Testing your patience with test calls

Keep those submissions coming! Here's today's:

"I managed a super high volume studio for many years and was regularly scheduling 8 appointments per hour from open to close during our busiest times of the year. Talk about no room for error!

To kick off the holidays every year, my studio was "test-called" by both the corporate office and the district manager, to ensure no customer was turned away. The caller would usually start with "What's the latest appointment you have?" And you'd better say that would be 8:00 pm or whatever your closing time is, or you would be fired. Turning away a customer is cause for immediate dismissal according to CPI.

I put up with those test calls for years and reprimanded associates who were caught saying the wrong thing. Then I got test called myself one day. The caller twisted everything I said around and kept me on the phone for a good 5 minutes (while there are plenty of things that need to be coordinated in the studio), trying to get me to say something out of line.

With nowhere else to really go to attempt to appease the test caller, I offered to have an extra photographer stay late to accommodate her. As a result, when she reported back to DM, she wrote that I "seemed kind of mean to associates."