Monday, August 4, 2008

At least I've never been jabbed with a pen

Deborah pointed me toward notalwaysright.com, a site that gathers often-hilarious, sometimes baffling accounts of customer service attempts gone wrong. So far, this one's my favorite.

My best personal WTF customer service account came when I was working as the online editor at The Island Packet. The newspaper printed a opinion piece by Andy Rooney from a wire service. This is a condensed paraphrase of an e-mail exchange between myself and a reader:

Reader: Please send me Andy Rooney's e-mail address.

Me: You can contact Mr. Rooney via the "60 Minutes" section of the CBS web site.

Reader: No, it will be answered by a secretary, and he'll never see it. Give me his personal e-mail address, the one he checks at home.

Me: Sorry, but we don't have that. We just pulled one of his columns from the wire to fill space.

Reader: Don't give me that crap. Andy Rooney's column was in your paper. It didn't just magically appear there. I'm sure you got it from him over e-mail. I need his e-mail address.

Me: Sir, we're a tiny little paper in South Carolina, 1500 miles away from New York, Mr. Rooney's column came over a wire service we subscribe to. One of the editors saw it and used it. We never contacted Mr. Rooney during any of this so I don't know what his e-mail address is.

Reader: That's bullshit! Give me Andy Rooney's personal e-mail address RIGHT NOW or I will call your boss!

Me: andyrooney@hotmail.com

Reader: THANK YOU! Now was that so hard?

• Posted by Brian at 9:45 PM
• Comments (3)
• Category: Funny