Dedication to the job

I've always taken great pride in doing my job well. You don't have to tell me twice that the customer is always right. But what do you do when the customer isn't always just right, but the customer is just pathetically sad, alone and well...kinda a little nuts?

I have this client that is married to a man several years older than she is. She's currently pregnant and already has 5 children, all under the age of 10. She's a very pretty, tall woman. I don't know her well, just professionally except for sometimes she crosses the line between client and agent and I'm not sure where her mind is in all this.

For example, about 9 months ago, she called our office and I happened to answer and the question she had was about directions to the local IRS office. Even though I thought the question a little bit strange, especially when your asking your insurance agent...but since we do commercial and trucking insurance I figured it had something to do with the business and that's why she called us.

Then about 4 months ago, she called again and she hemmed & hawed like she really didn't know how to come to the point of the conversation. She finally asked me if I had ever been to a certain grocery store in our city. I told her yes a few times and that my parents went there quite a bit. Well she asked if I had ever purchased their chicken chorizo. I told her no and wondered where this was going and what chorizo had to do with insurance. But...the customer is always right and we always listen to the customer and don't just brush them off.

Ok, so then she tells me that she had gone to this store that morning and she had purchased some of this chicken chorizo and she came home and fried some corn tortilla's and then fried some of the chorizo and made little tostada's for her kids. While the kids were eating she then went to fry a little more chorizo for herself when all of a sudden she noticed there was a small worm in the chorizo. Ewwwwwww! Gross.

So I'm wondering why I had to be the one listening to this and she goes on to tell me that she feels really bad because the kids have already eaten their chicken chorizo tostadas and now she feels bad that they ate chorizo with worm or worms and she wanted to know what she should do.

Uh, huh? What? Huh?

She wanted her insurance agent to tell her what to do? So I told her, because, well...it's my job to help my customers right? Uh ok, yeah...I guess that's right. I told her not to say anything to the children, they've already eaten it right? I asked her if she wanted the phone number to the local health department so she could report them. She said no, that's ok. She would just throw away the rest of it and not go to that store ever again. So she thanked me and that was it.

Well today, she called again and got my co-worker this time. She had recently filed papers with the tax collector to have her properties reappraised to lower the values in order to lower the property taxes. (And this is a woman that doesn't have enough sense to not feed her children worms? She knows enough to have her properties reappraised...and need I say more, she owns PROPERTIES, meaning more than one!) Her problem this time was that she had received a letter from the tax collector, but as she's Spanish speaking only, she didn't know what the letter said so she wanted to fax it over and have us read it and tell us what it said.

Is this woman an enigma or what? One second she's dumb as a rock, illiterate, scatter brained, helpless and lonely and the next second she's this business tycoon with multiple properties. Strange huh?