35. Their Call Time Was Up
I used to manage a call center for a large corporation with a few stores that had retail counters. Corporate would require these guys to have a minimum phone time, or else you’d run the risk of being written up. The higher-ups, in their infinite wisdom, decided that hold time was just as good as actual talk time. So people came up with a loophole. There were a lot of employees manipulating their phone times, like calling their own cell phones and putting themselves on hold.
I wrote up a few employees for these actions. We fired one employee for typical reasons like being disobedient, disrespectful, etc. Whenever we fired someone, we reviewed all their company emails to make sure we took care of any unfinished business. We found an email string between him and another employee who worked on a retail counter, showing off their long hold times with actual customers.
They’d bad mouth the customers saying how stupid they were. Some customers were waiting 15–20 minutes for help just so they could get their daily phone time up. Normally, I hated having to fire someone, but that one was easy.