I am a customer service personage for a well-known company.
In reality, I work in a glass fish-tank office that is separated from a call centre, two floors thereof. The call centre types come to us with questions, things they can't respond to themselves and bring us escalated calls. We don't have headsets, because we don't take calls constantly, and we're not monitored the way the call centre types are. However, as much as I love my job and the way it allows me to have money for shiny things, I deal with customers enough to know what I don't like:

- Do not assume that because I'm struggling for a word in French (probably because I'm reading what I want to say off the screen in English and am trying, sometimes unsuccessfully, to translate it ad hoc) that I would prefer to continue the conversation in English. In reality, this irritates me more than you can possibly imagine, since the point of my job is to be able to communicate with you in French. It simply means I am having a Bad French Day and normal service will be resumed shortly and perhaps with smaller words than it would otherwise be conducted.

- Please do not tell me that the suitcase that you have mislaid mostly consists of your dirty underwear. I didn't need to know that, least of all after I've had to escalate you to my boss.

- Please do not email me after I've resolved your claim for you wanting to 'put a face to the voice on the phone' and request to add me on Facebook. Mostly because I will not know how to respond, and so not do it.

- It is not my fault if the system that I currently need to access has a planned outage on the day that you call and there is no workaround in place for it. You do not need to shout at me for this and ask to be escalated to my manager, because he will tell you the exact same thing.

- Do not tell me "I pay your salary, young lady!". Because you don't.
( Maladicta, Tue 8 Sep 2009, 22:56, 4 replies)

When both I, and the other person
are better in english than french, I typically just switch to whatever language is going to communicate the issue and obtain a fix faster.

*shrugs*

The way to not respond is "Sir, that's bloody creepy, go away".

And fault management system outages suck when you work on a 24/7 desk :(
"Yes, I'm trying to figure out what's wrong, but I don't have access to half the logins I use on your equipment, and I can't log this issue to your telco because I can't get your circuit ref#'s. No, the site address doesn't help, because the database I'd use to cross ref those is down, too".
(Scritty Bakerman., Wed 9 Sep 2009, 0:41, closed)

I'd quite like to "put a face to the 'voice' in the post", may I add you on faceache/my-bo/be-book?
(Pope Jamiroquai III, Wed 9 Sep 2009, 2:17, closed)

Eurgh
I thought that might be slightly humorous but, in reality, I just feel sleazy and wrong now...
(Pope Jamiroquai III, Wed 9 Sep 2009, 2:18, closed)

"i pay your salary/wages!"
This is usually the beginning sentence in a surreal discussion that ends in me convincing them that I, in fact, am paying their wages and that with their attitude, they will not be receiving any sort of bonus or payrise until they put more effort into it.
(searlichek, Wed 9 Sep 2009, 7:02, closed)