This (Friday) morning, I had an irate customer to deal with on the phone.

Backgrounder. In this project, one of the portions is subcontracted to company U, which we (C) oversee for our customer (P). We've done several of these projects for P before, and this time, U told us they couldn't work on the new project because P had some other outstanding bills with them. (P also works directly with U in some other projects that we don't handle for them.) So I contacted P about this and asked them to sort it out quickly. In the meantime, I had our accounting people pre-pay a cheque to U for the new project in order not to delay it any more. I even hand-delivered the cheque to the right U personnel!

At that time, P looked into it and found that it was actually OUR bill (previous work done by U for P's project with us), but incorrectly invoiced to P. We should have gotten that bill, not P, but we never did, so we never paid it; P didn't recognize the charges as theirs, so they never paid it either. Mistake on U's part, confusion all around. In any case, I paid the cheque and had our accounting issue another one to pay the wrongly billed one. All done last week.

The Call. P (M and his manager A) call me up, all pissy about how their project was being held up because of our accounting mistake. My first question was, "No, this was cleared up last week. When did you hear this?" M told me he just talked to U staff yesterday. I briefly explained what I did to fix the problem. A was still very angry and demanded to know what was going on. They actually got our U contact on the phone -- she confirmed everything I said, and actually denied M's claim that he talked to her yesterday (which he changed to "this week".)

"M, I didn't speak with you this week at all. I spoke with you last week when I told you that." Then a little awkward silence on the P end of the line. Haha, I wish I could hear what A was thinking about M at that point.

U gets off the horn, and then M & A ask me why I didn't dig into the outstanding bill more (I suppose in some attempt to stay mad at me). I said, "It's a bill between U and you; I will not and CANNOT request such information! That's not mine to look into! I didn't do it then, and I won't do it in the future unless you expressly authorize me to see that confidential info." A calmed down, saw the reasoning, and agreed with me, but minion M was still irate, possibly because he was trying to show off in front of A (without any legs to stand on).

Conclusion. It ended okay by me. I had fixed the problem last week, and now it was just up to U to carry through the contracted work. And as far as I was concerned, P could shut the fvck up and wait. We'll see.

Some customers just need to chill. Especially before calling me. Because I won't always be so patient and understanding -- one day, I'll lose it.