Remember Doug

And his soon to be infamous "because customers are stupid" line? Doug, once again, you were right.

One of my coworkers is out of the office right now. One of this person's jobs is to review all the large payments that are submitted to us. A large payment, by the way, is $10,000 or more. We double-review these requests because that's a lot of money, and our payment guarantee will only cover $10,000 of it. So, while this coworker is out of the office, yours truly has to do the large payment research.

Usually, large payment research is non-eventful. We look for previous payments made, payment method (as in check or electronic), and make sure the address where we are sending checks matches the address given. We don't question why people would want to send $20,000 to their gas company, just to verify the account and address information is correct.

Today, a $25,000 payment came up for me to research. This was a payment to an investment account at a well-known investment company that has account numbers that are eight digits in length. Our brilliant customer only gave us three digits, proceeded by five X's. And the brilliant customer didn't give a complete phone number for the company (who wouldn't give me the account number anyway). I contacted the customer (I'll use the pharmacy's shorthand for customer: cx) and explained that we need the full account number. Cx insisted that the company could accept the payment this way, and told me to change the X's to 1's if they had to be numbers. I said I'd do it, but had to inform cx that if something went wrong (like the check never made it, it was put into the wrong account, or someone else managed to cash it) that every last one of those $25,000 would not be covered by our payment guarantee because cx did not give us the right account number. Well, cx got super angry at this and started yelling at me, then finally stated that they would find a different bank.

Apparently, doing my best to insure those $25,000 goes to the right place with as little delay and chance for mistake as possible made this person very angry. Customers are stupid.

What did I end up doing with the payment, you ask? I deleted it, of course! If you're not going to give me the right information and then get rude and mean for no reason, I'm not going to do you any favors. Those $25,000 got put back in Cx's account and that check did not get sent. So there. Stupid customer.

And I've had to do work all day because my favorite forums was down because they're moving to a new host or something. Blast you, Goldentrees! You're supposed to keep me occupied and not doing work! And on a Friday!! Augh!

P.S. Happy Imbolc!