No, it wasn’t like the drama that transpired in the recorded conversation between an irate customer and a PLDT rep. Far from it really—I was kind of enjoying myself. Hehe.

I had a six-month stint as a technical support representative, and I know how irritating it is to get a call from a total idiot. So yeah. I wasn’t an irate caller, I just had an irate Customer Service Rep (CSR)!

I didn’t mean to piss her off, you know. I just called the hotline to order birth certificates for me and Marc (hey, I’ll be spending P1,200 for those darned things!), and lucky me must have gotten a CSR nearing the end of her shift. She sounded like she wanted to get the hell out of there, and I was just another “sale” she wanted to close. Anyway, it was the first time I ordered birth certificates through the phone, so really can’t blame me for not knowing “the flow.” Know what I mean?

She was actually quite pleasant at first, to tell you the truth. I think she started getting irked off when this happened:

GAIL: I want to buy birth certificates for me and my fiance. I’m going to need two each, one for our passports and another one for the marriage thing.

CSR: Do you have his ID and authorization letter?

GAIL: I don’t have those, but how would really know if I do when you’re there and I’m here? Do I really need his ID and letter to order?

CSR: No, ma’am, but you’re going to need them when the certificates are delivered to you.

GAIL: Ah. That’s no problem. He practically lives here anyway.

Fine, fine. So I wasn’t exactly being my “intelligent self” that time. It’s one of those days, you know? There are just some people who seem to be easy to piss off. Call me evil, but sometimes I really do enjoy pissing off people like that. The more they get pissed off, the more I wanted to piss them off. Hehehe.

So anyway, the second time I pissed her off was when I forgot to give her my second name. Well, that one I didn’t mean to do. Really.

CSR: Ma’am, you said your name was “Abygail,” not “Abygail Josephine.”

GAIL: Well, they’re both my names. What difference does it make?

CSR: Ma’am, I’ll have to give you a new referrence number for Marc John’s certificate.

GAIL: Oh, you do? OK.

You know, if she didn’t sound so pissed off I probably won’t piss her off more. But with the tone of her voice, I had a feeling she really wanted to be rid of me badly 😛 I repeated the referrence numbers incorrectly (twice, but I didn’t mean to, I swear!), and made her wait for more than five minutes while I looked for the photocopy of Marc’s birth certificate. I felt her wrath on me for pulling her average call handling time, but hey, she gotta cool off you know. Besides, I really couldn’t find it! She sounded so relieved when I told her I don’t need anything else, and hung up the phone before I changed my mind.

This wasn’t really the first time I acted silly while on the phone with a customer service rep—it’s just the first time that a CSR got pissed off at me for acting silly. Normally, CSRs would just laugh aside my smart-ass comments. They won’t make me feel like an idiot. But this one… Well, she made me believe I was an idiot, so I acted like one.

She really reminded me of this college classmate of mine who always ran to the opposite direction whenever she saw me coming. I got a real kick every time her face contorts upon hearing my wise cracks—I didn’t consider a day complete without pissing her off at least once. I only stopped pissing her off when she stopped getting pissed off and started to laugh along with me. We never became best friends or anything, but I think she had been over at our place for one or two of my house parties.

It’s really not my habit to go pissing off people (hehe sure, sure), but really. Sometimes I just can’t help it. Me and my little circle of friends in college were total goof-balls (people usually go, “no way,” when they find out that I was a total geek when it came to web/graphics design). A former teacher even remembered me as part of the “noisy group at the back.”

I’m probably still not as serious as a nerd (hell, I’m still very talkative and well, I still joke a lot), but I have my days. Once you graduate from the “Daddy, can I have money?” stage, it’s not really that surprising that you’ll be able to see life with a tad bit more serious outlook. You get to see more out of the “just pissing off a customer rep” situation. But being always too serious about everything and forgetting to laugh isn’t healthy—takes the fun out of life.

Before anyone chastises me for pissing off the snarling CSR… Loosen up, for christsakes! And let me enjoy cheap thrills like this once in a while… It’s not like I do it all the time, you know? 😛