Dealing with customer support isn’t always the most straightforward thing. Oftentimes, you have to jump through hoops to get your questions answered and your requests fulfilled.
But no matter how frustrating it can be to deal with someone else on the other line, you probably shouldn’t scream and shout at them for no good reason.
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Even if you’re angry, it’s a good idea to keep your cool.
Not everyone got that memo, it seems. Reddit user Cherry_Medium recently posted his tale of bad customer service on the subreddit r/AITA, asking if he was, in fact, the asshole in his situation.
“I had a root canal a month ago – the clinic charged my insurance $800 and me $1600. I paid.”
“But the root canal was botched, and my regular dentist had to pull the tooth out because it was more painful AFTER the operation than before. Another $1000 I had to pay,” he writes.
It already sounds like a pretty crappy situation. So of course, things get a whole lot worse.
“This morning, the clinic that did my root canal called, saying that my insurance didn’t pay their share, so they are billing me the extra $800.”
Not only is he out an extra thousand for the operation, but now the dentist office is expecting him to pay an extra $800 on top of that.
But it doesn’t end there.
He then says that the woman he’s talking to on the phone (who he calls Emma) refused to discuss matters with him further: “I ask her to just hand the phone to her superior. She repeatedly refuses and tells me that my ONLY OPTION is to pay and ‘keep quiet.'”
I won’t lie, I’d get pretty angry at that response, too.
It’s what happens next, though, where things really start to escalate.
The Redditor completely lost his cool, saying, “‘QUIET? YOU WANT ME TO BE F—— QUIET WHILE YOU FLEECE ME?!'” Emma hangs up, and he calls back, proceeding to yell at her again.
This cycle of him calling and her hanging up repeated for three hours until he finally gets to speak to her supervisor.
That’s when the situation finally came to an end.
“I screamed ever harder at the manager, who also swore that it was totally impossible to lower my bill.” When he finally threatened to get lawyers involved, the clinic dropped the fee. So at the end of the day. Cherry_Medium got exactly what he wanted.
“So, since Emma could get her manager on the phone, and since my bill could be cancelled all along, and they just tried to steal from me, I feel I did nothing wrong.”
The Redditor concludes his post by saying, “My wife is upset at me from screaming at “this poor girl.” But IT WORKED. Was I an AH?”
The commenters weighed in.
The general consensus is that, yes, he was being an asshole to Emma, who was just trying to do her job. But it isn’t quite as simple as that.
One comment pretty much sums up what most people are saying.
The comment reads , “The first time OP were told to suck it up and shut up, he had every right to angry. But continue to harass the caller? Yeah that’s where he cross the line. Especially for three hours.”
Other comments are confirming this too.
“Screaming didn’t work. Threatening a lawsuit worked. You could have done that from the onset in a calm and professional manner. You abused someone not at all responsible for your problem. YTA,” another comment reads.
It clearly isn’t a one-sided issue
Sure, the dentist office shares some fault, but to go ahead and scream at a receptionist for hours on end doesn’t seem like the way to solve a dispute, either. And based on the comments on the thread, a lot of people seem to think so, too.
What do you think? Was this Reddit user in the right? Or did he cross a line somewhere in there?
