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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/plogan56 on 2024-08-08 16:10:15+00:00.

For context: the software development company i used to intern at uses a sheet to estimate the cost of building a certain software or update for a client. This sheet includes: employees working on the project, how long they estimate it’ll take, yada yada yada. After an intern goes around the departments collecting this info from the various employees we then calculate the cost & send it to the client to “accept” or “reject”.

Note: Since our company is so popular in the area we have a pretty long query sometimes, so if you reject the estimate, chances are you might have to wait in the queue all over again to request a new one.

So the day was slow & they mostly had me man the phones and go on coffee runs, typical intern stuff; then a client calls in saying she wants a piece of “Clock in” software for her employees so she can more accuarately track their work hours. By this point into my internship, i had done at least 4-5 of these sheets at least and i was taught by my supervisor how to identify which departments would be needed for which projects so after gathering the details from the client i hang up and translate the needs for the employees(essentially explain it in programmer jargon).

Half an hour later, i’m done with the sheet & i have checked the calculations 3 times so i email it to the client and i swear not even 2 minutes later i get a “Estimate Rejected” message on the company smartphone i was given. She added a reply stating “This estimate is non compliable with me” so i respond to it with “We are sorry to hear that ma’am, please enjoy the rest of your day” and then i go about my business. Roughly an hour later she emails the phone again asking “is that all you have to say?” By this point i realized what she was trying to do and report to my supervisor that ms.karen was trying to haggle the price.

My supervisor calls Karen’s phone and asks if she would like to have the estimate resent to her so she can accept & Karen outright tells her she wants a cheaper price; to which my supervisor tells her the price is non-negotiable and to take it as is, so Karen uses her signature move of "let me speak with your manager, but my supervisor simply informed her that she’d get the same response and just hung up on her.

Karen eventually did call back and even showed up to the building to “renegotiate” the price but was shot down, but she was able to get a meeting with the manager to file a complaint for “poor customer service & unproffessional behavior”. My supervisor & I were called in and asked for our side of the exchange, we just gave them the chat log and proof that she rejected the estimate initially sent to her. She had no color in her face after those came out and couldn’t even look at him, she was given a blacklist for us and reccommended other companies.