A Remake Chronicles Extra by Adam-Troy Castro
At one point during my eye-rolling seventeen years at the Job From Hell, I was appointed the manager of the Customer Service Department, an assignment that I was to learn reflected the company’s belief that the sales jobs were for people who could produce and customer service was where you put any asshole who couldn’t.
This makes me one of the assholes. I freely admit it. I was burned out on sales and extraordinarily bad at dealing with abusive morons. But as manager, my job was often dealing with psychopaths or losers even in the office, among them the guy whose idea of a fun afternoon was to take his car out after a big rain and drive fast over puddles, to splatter the old ladies waiting at bus stops; and the guy who I had to stop from singing jolly songs about, excuse me, old broken down niggers in the office. There was also a guy so clearly crazy that, while he was working there, was mistaken by a TV news crew as homeless and filmed for a news report on mentally ill people roaming the streets.
Then there’s Morty.
Morty was a greasy little man of about fifty, and if you think I abuse him by calling him greasy, I assure you that I am being 100% accurate, as you could tell what papers he had been handling from all the see-through fingerprints.
He could not ad-lib a fart after a heavy meal.
This is a drawback in customer service. Yes, we had a script for handling problems, but people will say things that are off-script; you need to be able to deal with them as a human being. Morty kept putting his hand over the mouthpiece and asking me questions like, “This woman just said that she has to rush out the door and pick up her daughter — what do I say?” I had to give him an answer, each time. He did this even when the customer’s problem was identical to one our guidebook accounted for, only phrased differently. We were set up for customers who wanted us to take their payments on pay day, for instance…but Morty would ask me what to say if the customer said “Friday” instead. He was that helpless. And each time I gave him guidance he had to scrawl my instruction on a yellow post-it note and pop it up onto the wall, so many of them that soon he had the whole wall feathered with them, in a system opaque to me.
Morty was so worthless that when, at one point, he had to call a customer whose check had bounced, and was told by a sobbing woman that her husband had just died in a flaming car wreck and that she was out the door and on her way to the hospital, he said, “So will you be able to replace that payment when you get back?”
I hollered, “MORTY! FOR GOD’S SAKE! BE A HUMAN BEING! TELL THE WOMAN YOU’RE SORRY FOR HER LOSS!”
He took out a yellow post-it-note and wrote on it that when a customer referenced a sudden death in their family, he should say that he was sorry for the loss.
Which wasn’t so bad until the next time something like that happened, a few weeks later, and the son of a bitch actually said to the customer, “Excuse me, ma’am, I’ve written down what I have to say in a case like that,” then stood up and rifled through his forest of yellow post-its and, reading robotically, said, “I…am…sorry…for…your…loss…”
This ACTUALLY happened. I know you cannot countenance any human being that stupid. But it actually happened.
But even this was not Morty’s most horrific point of incompetency.
That was this: he could not say ”Visa, Mastercard, or Discover Card” to save his life.
Every time he offered payment options he said, “Vista, Mastercharge, or the Discovery Card.”
This, people, burned in my breast.
I’d say, “Morty. It’s the Visa, Mastercard, and Discover Card.”
He said, “Vista. Mastercharge. Discovery Card.”
“Morty. Say Visa.”
“Visa.”
“Say Mastercard.”
“Mastercard.”
“Say Discover Card.”
“Discover Card.”
“Now say the whole thing.”
“Vista. Mastercharge. Discovery Card.”
Go Back to line one.
This became an issue.
He’d be on the phone with a customer, while I monitored him.
“You can pay by Vista –”
“MORTY! VISA!”
“Sorry, Visa…or Mastercharge…”
“MORTY! MASTERCARD!”
“Sorry, Mastercard…or the Discovery Card…”
“MORTY! THE DISCOVER CARD!”
“Sorry. Discover Card. You can pay by Vista, Mastercharge, or the Discovery Card.”
Later:
“Morty. Here’s the card from my wallet. What does it say?”
“Vista.”
“Look again, Morty.”
(Defensively) “It’s a Vista.”
“MORTY. WHAT DOES THAT LOGO SAY?”
“Visa.”
“Okay. So what kind of card is it?”
“A Vista.”
We are talking dozens of corrections a work shift, going on for a period of several months.
“Morty. Visa.”
“Vista.”
“No. Not Vista. Visa.”
“Visa.”
“Fine. Say it again.”
“Visa.”
“And this is a Mastercard.”
“Mastercard.”
“And this is a Discover.”
|
“Discover.”
“Now say them all.”
“Vista. Mastercharge. Discovery Card.”
He couldn’t do it. He honestly couldn’t do it.
Came the point where 90% of my energy was dedicated to making sure Morty could have a conversation with a customer without screwing up on this or any other major point, and I decided to go for broke and attempt a thought experiment. I went out to an art supply shop and bought a giant piece of posterboard, upon which I painted, in letters six inches high, VISA. MASTERCARD. DISCOVER. Before he came to work I cleared the wall above his desk of every single yellow post-it-note and put this poster up, in a place where he would be staring at it from two feet away during any phone call he made.
He came in, sat down, and did not notice that all his yellow post-its were gone.
He spoke to a customer. “Vista…Mastercharge…and the Discovery Card.”
He spoke with another customer. “Vista…Mastercharge…and the Discovery Card.”
He spoke with a third customer. “Vista…Mastercharge…and the Discovery Card.”
Five more times in rapid succession.
I told him, “Morty. Look up.”
He stared at the wall. “What?”
“Morty, read the words actually in front of you.”
“Vista. Mastercharge. Discovery Card.”
“No. Read THAT POSTER.”
Slow blinking. “Oh, yeah.”
“What does it say?”
“Visa. Mastercard. The Discover Card.”
“Do you think you can say it right, with a customer, just once?”
“Okay.”
Next call, staring fixedly at the poster, he got it wrong AGAIN. He could not get it right even with a billboard instructing him on the right way to say it.
Morty was not fired for cause, but not long afterward for budget cuts; when we started hiring again, he called me up to get his old job back, telling me that he knew he had excelled at it. I was gentle. I didn’t actually hate the guy. He was not a bad guy. He was supporting a young son and would clearly never, ever excel at anything enough to make a good living. I just didn’t want him working for me.
He was an average human being.
And the saddest part of that statement is that it means, half the people out there are *beneath* him in basic competency….
Comment By: George Peterson
March 15th, 2012 at 1:59 pm
No, this wasn’t an average human being… Granted, there may be many people worse off, but this is definitly below average, certainly in terms of the ability to communicate with people on a normal level.
Comment By: Samuel Cooper
March 16th, 2012 at 3:40 am
I am definitely with George on this. I have rarely met someone with this level of incompetence. I am so glad you no longer work there.
Comment By: alexander hoffmann
March 17th, 2012 at 12:08 am
Nor have I ever met someone with this supposed level of incompetence who could be realistically used in such a blatantly elitist exemplar of an “average” human being. Thank Goodness we have a few, so very touchingly few, people of quality to point out the supposedly worthless quality of the “average” human being.
Comment By: Remake Chronicles
March 17th, 2012 at 7:53 am
As Kurt Vonnegut said, I am not only marching in that parade but waving a banner.
Any man’s personal estimate of “average” depends on what he’s personally encountered. My personal estimate of what constitutes “average” might have been colored by 17 years at that job, where in addition to Morty, the guy who sang songs about “niggers” in the office, the guy who used his car to splatter puddles onto innocent people at bus stops, the woman who taught her kids that if they were ever lost they should not allow themselves to be found by police, the guy who thought it was funny to spray mace at the Christmas party, the guy who stood in a room by himself and ranted at length about how brilliant he was, the woman who wanted everybody to know that TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE was a true story and that the FBI was looking for Leatherface right now, the woman who argued with me that science had never discovered anything, the manager whose idea of a great joke was blowing cigar smoke in people’s faces, the woman who made a hit list of people she wanted to drive to suicide, the woman who killed herself and four other people by getting drunk and driving the wrong way on the highway, the girl who got pregnant from a guy she loathed because she traded sex for drugs, the woman who wanted me to know that if she ever saw anybody carrying a book she knew the guy had no life, the guy who had never heard that JFK was assassinated and thought it was stooopid that he should ever be expected to, the person who had shrieking phone arguments with her sister that ended with “I hate you! I hate you!” on company time, the fellow who stole credit cards numbers and never suspected that using them to send pizzas to himself would result in him being caught, the guy who during October of one Presidential year did not know that a Presidential election was going on, the woman who refused to call a tow truck for an employee whose car had broken down in the parking lot because it wasn’t in her job description, the one who started an argument about the “incompetent” co-worker who didn’t “know” that New Mexico was a foreign country, the man so personally filthy that people entering the same elevator he had used three hours before got physically ill and vomited, the guy who got bored with his job and spent weeks going through the customer list to make random abusive phone calls to total strangers, the manager who forced his employees to write up hundreds of fraudulent sales, the several people who nodded off at their desks from drug abuse, and the male manager who fondled a male co-worker on a daily basis and threatened to fire him if he complained…well, I could go on for longer. A case could be made that, with his absence of sheer malice — as the guy actually did have a good heart — Morty was on the upper end of the scale. If your personal experience is a better one, then I withdraw the comment and commend you on your good fortune.
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