Quote:
Originally Posted by jennyj87
Now I work at a college and I've learned that everyone thinks its someone else's department that handles things. I work in the maintenance area, answering the phones, and I've gotten phone calls transfered to me about withdrawing from the university and how to use our online class add/drop system.
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YES. I used to answer phones in undergraduate admissions and we would get the weirdest calls that had nothing to do with our department.
I work at a different university now and it's not an isolated phenomenon. My job is actually two positions combined, and the woman who had half of my job before me was a sweet older lady with a lot more time on her hands who was generally happy to track down people's extensions. The operators picked up on this pretty fast and got used to sending her all the really strange calls they didn't know what to do with. Now I have her job (and her extension) plus someone else's and I really don't have time to do this, but they continue to send me the weird calls that have nothing to do with my department. I hate to transfer people back to the operator again, but since I've started doing that it's gotten better.
My co-worker told me the weirdest one she ever got was a man from another country asking her to find his wife, who had left him and moved to the city the university is in. He gave her a list of all the places she might be and asked her to find her and make her go back to him. Huh?
I've never worked retail, but I worked part-time at an animal shelter for many years and have plenty of awful customer stories. People trying to steal kittens by putting them in their purses, people opening up all the cat's cages so they can "play", people who treat the shelter like a zoo for their kids - we had some women actually try to leave their young children with us while they went across the street to go shopping. Because we had nothing better to do than babysit kids and make sure they don't get bitten by already-stressed animals.
This next part is not for the squeamish - but the cruelty and stupidity of people was something that really got to me in that job. One morning in the middle of a new england winter we arrived to find three puppies tied to the front door, freezing, because somebody didn't have the cojones to come in and surrender their dogs face-to-face (the puppies ended up being ok, btw, and all found homes). Another time a person brought in a guinea pig they had been keeping in a cage full of cat litter because they didn't want to buy shavings. The poor thing was caked literally all over with dried clay from where she had gotten stuck in wet litter over and over. And the worst one - this person brought in a cat in a carrier and just left it in the entrance before running out the door. We took the cat in the back to examine her and she smelled awful. My boss put his hands into the carrier to pick her up and his hand went
inside the cat's abdomen. She had a mammary tumor that had gotten so bad it had burst and was left as a giant open infected wound. It was horrible. Unfortunately, at that point there was nothing we could do for her and she was euthanized.
There were a lot of happy stories in that job too, but it was a real eye-opener to how awful people can be.