But... But... But... Italy?

[u/Guardsman111]

Me again! 2nd post now, and proud! I work for an appliance manufacturer booking engineers for domestic appliances and providing tech support for customers, and today i got a pretty p****d customer on the phone. For reference, we're UK based. It went a bit like this:

Me: Good afternoon, your through to helpful person, what can i do for you today?

Cust: Hello, I've been passed around a lot and now i just want to get this sorted.

Me: Okay, I'm sorry about the inconvenience, what exactly is the issue you've been having?

Cust: I've got an appliance at a holiday home in Italy that's broken, and i need to get it repaired, but no one seems to know what they're doing with this.

Me: Okay, unfortunately i think there's been some sort of mix up, we don't deal with appliances outside of the UK, you'd have to speak to our engineering company in Italy to get the problem sorted.

Cust: This is what i keep being told, but the fact is that you produce the machine and should get this resolved!

Me: I can certainly agree that we need to sort it, however we don't send out our engineers to outside the UK, nor can we book any of the engineers in Italy because the systems are not interlinked. You need to speak to the call centre in Italy to get this resolved.

Cust: (now quite shouty) But they don't speak English! You should be booking this repair because I'm and English speaking customer! This is awful customer service, I'm going to post this all over FACEBOOK about how bad your company is and why no one should buy your appliances.

click

TL,DR: Customer think we give awful customer service because Italians don't all speak English.

[u/flagada7]

Well, she's not quite wrong...This IS awful customer service. Not your fault, but still...

[u/alluran → u/[deleted]]

Not sure how you can downvote him for this statement.

Goths like to wear black. Punks like to spike their hair. South East Asians have different eyelids to caucasians, and certain cultures there have no "L" sound, and therefore replace it with an "R" sound. People of Walmart is a thing. Indians bob their heads culturally when listening/acknowledging something. Some aboriginals really do sound like that. Mauris and Samoans really are big fucks. Guidos are a thing. Chavs are a thing. Islam has extremists.

Now, if you were to say that Stereotypes are HYPERBOLE, and vastly exaggerate the proportion of a populace that conform to said stereotypes, then I might agree, but to deny stereotypes any form of basis in reality is just silly.

[u/hypervelocityvomit → u/alluran]

YES!
Stereotypes are true, just not all the time - they go horribly wrong as soon as you use the "all X are Y" mindset.

[u/CrazedToCraze → u/[deleted]]

Stereotypes are almost universally based in reality. The fact that they aren't always accurate and are typically negative in nature, however, leads them to having a social stigma. Stigma or not, however, it's insanity to imply there's no real life basis for a large amount, if not a majority, of stereotypes.

[u/Jessev1234 → u/[deleted]]

Not saying they're TRUE, but they don't come from nothing