The 4:59 PM call that ended in a beautiful, dose of instant karma.
I just clocked out. Mind you, my shift ended 52 minutes ago. Because of course, a call rolled in exactly one minute before I was supposed to log off, and per company policy, we aren't allowed to pass them along. You get what you get.
And what I got was a "business professional" who was having trouble processing a disbursement payment we sent them.
For context, I work for a payment processor. The disbursement they received functions essentially like a non-reloadable gift card. They were trying to run it through QuickBooks, and our bank was rejecting it. Why? Because QB was automatically trying to save the card for recurring transactions, which this payment type explicitly does not allow.
The caller was already at a level 10 because apparently another agent had failed to call them back earlier. Strike one against me, obviously. I power through the verification process while she’s ranting and raving about how much my company sucks, how this is entirely our problem, and how incompetent everyone is. At one point, I politely offered, "Would you like me to try and get that specific agent on the line for you? I’d be more than happy to check."
Cue another massive tangent. Zero answer to my actual question.
I pull myself back into the line of fire and offer to assist with the actual transaction. I ask her to try running the card again so I can see what's happening. Instead, she launches into a history lesson of everything she’s tried in the past, proudly capping it off with, "Well, I spoke with a QuickBooks 'EXPERT' for four hours trying to resolve this! QuickBooks says YOUR bank is rejecting the payment!"
I agreed with her. "Yes, our bank is rejecting it, because QuickBooks is trying to save the payment method as a recurring card, which it cannot do."
I offer an alternative: "Would you like us to issue a different payment method? We can absolutely do that."
"NO! Because that is going to affect my payroll which is in two days! I just want a new card!"
"Perfect, I'd be more than happy to issue a new card for you. Let me just explain the timeline for that process—"
Which, naturally, sent her into another spiral of absolute frustration.
Finally, I had to rein her back in before I spent the rest of my night with this woman. I asked her if she had actually tried running the card when I first asked. Before she could launch into another monologue, I cut in: "Please attempt to run the card right now, and let's look together to see if the system is still trying to save this payment method."
She huffs, opens the screen, and starts filling it out. And then, like absolute magic, mid-sentence while blaming my company, blaming our tech, and swearing up and down that neither she nor QuickBooks could ever do anything wrong... she stops.
She found the checkbox. The checkbox where QuickBooks was, in fact, trying to save the payment method.
But the universe wasn't done with her yet.
In her rushed, embarrassed scramble to finally run the card correctly, she failed to type in the full, required security information to process it completely. She jammed it through anyway.
The system flagged it. And the card locked down tightly for security purposes... until the 30th.
Remember that payroll she said was due in two days? Yeah.
I spent nearly an hour past my shift being cursed out and degraded, only to watch a "business professional" completely locked herself out of her own funds due to her own sheer impatience and incompetence.
And that, my friends, is what I call beautiful, unadulterated karma.