The Disturbing Customer Service Trend You May Not Know About

There’s Currently Nothing You Can Do About it

“Do you, as a woman, like to wax your armpits?” I can still remember the chill that ran down my spine as the creepy voice filled my ear. He’d started by asking if the store waxed armpits, and I thought he might have been calling to make his wife an appointment, so told him we only waxed eyebrows. His second question made it clear that he wasn’t looking to make an appointment. He had a more disgusting motive for calling, one that I wanted to know nothing about.

“Hold on, I’m going to get someone who can help you,” I said. I placed him on a brief hold. It should come as no surprise that the man had hung up by the time I returned with my manager.

“He calls all the time,” she said as she pressed a few buttons on the phone, searching for his phone number. He’d called using a private number, so she couldn’t trace him. The only thing she could do was tell us to hang up in the future. She clarified we couldn’t be rude to him or tell him not to call again, but she didn’t offer any reasoning why.

Sadly, I’m not the only person to receive this type of phone call. The next week, a coworker received a phone call where the man on the other end ‘apologized for taking lewd pictures of her when she wore a skirt’. She wasn’t the type of woman to wear skirts to work, preferring pants or leggings instead, but the phone call still made her feel uneasy. She also stated that she had been considering wearing a skirt to work, but now she couldn’t because of how the man on the other end of the phone made her feel.

A friend who works at a plus-size clothing store told me there’s a panty man who calls her store. He breathes into the phone as he has them describe the panties they currently have on sale at the store. After the worker describes the panties, he’ll ask them about the ones that they are wearing. They are also helpless to do anything other than hang up.

Phone calls like this are nothing new if you work in the customer service industry, you may have been on the receiving end of one of these phone calls. There’s even a movie called Compliance (2012) which is based on actual events that happened in a McDonald’s. In the movie, a girl is strip-searched and assaulted because a man on the phone pretended to be a police officer. The man is believed to have called over 70 fast-food restaurants and grocery stores. However, the suspect was acquitted of any crimes related to these calls.

Since this is such a widespread problem, why isn’t there anything we can do about it? Why do we have to be polite to callers who call to ask and say disgusting things? Why are these people treated as customers when they didn’t call to inquire about a product? Perhaps we are told to be kind to them to keep ourselves safe. This makes sense because the caller knows where we work and may have visited in the past.

While there’s not much we can do about this issue, we can at least report it to supervisors and ask them to come up with a solution. Hopefully, businesses will create guidelines in the future.