Addendum To: And This Is Why I Hate Calling People At Work

So I got back to the woman I talked to about those mysterious pills that came in with the pee.  Frankly, this woman is psychotic.  She was incredibly passive-aggressive when I just wanted to know what she wanted me to do with those pills, became very accusatory because she believed our lab broke some urine bottles she shipped to us several weeks ago, and came off as so narcissistic that I don't think she listened to a word I said and instead just was waiting for a moment she could begin spewing out what was stewing in her head.  And she was incredibly, absurdly thin-skinned, too.  Get this -- I was just listening to her talk and talk and talk when my co-workers, who were behind me, started chuckling.  And this bitch goes, "Are you laughing?"

"That is my co-worker," I said, incredulously and sternly.  I have never accused someone of laughing at me while I was on a business call.  I wouldn't say it even if I thought the person I was speaking to was.  How borderline fucking paranoid do you have to be to think someone at work is laughing at you??  And I thought I was crazy, holy shit. ...

She wanted a photo of these tablets ("Those aren't really tablets, but capsules, but anyway ..." she actually said that -- my God, she is insufferable and out of her mind) and I was only too happy to e-mail it to her because I was praying to Buddha that would be the last goddamn time I would ever, ever have to speak to her.  And that was my last phone call with her ... but she was going back and forth with me through e-mail.  Luckily, her tone got less combative once she realized that the testing was underway for the pee she presumably intended to send.  That doesn't excuse her tone, of course; she didn't have to fly off the handle over some cold tablets.  Turns out they were thrown in to the bag by mistake by someone who thought the bag those tablets were in was empty.

Unfortunately, I have spoken to human beings a lot.  I was verbally abused too many fucking times by assholes when I was an usher, and that was because those assholes thought I was beneath them.  As I have gotten older, however, I have realized that fuckers who scream at customer service people do so because they feel like they're not in control, and they feel demeaning people is their only way in which to get that control.  That, shall we say, power imbalance is in my favor at my job.  These people who call need test results, and my company provides them.  That means those people are waiting on us, and on me.  I will always try to help.  But if they refuse to be cooperative, I remind myself that we got the answers, and I will lord those test results over the pricks who call in and want to be nasty with me.

So, I will say that those interactions I described above are way worse than this bullshit she pulled.  In fact, believe it or not, I have to admit that in dealing with her nuttiness, I saw a little bit of ... myself.  Hey, I'm no angel.  In order to get what I want, I will become passive-aggressive and defensive and yelly as she was.  I'm not proud of that behavior (necessarily), it's just that I have had temper tantrums like that many times before, and I know that I won't change because that's how I act when I am pissed -- just like she was.

---

Her last e-mail to me was that explanation of how those liquid gel caps got in that bag.  It was a mistake, and there was no intention of testing them or anything like that.  The thing is, I never asked her how those tablets got in there.  I don't care.  And so I wonder what her point was in fleshing out the story.  Did she think I wanted to know?  Or is this another demonstration of her narcissism, that she just assumed I had to know how Nancy Drew solved The Case Of The Stowaway Capsules.

Should I have responded to that e-mail?  There may be, unfortunately, a time where I'll have to contact her again, so maybe, just to keep the peace, I should acknowledge what she discovered.  But ... well, it was another ten-hour day at work (the problem of her took up almost an hour of my time) and I needed to pick up lottery tickets for my parents and sister and I wanted to go home ... and, frankly, I needed to send her a message that if I ever fucking heard her psycho voice again, it would be too soon.  So I left without replying to her.  And, yeah, I think I won't reply to her.  I got what I wanted from her.