I worked for years for a company that provided websites and technical supports for photo labs and their customers so you could place orders online. Working that job I saw a lot of bizarre things and was yelled at a lot. Nothing really phased me towards the end. So when a customer asked to be bumped to a supervisor, I took the chat. This particular product took nearly 2 weeks to make, as it was pretty much hand woven (or so they claimed) and then you had to add whatever (cheap) shipping the customer chose. So understandably as it was a week before the holidays, there wasn’t really a good answer to whatever the customer’s problem was. I hopped on, and did the usual asking for questions to buy time for me to get the info from the other agent on what had happened.  “ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME! IS THIS A JOKE!” She chatted in all caps. Then woman shared the above photo. I was so glad this was a chat and not a call, as I just lost it and broke down laughing. This image…is my company’s image if shit hit the fan with the customer’s image. It means that either we never got the high res of the photo (stupid bad out-dated uploader) OR we had a server malfunction at the time the order downloaded to the production company and they got this instead of the high res photo. Now its rare that this image would show up at all and even rarer that it would ever reach the 3rd party production company. But…apparently it was a perfect storm of screw ups. I apologized to the woman, offered whatever I could to her, and said I’d try to rush a re-do to her. I then (per company policy) had to ask the woman to mail the blanket back to us, so we could prove to the production company there was a mistake. (And as we can keep screw-ups, I actually really wanted this blanket for the office!) This was met with….a hang up. The woman was just so angry at us. So I then call up the production company and asked why didn’t they call us when they saw our low res error message on a blanket and spent 2 weeks making it onto a blanket. Their response “I’ve seen weirder shit, and I just print was is sent.”
Every Friday Lili shares her favorite photography & the stories behind the photos.
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