When Idiots Call: A Hilarious Customer Service Conversation

By now my husband realizes he has the opportunity to just end the call. T-Mobile policy allows their reps to end calls for two types of callers. When reps are being cussed out by belligerent customers, the reps can hang up. When reps find themselves with mind-boggling idiots, they can tell the customer to go to her local T-Mobile store where a person can actually see the phone and fix the impossible. The impossible, to many of these callers, is usually just finding the “on” button.

But in the company’s computer system that stores comments made by other reps about any particular caller, my husband sees two previous phone reps had already sent her to a store. Both times, the store reps left their memos about how the woman came, but neglected to actually bring the problematic phone. So my husband knew he was the only chance this woman had at actually using her phone.

Husband: “I know it can be complicated to have a cell phone. But please take a look at it and let me know what color it is.”

“I don’t know what color it is!” the woman yells at this obviously incompetent drone.

“Okay. Let’s try something that can help you figure out what color it is. Look at your walls and tell me what color the walls are painted.”

“Well the walls are white!”, she angrily responds.

“Great!” He says, seeing a glimmer of hope. “Now look at the phone and use this same method to see what color your phone is.”

“Well I don’t know what color my phone is! I didn’t PAINT my phone!”

After much time passes with my husband giving other examples of how to find the color, and then finally listing several different possible colors, the woman finally says it’s silver.

Husband: “Great. That means it could be only one of four different types of phones. All I need to know is what color the buttons on your phone are.”

“My phone doesn’t have any buttons!”

Now my husband had to figure out how to explain what buttons are. “They are little things with numbers that you push in order to call somebody.”

“No. The phone just doesn’t have any buttons!” And instead of looking at buttons, the caller starts taking the back off her phone and reads the battery’s serial number to my husband.

Husband: “Thanks for reading me those numbers. But I actually need to know the color of the numbers on the keypad.”

“Well the numbers are black” she said still mesmerized by the battery.

“Okay, I got that. I want you to turn the phone over and find numbers on that side of the phone…the side with the screen on it, and tell me what color they are.” Then my husband goes to listing the four possible colors they could be.

“Well I just don’t know.”

“Okay. Is it kind of blue?”

“I don’t know!”

“Okay. Just make a guess.”

“I don’t want to guess. What if I guess wrong?!”

“Okay. What color do you think it might be?”

Finally after many more stupid questions and even stupider answers, it was determined, or at least guessed at, that the button colors were, or at least might be, an aqua-blue. Then for the next 30 minutes, like someone trying to talk a man off a ledge, my husband had to somehow get the woman to figure out how to correctly put her SIM card in the phone, all the while the woman thinking it was my husband that a sandwich shy of a picnic.

Ever since hearing this story, I’ve been a lot nicer to the customer service reps I call.