me.

That evening over dinner, my dad asks about everyone’s day, and my mom says, casually:

Mom: “Oh, I prepped dinner and then went to the elementary school to ream out [Teacher]. Did you know he was making [My Name] copy the same essay for two weeks because he thought her handwriting was too ugly? Like that has any bearing on the quality of her homework! Anyway, I told him and the principal that if he has trouble reading, he should take a refresher course or maybe consider changing careers instead of taking it out on a ten-year-old little girl.”

A customer comes in for his prescription.

Me: “Can I get your name?”

Customer: “They know my name!”

Me: “Yes, but I don’t.”

Customer: “I was just here last week!”

Me: “Yeah, you and a thousand other people. I don’t remember any of their names either.”

Customer: “But I’m here every week!”

Me: “What’s my name?”

Customer: “Huh?”

Me: “You’re here every week, and there are three of us who work here. I’m here every day and deal with thousands of customers. If you expect us to remember your name, then it should be the easiest thing in the world for you to remember mine.”

Customer: “…”

Me: “…”

Customer: “John Smith.”

Why do I get this every day?!

I work in a call center for a bank. This bank finances auto loans, so most of our calls pertain to car payments or our website.

Had a lady call in earlier today. As she calls in, an account pops up with a male name attached. I quickly learned that it’s her son’s car and loan. He had previously called in at the beginning of this month to permanently authorize her on the account, meaning I have permission to speak with her. 

She calls in, and I do my standard greeting. I’m cut off about halfway through with:

Caller: “Yeah, yeah, I know. The call is recorded. I’ve heard it before. I’ve been on hold forever, and we need to fix something right now.”

Great. This should be fun.

I glance over the account quickly while she’s verifying the information. I notice the account is only a few months old, and there’s already a late payment marked on the account (meaning a payment went over a month past due, so we reported it as late to the credit bureaus). Sure enough, after verifying the account, she hits me with the old:

Caller: “We made a payment on time, and your company screwed up, and now it’s affecting my son’s credit. He’s trying to buy a house and he can’t now…” *Blah blah blah.*

It’s very common for customers to blame us when a payment is late. They think we don’t keep records of our calls.

Caller: “My son called in a week before his first payment was even due. He made a payment using his checking account. You must have taken down the numbers wrong, because the payment never came out!”

She explains how a month went by, and that’s when they realized the account was behind. They got it caught up, but it’s too late. The damage was done. She wants that credit mark removed since we messed up, according to her.

Now, even if that entire story were true and we took down the numbers wrong, the chances of us doing anything about the credit mark are slim, for multiple reasons, but I decided to humor her a bit.

Me: “Ma’am, I’ll pull the call from that day, review it, and if you’re correct and we took the information down wrong, I can pass along the account.”

I made sure to mention that even if that was the case, I can’t promise anything.

So, I pull the call and listen. And boy oh boy.

To start, it wasn’t even the son (the account holder) calling in. It was VERY CLEARLY the same woman I had just spoken with. However, this was BEFORE her son had authorized us to speak with her, so she lied about who she was and claimed to be the son. The son has a gender-neutral name, and the mom was able to verify his birthday/social, so the representative believed her. But regardless, she lied about her identity. That’s considered fraud.

Strike one.

Secondly, she did not call in early. The account was actually over a week behind on its first payment, and it was made clear to her within the first thirty seconds of the call. The representative specifically told her it was a week behind and asked why that was the case. The mother made various excuses. So, she lied again about when she tried to make the payment.

Strike two.

Third, during the processing of the payment, the representative specifically read back both the routing number and the account number for the checking account. The mom confirmed the information was correct. So, her main claim about us taking the information down incorrectly was also a lie. She GAVE us the wrong information.

Strike three.

On top of all of that, we called her son’s phone every day and left messages. We sent bills stating the account was past due. The son had the account registered online and never bothered to log in to check that his first payment went through, and they clearly never checked the bank account to make sure the payment had come out. This is literally 100% on them.

I had the pleasure of calling the woman back to inform her that the waiver request was denied. That call may be good for a separate story all by itself, but she did not take it kindly and demanded to speak with the manager, who listened to the call. Imagine her shock when I let her know that I had listened to the call myself.

For those wondering, the son definitely knew about the loan. Not only would he have had to have been at the dealership to sign the contract, but there were notes in the account that we spoke to both the son and the mom during the call, where the son authorized her on the account.

A caller is reading out a reference number to me. I stop when she says:

Caller: “K as in cake.”

Me: “Uh, do you mean ‘C’ as in Charlie or ‘K’ as in kilo?”

Caller: “K for cake!”

Me: “Cake begins with a ‘C’.”

Caller: “Yeah, but it’s got a ‘K’ in it somewhere.”