These Difficult Times

The following conversation happened at 9:50 AM yesterday.

ROB Tekserve Pro-Video-Post. This is Rob.

CUSTOMER Yeah, umm, I bought a, umm, Lacie, umm, umm, DVD burner yesterday and, umm, iDVD don’t see it.

Okay, deep breath. I have to brace this guy right off the bat for the reality that he might be in for more trouble than he actually sees right now.

ROB Oh, iDVD needs to be a relatively current version to “see” Firewire external DVD burners. An older version won’t see them. Is your version older than two or three years?

CUSTOMER Oh. Okay I got it, umm, hooked up by USB.

ROB Hmmm. Try plugging in with a Firewire cable.

I knew at this point that he wasn’t out of the woods yet. So I continued…

ROB Keep in mind though, that you might have other obstacles to overcome. Yeah, you might still have to buy a new version of iLife.

CUSTOMER Oh really? Damn!

ROB And that means you might have to buy the new operating system too, for that to work. What operating system do you have?

CUSTOMER But, I told the girl I spoke to that yesterday, man! Yo! They scammin’ me. Why they gotta do that?

ROB Sir, I’m only trying to tell you —

CUSTOMER I buy all my stuff from Tekserve, man. I expect better service that this.

ROB Well, we try to protect our customers as best we can. I’m only trying to advise you to expect other obstacles. I’m trying to—

CUSTOMER And now you’re givin’ me this!

ROB Don’t raise your voice, sir.

CUSTOMER Why I can’t get no muthah-f#ckin help?

ROB Don’t raise your voice, sir—

CUSTOMER And don’tchoo hang up on me neither.

I wasn’t sure how to react to that one.

CUSTOMER I’ll come down there and wait for yo ass!

A chill went down my spine.

ROB DO NOT threaten me, sir.

CUSTOMER Suck mah di@k, you a faggit. Whatcho name? Umm, Rob? Oh yeah! Rob!

Great. He remembered my name.

ROB That’s right. My name is Rob.

CUSTOMER Suck my di@k, you faggit! You muthah-fu@kin faggit!

—Click—

What can be learned from an interaction like this? This interaction started by this customer being stymied by a seemingly small and innocent technical problem. Presumably, his goal was to make a DVD, but he was thwarted by obstacles to this goal. When I delivered to him the (possible, but not inevitable) bad news, he was swept into a maelstrom of anger.

I later found out that this customer called back in an attempt to talk to the salesperson he’d spoken to yesterday. She wasn’t in yet, luckily, and our receptionist told him this. Upon hearing this the customer hurled insults at our receptionist, calling him a “fucking white-protected faggit.”

Analysis

Note how the customer’s mind flip-flopped. His posturing did a one-eighty. Within the span of thirty seconds, he went from, at first, total submissiveness &mdash with all the uncertain umms &mdash to felonious menacing. You can see the state this man in, as we began our phone call, how close he was to the edge, so easily tippable into rage.

Several difficult customer-types are thrown into the mix here. First, there’s the Crazy Train. That’s an obvious part of this equation. (Umm, cuckoo!) But what may not be so obvious to you is what’s underlying this interaction: the victim mentality. Buried deep inside this man is the Helpless Child. But in this case, it’s not the standard variety of Helpless Child: this is the Rage-aholic Thug Variant, the one that thinks throwing his weight around, threatening people, and insulting them is how to GTD. It didn’t work.

This customer was a truly twisted mutant of different difficult customer types. Really, an interesting case, when you think about it. He was a bundle of all the neuroses of the victimized Helpless Child, mixed together with the insanity of a Crazy Train, and baked into a soufflé of personality disorders, cursewords, and threats, a bundle that’s a little bit too common these days.

Could I have defused this difficult customer? I wonder about this. I don't think I could have because he couldn’t be reasoned with. And furthermore, would this man accept responsibility for his actions, for the fact that he bought something willingly? How could I have defused this situation? I could have bent over backwards and waved my “magic wand,” as we say, to fix his problem. But after what he said what he did? Um, no.

My Reaction

Let me share with you how I reacted. My first instinct was actually to call this guy back and try to find out what the problem actually was, which I never even had a chance to do, and solve it. But after reconsidering this, I decided to take another action: I typed up everything I could remember that’d been spoken, and then showed this transcript to anyone else I thought might interact with this guy, should he come into the store. Transcribing the conversation helped to me cool off a lot, which reminds me: What does WWYIKM say? It says “Unhook with a business tool.” When I transcribed the conversation, I was executing an excellent form of by-the-numbers unhooking procedure. It made me feel a lot better.

In terms of celebrating this difficulty, well, it was a learning experience. I learned that my coworkers were very kind and supportive about being threatened, and that there wasn’t much I could've done to mitigate this situation from going out of control the way it did. So, my friends were all behind me — after all, this could have happened to any one of us. And management has summarily “fired” this customer, told him to never shop at Tekserve again. But what else can I learn? I guess I can be proud I didn’t freak out too badly. I’m ambivalent about not responding to this guy with more anger, more insults in response, but this really isn’t my style at all and probably not a good idea anyway.

Other Factors

I never got to find out several things: (1) What this guy was, in fact, attempting to accomplish: Burn a video DVD? Back up data? I’ll never know. How do I feel about that? Not too bad. (2) What version of iDVD software did he have? Nope, don’t give a crap now. The saddest part of this interaction is that his software was probably up-to-date and he only needed to plug in the Firewire cable to get going. Instead, all he succeeded in doing was getting blacklisted at a store he likes and getting two-hundred, friendly, Mac-savvy people to hate his guts.