Classless adults

Slight recovery from the past couple days of low sales. Thanks to those who submitted comments on my plots — I’ve fixed them up and think I’m all set for tomorrow’s presentation. I’ll post the final slides later this week.

Had an interesting (though slightly exhausting) experience today — a very upset Australian-accented customer was routed my way via phone in the latter half of the afternoon. Apparently he wanted to find out if Laox sold rice-cookers, and was extremely upset by Laox’s lack of web-content. After becoming frustrated trying to get an explanation from Laox’s “English speakers”, I was hand picked to listen to his complaints. Every other phrase was a mix of “…you fucking assholes…”, “…shit heads…”, or “…you fucking idiots.” He then went on some tangent about Japan’s “…shitless economy…”, and Laox being some example of it. He unfortunately stated that the U.S. “…should have bombed fucking 4 nuclear warheads up your ass” (referring to Japan). It was clear he thought he was speaking to a Japanese. I couldn’t figure out what to make of this guy — he spent probably 90% of the phone call yelling and screaming, interspersed with complaints about how much the call was costing him because he was making it from his hotel room. I asked around afterwards and it was apparently a first-time; hopefully it’ll be the last. He did say he would be showing up tomorrow afternoon expecting to see the company president. Guess we’ll see if he holds up to his word…ugh

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Posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2003 at 12:03 am and filed under humour, salaryman, sonystyle, tokyo life. Subscribe to RSS 2.0. Skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging disabled.

2 Responses to “Classless adults”

  1. andrew
    June 25th, 2003 at 12:17 pm

    matt,

    that’s really rough. you’re probably seeing the OTHER extreme right here. sounds like you played it cool and it could just be a test from “the company”… hehe.

    from the sounds of it, the guy has a lot more issues than getting a good deal on a rice cooker… ;-)

  2. Yosteve
    June 25th, 2003 at 1:10 pm

    matt -
    well, that sounds like quite an experience. not terribly unusual, i’m sorry to say. andrew is right, such people do have other issues, and this guy is almost certainly not what he pretends to be but is mentally unstable. good experience learning to handle this type – once they start getting abusive, i find it best to demand some information such as their name, name of company, phone no., etc., then ask them to state what it is they want . . . at that point they are usually revealed as not real customers and you can simply say something like ‘i’d rather not waste any more of your time so i have to hang up’ . . . and then click.

    hope that’s helpful . . . anyway, it comes with the territory!

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