Hysterical......

[Pinkie]

Did you ever have a customer do something so sucky, that all you could do is laugh hysterically? Happened to me yesterday, and lucky for me, I didn't do it while on the phone with a customer or face to face with a customer. Every now and then, we'll get assigned paperwork and won't have to take calls, and I got lucky yesterday. As I was going through the slips that customers send in with thier payments (looking for address changes, there's a spot where the customer can write in if they want the bill mailed somewhere besides the home address, like a po box) and one customer and written her name, in bold print, all in caps. Beside this, she had written "Who's the rocket scientist who butchered my name? Get it right!!" I don't know why, but I found this hysterically funny and could not stop laughing for 20 minutes....I saved that slip and will look at it every time I need a laugh.

Thank you Ms. SC!!! You made my day!!

[FenigDurak]

Hehe, that's great. I'm not sure I'd call her a pure SC, but close enough. My name gets butchered so frequently that I often don't get any mail. The mail carrier that covers my building won't put mail in if the spelling of the name doesn't match 100% to the label on my box.
But she'll put mail in there for Mohammed Ali. -=facepalm=-

[One-Fang]

That's weird. We don't really have names on letterboxes at all. So if it's addressed to that address, it goes in that box. Doesn't matter who it's addressed to at that address. E.g.: 37 Smith St will go in 37 Smith Street's letterbox. Doesn't matter who lives there, or even if it was addressed to "Cookie Monster, 37 Smith St".

[Banrion]

Around here, in freestanding residential neighborhoods, they will generally just leave mail no matter who it is addressed to, but in multi-family dwellings, such as apartments and condo's, the name has to be on the box or they won't deliver. I guess it is probably due to the high turnover in apartments and such.

[friendofjimmyk]

My name gets butchered all the time too and I believe it's a relatively easy one!!!!! Plus, it's of Spanish orgin and I get mail in Spanish...but I don't speak Spanish. Now, I did take one year of Spanish in college but that was a long time ago and I've slept since then!

OT - A lot of people get a surprised look on their face if they know my last name ahead of time and then see me and they get that, "huh?" look on their face. So do instructors, they call out my last name and I don't think they expect to see me answering the call. I get a lot of questions about who my husband is and I am not married. It's my maiden name!

[trunks2k]

My last name is usually spelled correctly, but sales people and such consistently pronounce it wrong, and always the same way. My last name is not hard to pronounce, it is quite clear. I am not named after an actor or famous guitar maker! I'm named after a type of primate damnit!

So when sales people call and mispronounce my name, I just have to tell them that there's nobody here by that name.

[Dips]

During my brief stint at the Cheesy Travel Package Company (See Twelve European Countries in Six Days!), I was the person who made name and address corrections in the database. And, yes, we had some Real Men of Genius taking down the original data, so I was always busy fixing their mistakes.

The only contact I had from customers was their letters, notes on payment slips, etc. There was this one one guy whose street address was much longer than the the number of spaces allowed for the address field. I admit our address field was quite short. This was back in 1984 and the company computer system probably dated back to 1974. It was ancient. But this guy's address was extremely long. I'll make up a similar one just to give you an idea how long it was:

94 George Frederick Root Memorial Road to Nine Acre Corner off the Southwest Bypass to Salem Turnpike.

Obviously, the person who entered his original data had to abbreviate his address to make it fit. Apparently he had a fit because accounts receivable sent me the slip which came in with his first payment. It had the abbreviated address vigorously crossed out and the full address written out in all caps with multiple exclamation points.

Since the field wasn't any bigger, I just made a new abbreviation and entered it. Sure enough, about a month later, I got another slip just as before, only the all caps were bigger, there were more exclamation points and a bunch of arrows pointing at the fully-written out address.

Up to that point I was thinking that this was some poor guy who wasn't getting his mail in timely fashion because we couldn't put his full address on the envelopes. I looked at the slip and noted that he sent in the payment within days of the billing date. He was getting his mail just fine, he just had a weird hobby...

I was almost tempted to redo the abbreviations to make his address look obscene. Of course I wouldn't really, I just sent the slip back to AR and told them his address doesn't fit in the database and couldn't be "fixed." They had a choice: either hand write his FULL address on the bill before they mailed it to make him happy or just ignore him and stop asking me to correct his address.

Of course, they did neither. So I kept getting a series of pissy payment slips with all kinds of markings, insults, you name it. Sometimes I'd rearrange the abbreviation (I was good; it was always to something which would make it deliverable and I kept it clean), other times I'd ignore it.

I'm with Pinkie. It got to be so over-the-top silly that I started looking forward to what he would come up with next.

[trunks2k]

<snip>
Of course, they did neither. So I kept getting a series of pissy payment slips with all kinds of markings, insults, you name it. Sometimes I'd rearrange the abbreviation (I was good; it was always to something which would make it deliverable and I kept it clean), other times I'd ignore it.

And nobody decided to just pick up the phone and call the guy about it, and say "hey, your address is too long, so stop bothering us"?

[skeptic53]

My first name is more common as a last name, and vice versa. Sort of like Smith Thomas but not that extreme. Applying to graduate schools was a nightmare. I could not get an interview unless my file was complete, it had to have transcripts from both colleges, test scores, letters of recommendation, and application all in the same file. 100% of the time, one item or more would end up filed under my first name. It took many expensive phone calls and patience to get the clerks to look under my first name, believe me that the item belonged in my correct file, agree that my file was now complete and I could be considered for an interview.

Sigh. Does that mean my Mom, who named me, is the SC?

[ArenaBoy]

Had a good one happen to me this summer. There's a back road that you can enter through to get in to the party venue. The entrance splits up leading to VIP or regular parking. My job is to ask them about it. It was me and a guy called N, we were making cracks about the customers like usual when this gem showed up.

Me: Hello, do you have VIP or general parking?
Gem: Hmm, VIP. Yeah, we can do VIP. (Means they have general but want VIP.)

At this point, N just flat out lost it and laughs. The guys in the car were pretty pissed at us and one of them said that he was psycho. The guys looked at us like we were a bunch of weirdos.

[Dips]

And nobody decided to just pick up the phone and call the guy about it, and say "hey, your address is too long, so stop bothering us"?

Hell, no. The AR staff would NEVER pick up the phone to call a customer unless the customer owed them money.

I couldn't call the guy or write to him because I wasn't trained in "customer service." I was just a data entry drone. Even dialing out from my phone was nearly impossible.

I doubt calling him would have made a difference anyway. This fellow didn't seem like the type to meekly listen and accept the way things were. It would have become a pointless argument very quickly.

The Cheesy Travel Package Company was bought out years ago by Cheesier Charter Vacations. I hope that they modernized the database. I also hope the fellow decided to move or petition to have his street name changed. If not for himself, then for his poor family who must be getting very tired of hearing about how nobody ever gets his street right.

[Cia]

Some day I will have to go to the Minnesota SOS building in St. Paul just to see their street sign - Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. I'm imagining a sign about three feet long by 6 inches high.

[Seanette]

Around here, in freestanding residential neighborhoods, they will generally just leave mail no matter who it is addressed to, but in multi-family dwellings, such as apartments and condo's, the name has to be on the box or they won't deliver. I guess it is probably due to the high turnover in apartments and such.

We still occasionally get mail for the previous tenants.

We've lived in this apartment for two years.

[aqutalion]

Around here, in freestanding residential neighborhoods, they will generally just leave mail no matter who it is addressed to, but in multi-family dwellings, such as apartments and condo's, the name has to be on the box or they won't deliver. I guess it is probably due to the high turnover in apartments and such.

It's different around here. Here, if it's addressed to a particular apartment, it goes in that apartment's box, regardless of whose name is on it. Once, I happened to check my mail while the mail carrier was still delivering it. He has a piece of junkmail addressed to my box, but the name was for the person in the next apartment over. He said he was required to deliver it to me, even though the other person's name was on it, because it had my box number.

[Gurndigarn]

We still occasionally get mail for the previous tenants.

We've lived in this apartment for two years.

Six years. We still get mail (real mail, not junk) and phone calls. Though I think most of the phone calls are from debt collectors. The fact that we got so many attempted collect phone calls from a jail indicates that the prior phone number owners weren't fine, upstanding citizens.


(Blocking collect calls from jails, by the way, is not an easy thing to do: you have to find out who the phone company for that jail is, find out how to contact them, and then actually contact them during thier irregular hours to finally get the calls shut off. In the meantime, every Sunday, regularly, we'ld get a phone call saying "WE HAVE a collect call from don'tyoudarehanguponmeyouasshole, who IS ina state... correctional institute. Will you accept the call?" Four or five months that went on, until we finally got them blocked.)