An early 20th century candlestick phone being ...

An early 20th century candlestick phone being used for a phone call. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here’s my most recent maddening customer experience:

Client via email: Call me, I wish to discuss your previous email.

Me via email: (late at night) I will give you a call in the morning but it might be faster and easier to do this via email.

Client via email: No it has to be over the phone.

*I call. Voicemail. I leave a message. I wait a day and call again, leaving another message. Several days pass and she still doesn’t return my calls.*

Me via email: Did you get my messages? If you can let me know what’s the best time to reach you, we can schedule our call for that time.

Client via email: The best time to reach me is every day from 9 AM to 9 PM.

*I spent another week trying her each day at a different time in her range. Voicemail every time. No one calls me back.*

Me via email: Is there a more specific time you can give me when I might be able to reach you on the phone? Actually, if you want to just let me know your questions via email, I would be happy to address them that way. Then you’ll have your answers in a matter of minutes instead of these weeks of phone tag.

Client via email: It has to be over the phone. I am available every day from 9 AM to 9 PM.

At this point, I want to kill her. I have a baby at home and finding time to call her every day is NOT easy and she isn’t making it any easier by neither giving me a specific time nor calling me back. She has my phone number in all my voicemails and my email, what’s stopping her from calling me if a phone call is so freaking important? It would be a hell of a lot easier to just do this via email, is what I’m thinking, but this isn’t a situation I can walk away from so I try for one more week and then finally ask someone over to watch the little one and just commit to calling her every 30 minutes until she finally answers for this freaking phone call she insisted on having.

When I finally get her on the phone, she just literally reads my email back to me and then I’m like… do you have a question? and she’s like, no I’ve got it. And I realize that all that time she never actually read the first email and all this back and forth was because she just wanted me to explain it to her rather than read it herself. I am annoyed by this and by all the time I’ve already wasted calling this woman over and over but, I say to myself, at least this whole stupid ordeal is over and we can move on. And as I’m saying my goodbyes and we are ending the call what does she say?

“Can you just go ahead and write up everything we just talked about and send it to me in an email?”

Are you… How could you… Why did you… ARGH!

Not only had I ALREADY written it all out in an email… the very first email may I add… but why in God’s name did she insist on a phone call if she just wanted the info in an email in the first place?