As most people know, I work in a call center for a major cable internet provider. We provide tech support for the internet only, whereas the cable TV goes to a different department. Now I don't usually post these because most people do not stand out, but this week I had someone AWESOME.

There was an outage happening in one of the areas we cover, and it took out both TV and internet. The outage effected several thousand people, and of course people are watching TV at midnight. The calls start to stack up, and we have a queue of about 20 waiting for us. I quickly learned about the outage and was able to tell most people that there was an outage and it will be a matter of time before it is fixed and to be patient. I also learned that the department that handles the cable TV side was ringing busy for people so they would start to call back and choose internet tech support instead. Fine, we can tell them too that there's an outage.

Except for one guy. He called in, was a TV-only customer, and proceeded to yell and scream that he had no TV. I politely explained to him that there was an outage, and it would be some time before it is fixed, but we are aware of it and it's being worked on right now. Unacceptable! He was a Vietnam veteran and demanded it to be up now. Somehow I was supposed to fix this internet problem myself just for him. Just because he was a vet. I told him there was nothing else I could do, but that didn't stop him. He had his daughter and grandchild over right now and wanted to watch TV with them but they couldn't and demanded to know what he should do. I started thinking of a few suggestions... like READ A BOOK? PLAY A BOARD GAME? TURN ON THE RADIO? Then I realized. It's Midnight. It's freaking 12am where he is. Shouldn't that child be in bed? On a school night? I did not express any of these thoughts to the customer but I really wanted to. Eventually the guy gave up and said he was switching to Dish Network. Sounded like a good idea, perhaps he'll enjoy their outages just as much.