Thank You For Calling...

Working in a call center I get many interesting calls. Apart from the standard calls asking for their flex balance or the status of their recently submitted claims, we also tend to get a few crazies calling in here and there.

One such exciting crazy happened to fall onto my line just before my lunch break today. I answered the phone:

"Thank you for calling the service center, this is Rob, how can I help you today?"

"ffar eee invitations?" - the woman on the other line sounded aged, and unlike a good wine the years hadn't improved her. Her tone was extremely soft and her voice, shaky at the least. I couldn't understand some of the things she said.

"I'm sorry, this is *company name here*"

"Do you invitations?" Do we invitations?

"We don't have anything to do with invitations, we are a medical insurance company..."

"ooh... nice to meet you!"

I didn't know how to respond to that. Fortunately, she spoke again before I needed to come up with something to say.

"you a party with invitations?"

"No, we don't have any parties, I'm sorry."

"Oh..." I could tell that her hopes had been crushed from my last statement, and even if she had snuck out of her padded room to make this call while the nurses had their backs turned, I still felt bad for crashing the party in her head.

"Well, enjoy yourself," she added very sweetly.

"Thank you, have a good day," I said.

Calls like these make me laugh, and they at least take away from the monotonous calls that my days are perpetually littered with.

There are six of us in my department. We get to be the voice of the company to anyone willing to hear; even when the majority of our callers aren't willing to listen. Five of us have a specific day of the week to do projects, which involves clearing out the voicemails and e-mails that come in; Wednesday is mine.

Yesterday, as I was emtpying our voicemail box, I came across a lovely man who obviously was very passionate about his flexible spending account.

"The next message is:"

"FUCK THIS!" *click*

"End of message."

I am honored to work in this highly optomistic, patient, and sane environment. It's what keeps me going through the day and it gets my bills paid. I just can't wait for a day to go by when everyone who calls in can show standard mathematical skills and understand that our company has an uncountable amount of guidelines set into place by the IRS and other companies, which we can't control, and not let their panties get in a bunch. Talk about a day when pigs fly!

If I could tell all of these peolpe one thing... it would simply be, be happy!! Be happy like us customer service folks. We're always smiling!!!!! ...

A classic:

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