Are you serious?

[awarrenfells.livejournal.com]

Customer: "My internet is down"

Me: *Get customer's info and check the maps."

Me: "Sir, you do realize that we have a tropical storm over your area as we speak."

Customer: "Yeah, I know.  We are already up and working on our towers, why aren't you."

Me: "Because we are not suicidal."

Customer: "Well, I want a credit for my outage."

Me: "Sir... we can not control mother nature. " <i>Nor am I God, and able to will the storm away.</i>

Customer: "No, but you can control your service.. and mine is out."

Me: "..."

I really, REALLY, hate arrogant SOB's who think the world revolve around them.

Comments

[gilded_lady]

*facepalm*

[tohanry.livejournal.com]

That reminds me when I did phone tech support for a DSL provider....and well we got a call...about how people couldn't get their DSL...even when their CO was full of water....

Or the time that they complained about how their CO was down...cause someone shot it up....kid you not...

[kgasso.livejournal.com]

I'll never forget the time our CO caught fire. People couldn't call (no local dialtone), so they'd drive in to complain. Most were understanding, several were rude and demanded that we fix it immediately, and a few told us that we were "lying to cover up for our crappy service being down again".

The best part with the last group was that their route to our office -- on a one-way street -- took them right past the big building with flames shooting out of it and emergency vehicles everywhere.

[http://users.livejournal.com/hub_/]

his needs are more important than yours.

[awarrenfells.livejournal.com]

Of course. It's not like I am under the storm right now myself anyways...

.. oh, wait.. I am ^_^

[preserver3.livejournal.com]

Next time, simply tell him the outage would not occur if he could get out of the storm. If he can get his equipment and line connected outside of the affected area and he still can't get service, then you'd be happy to offer him a credit.

[awarrenfells.livejournal.com]

Except we are wireless.. the towers were offline :P

[superbus.livejournal.com]

I had a guy similar to that yesterday. Guy from a vendor called in and demanded that we restore a service license on his box that had expired.

Thankfully, they don't get too pissy (my bosses) at me when I get aggressive back at vendors. :D

[awarrenfells.livejournal.com]

Lucky you.. I was crossing the line with the suicidal remark, but I have hit my level of stupiz for the day already O_o

[doctoreon.livejournal.com]

My bosses never hear what I say unless the users repeat it. Even then, my boss usually agrees with me about the level of retardedness present. This is the only thing that makes working at a help desk endurable.

[penguindreamz.livejournal.com]

Every year when the wildfires in California start, I always have some asshole who doesn't understand why we won't send a tech out to repair the towers that are burning/have burned/got damaged somehow. I don't think our insurance will cover purposely setting the employees on fire.

[kgasso.livejournal.com]

Back when I worked support for an ISP, we'd have users call in who wanted credits for storm-related outages all the time. Usually, the outage was somewhere between 1 to a "whopping" 4 hours.

Not to mention that these were residential users with absolutely no SLA who openly admitted to using the account for business and tried to claim losses of "thousands of dollars a day".

I was always happy to oblige and give them a credit -- at the average price for the account, that four-hour outage credited them a cool $0.11 to their account. :)

[donnaidh-sidhe.livejournal.com]

If they were really losing thousands of dollars a day, it's their own damn fault for not having a backup modem with another ISP at the very least.

[awarrenfells.livejournal.com]

And, not to berate my service... but if you are that business dependent, you shouldn't be using a wireless modem anyways in my opinion.

RF is such a finicky thing. :P

But.. thats just my personal opinion... and we all know what they say about those ^_^

[sethb.livejournal.com]

If they're using the account for business, the tariff probably requires them to have a business account. They get back $0.11. Then their bill goes up $50 a month for business-class service.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

"Really? How long have you been running a business on that connection? Uh-huh? OK, here's what I'm going to do for you. I'm going to calculate the difference between residential and business rates for that whole time, send you the bill, and cut off your internet for violations of the terms of service. Have a nice day."

[emerald-embers.livejournal.com]

Oh man, the forward to abuse/security button on email support at my office is my absolute favourite.

"Ah, right, residential account, you're bitching about losing money because you run a business from home, enjoy a friendly phone call from our lawyers <3"

[buckaction.livejournal.com]

any time someone spewed that "losing thousands of dollars an hour" crap, I would immediately fire back with:

"Well, i'm terribly sorry to hear that. I'd be happy to transfer you to one of our very helpful sales associates, who would be more than glad to assist you with upgrading your account to the superior service and performance of our business class online."

Well within call quality standards word list, and usually resulted, if not in a outright hang up, then a expletive and a hang up.

[brotherflounder]

*sigh* I apologize for the morons from my city. They haven't had to deal with a full-on tropical storm in many years, despite being a part of Florida.

[brotherflounder]

And when I say city, I mean hometown (Jacksonville) as opposed to my current location.

[awarrenfells.livejournal.com]

It's ok. I am from Florida.. and it seems like I have to aplogize for Floridians in general all the time. O_o

[doctoreon.livejournal.com]

There is a reason Fark.com has a Florida tag.

[kyidyl.livejournal.com]

Ha...that blows.

Remember several years back the NYC brown-outs? Yeah, no power to NYC. This guy lived in Jersey, so close to the border that his CO was in NY and -- you guessed it -- without power. He just could NOT grasp the concept of why he couldn't get online.

[awarrenfells.livejournal.com]

Then the following would have ensued:

Me: "Sir, I need you to unplug your phone."

Customer: "But then it won't work!"

Me: "Exactly!"

Or, if was a real $luser, he would have unplugged the phone anyways, and it would have been the end of that painful conversation ^_^

[buckaction.livejournal.com]

I was working for Optimum Online during the 2003 Blackouts. We only took one call an hour during that time, but each call we did get started with "I know there's a blackout right now but..."

Yeah, and but WHAT? you hit the nail on the head with the word "BLACKOUT", there really isn't much more that should need to be said there, you'd think.

And we had tons of idiots people just outside the affected areas that simply couldn't comprehend that just because THEY had lights couldn't mean that our equipment didn't.

[xforge.livejournal.com]

""Well, I want a credit for my outage."

Heh. I guess this was a commercial customer, but I just love it when home users do this - "Okay, the $40 a month you pay divided by the three hours your service, there'll be a check in the mail for eighteen and a half cents next week. Have a nice day!"

[xforge.livejournal.com]

"three hours your service was out"

gih.

[doctoreon.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, I once had a bank send me a check like this (unsolicited). I could not understand why anyone would send a check that was worth less than the paper on which it was printed and the postage used to send it. Recalling it now, my mind is once again boggled.

[doctoreon.livejournal.com]

I forgot to mention that they actually called me to ask why I never cashed it. I told the person who called me that it would cost me more in gas to get to an ATM than the check was worth. She agreed and closed whatever ticket system they had on the check.

[kenbrody.livejournal.com]

Years ago, we had an account at a large bank. (Actually, several accounts. One small business checking account, a personal account, and a custodial account for the kids.) The kids' account was supposed to be free. Well, every month, they hit us with a monthly service charge, and every month we'd go to the local branch and have a teller reimburse us and "fix" the problem, only to have the charge appear again the next month.

Well, after too many months of this (plus the nickel-and-diming on the business account -- who gets charged for making a deposit???), we closed all the accounts.

Well, we _thought_ we closed the accounts. Apparently, they decided one of the accounts had 10 cents interest due after it was closed, and reopened it. They would then spend 32 cents postage to tell us we had 10 cents in the account. My wife was so fed up with the bank, that she let them due this for quite a few months, until she decided to go back to the local branch and withdraw the 10 cents close the account again.

[doctoreon.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's pretty much what happened to me. Completely and utterly retarded.

[jecook]

I once had a service call where I was asked to troubleshoot network connectivity at some apartments in the rain¹. I did what I could, but stopped dead cold when they asked me to start playing with power and I refused because I was standing in two inches of water, and the equipment was sopping wet from the leaky enclosure it had been shoehorned into.

and the person was all bitchy at me too, until I said "fine- you can deal with it- I'd rather not get electrocuted."<sup>2

1</sup> It was an older complex that had ethernet based internet access for the units retrofitted to it. We had more calls on those properties then anything...
² The lady wanting me to fry myself was a co-worker of all things- There were some words spoke by my boss to her boss and that was that.

[canray.livejournal.com]

I remember hearing horror stories of calls about the Cable service being out in New York...

During 9/11.

From places that could *SEE* the Towers.

[awarrenfells.livejournal.com]

Wow. Now THAT is fail.

[erikarn.livejournal.com]

The pron must go on.

Or, they may have had some ${AIRPLANE} / ${AIRLINE} shares they desperately needed to offload via their online trading account.

[kenbrody.livejournal.com]

During the blackout that hit the entire northeast US several years ago, I got a call from our main office (out in Indiana at the time) wondering why I wasn't online on chat, or responding to e-mails. I simply told him to check the new channels. A few moments later, he said "oh, never mind".

[kenbrody.livejournal.com]

That should, of course, have been "_news_ channels".

[vulpisfoxfire.livejournal.com]

I am curious as to what towers the caller was refering to, that were being worked on on his end...

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

With any luck, his power will go out and this problem will go away.

Ironically, I have more problems with power during the bright sunny days in the middle of the summer - because the electric company decides to do maintenance and such, or some idiot decides to drop a tree in his front hard and it falls the wrong way.

[mcity.livejournal.com]

In this case, almost literally.

Also: Holy crap I can't believe someone is using that icon I made.