Certain customers refuse to take an expert’s word at face value, and that’s when the expert starts to mess with you. When this IT employee grows sick of an entitled customer’s impatience, they decide to mess with her.
Everyone’s time is valuable. Whether you’re an employee or a customer, it’s important to consider that you’re speaking to human beings, not all-knowing wizards. An employee can’t drop everything they’re doing to appease one customer; that’s unfortunately, not the way the world works. If a 1:1 customer-employee ratio existed in any given workplace, then we’d be telling a completely different story. Even still, select teams rely on other groups to get their work done promptly. If one team isn’t available, they don’t have the pieces for the whole puzzle. And, of course, a customer so deep in their own entitlement wouldn’t even attempt to get a clue as to why their problem has not been resolved; they’d prefer to complain, complain again, and then complain some more.
At what point does malicious compliance become acceptable in the workplace? At first, you want to give your colleagues and customers the benefit of the doubt. If you’re honestly trying your hardest to be a good customer, coworker, or helper, you’d hope those around you are doing the same. Innocent until proven guilty, right?
The world doesn’t work like this, friends. Out in the world, there exists a certain kind of customer who believes they might actually be the last person on earth, I Am Legend-style. Their problems take top priority, and they’ll speak to your manager if you don’t find a resolution to their issue swiftly. You can try to reason with them all you want about how you need certain parts to fix their car that aren’t available at the shop, or that you can’t put yourself in physical danger to retrieve an Ethernet cord for their printer, and they won’t care. It’s one ear and out the other. Scroll below to read about an IT employee who is dealing with a customer who won’t accept the fact that their printer won’t be repaired as soon as possible. She learns her lesson in the end.
