Diary of the Red Queen, Mama & Lunatic
Diary of the Red Queen, Mama & Lunatic
Newest Entry
|
2001-07-14 - 5:46 p.m. Muahahahaha.... So I work for a freemail site. Sometimes I abuse my authority. Most of the time I don't. But today, someone tried to usurp my authority and I didn't take kindly to it. I do e-mail technical support, and sometimes my phone rings, but it is usually not a customer. Since it's a freemail site, we do not offer phone support, because that's pricey. However, many, many people think it's "horrible," "ludicrous," "criminal," and many other fun adjectives that we do not offer phone support. Sometimes a customer will be clever enough to look through our site, figure out who we're owned by, call them, and through sheer cussedness get them to give out the phone number for technical support, even though that phone number is only supposed to be for inside personnel and "escalations." I got one of these customers on the phone just now. He said he was having "login trouble." Since we had an outage recently, usually people with "login trouble" just need to clear their cache, but I went along with it. I asked for his username and he gave it. Looking up his account, I saw that "Suspended" was listed at the top. We use "suspended" for all sorts of purposes. Spammers get suspended, accounts that haven't been logged into in awhile get suspended, etc. The only reversible kind of suspended is if you hadn't logged in in awhile. Otherwise, well, you stay suspended because you violated the site's terms of service. I looked further down in the support notes and discovered he had been suspended for writing abusive e-mails. He was apparently the moderator of a Jewish-focused e-mail list. He had advertisements in his signature, which can almost be construed as spamming. But most salient of all, as I looked up the complaint against him, I found that he had threatened to get the entire online Jewish community to ostracize a woman because she did not agree with him on a point of politics. He had even resorted to name-calling, saying the woman was a "piece of treif". I explained this to the man in as mild a tone as I could, just stating the facts. I read the complaint e-mail back to him, and he did not deny having written it. I admitted to being ignorant of what "treif" was, and he pounced on that. "SEE!" he shouted. "You don't even know what that is! For all you know, it could be a compliment!" "All right, sir," I said, "if you want to play that game, I'll look it up." I surfed over to one of my favorite sites, AskJeeves.com and asked ol' Jeeves, "What is treif?" Jeeves came up with Ahavat Israel, the Amazing Jewish Website, which defines "treifah" as: I recited all this to the guy on the phone, and it gave him a bit of pause, I think, that I'd been able to find it so quickly. "It's the opposite of Kosher," he said. "It does not sound like a compliment to me." He went on to say that he didn't think he should have to compliment people to remain on the freemail service. I reminded him he'd violated the terms of service by threatening people. "Based on this one e-mail?" he asked. "No, we used that e-mail as the basis to launch an investigation," I said. "Listen, you, whoever you are," he said. "You have no right to cut me off like this." "You violated the terms of service that you agreed to when you signed up for this account." "Prove it!" I did. I put him on hold and collected lots of information from other techs who'd dealt with complaints regarding this user. He'd been suspended and reinstated once before on his solemn promise not to do anything of the kind ever again. He'd been sent multiple warnings from technical support. He didn't accept any of this. "It's not your call!" he said. "Yes, it is." "I demand to speak with a supervisor! You're interjecting yourself in a political argument in which you have no part! You can't possibly understand what is going on here!" "The account is suspended, and there's an end to it. You were warned more than once, and you didn't change your behavior. You cannot get this account back." CLICK. I hung up on him. I was shaking, I was so mad. He was so condescending, and had all but called me incompetent and bigoted. He'd be back, I knew, and he was. Terence got the call, and a supervisor was put on the phone almost immediately. Fortunately, we had already briefed the supervisor on what to expect, and the supervisor wasn't having any of this guy's bullshit. Apparently the guy demanded my name, and said it was "his right" to get it. The supervisor refused, although later I told him it would not have mattered if he'd given the guy my first and last names, because they're so common it's impossible to look me up anyway, given only that I live somewhere in the US! So the conversation with the supervisor went on and on, and the guy tried to make the supervisor believe that "piece of treif" was a compliment as well! But now everyone on our call floor knows the real definition, so that wouldn't wash. Plus, the supervisor isn't stupid. The guy also tried to claim First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, which he also waived when he signed the terms of service. "You're violating my civil rights!" he exclaimed weakly, towards the close of the call. "No, we're not, sir. You have a nice day, now," said the supervisor, hanging up. So that's my story. I learned a new Jewish word, and I kept an asshole from getting back on the service. It's almost as much fun as hunting spammers. Too bad that guy was moderating his list from that e-mail account. That's going to be rough. TRQ
|
My Mood: 
My Weather:
Diagon Alley Forum
Diaryland
|
