Service with a Smile

We all have to deal with people on a daily basis. Clients/customers/fellow employees are part of our daily routine. And most of the time this is perfectly fine. But you get those times where someone says or asks something truly outrageous. Something so spectacularly useless that there can be but one response.....

Let's face it, people can sometimes astonish you with their sheer absurdity! Once, while working as a IT support technician for a company that shall remain nameless, I was called into a manager's office to fix a printer that wouldn't print. Being a manager this person liked to lord his superiority over others and loudly told me, so that everyone in the department could hear, to fix the printer or there would be trouble. Crawling under his desk I immediately found the problem and fixed it. When he asked (loudly, of course) what the problem was I told him, just as loudly, that he had unplugged the printer in order to charge his cellphone, thus rendering the entire department unable to print. On another occasion I received a call from an employee whose computer would not power on. I fixed it within seconds and told him to not unplug his computer in future. These are really simple examples of how tear-jerkingly stupid people can be at times.

Now that I am in the corporate space, I deal with much larger clients, but unfortunately the absurdity still follows me around. We provide a large number of mobile solutions to corporate clients and one day I received a call from one of them. He asked me if I could assist him with a formula in Microsoft Excel that he just couldn't get working. I assisted him and the problem was quickly resolved. He then thanked me and was about to hang up when I asked him what exactly his call had to do with our services. His answer? "Oh, nothing. I just thought you might be good with Excel." I've also had a client call me up to ask me where a particular server, that had nothing to do with us, was located in his server room. I politely told him that I do not deal with the server in question and instructed him to take it up with his in-house IT department, all the while wondering why he had called me in the first place.

Whether you are in the corporate space or in retail/services, I can almost guarantee that at some point in your career you have had the same thought that I have......