I work from home as a customer service representative for a company that makes custom products. I'm the only customer service rep, I handle emails, calls, and chats. We are behind on literally everything. 99% of my day is spent quelling (oftentimes, rightfully) upset customers. There is nothing I can do to get their products out any faster. I'm not authorized to apply discounts, refunds, or anything like that for their wait times. I can't transfer them to managers or anyone in charge (last week I had a phone call that lasted nearly an hour of me just repeatedly telling them that no, I can't transfer them to a manager and they'd just say the same thing I am anyway).
It's starting to emotionally exhaust me. Phone calls are the worst because as I mentioned, I have no control over anything production wise (and I'm not on location so I can't really physically check) and I can't offer any kind of reimbursement for their wait, often leaving me accused of purposefully giving them bad service. I stay awake at night full of dread for the next day.
My anxiety is already sky high since my mother is on her potential deathbed in the ICU at the moment and I'm just sitting here telling people that I'm once again sorry for the continued delay on their order! And then I feel I'm not doing well enough keeping up with tickets because I can't get to them all within our 24 hour turnaround time for responses because there are so many inquiring about late orders.
Bonus: we keep having sales despite being behind on production that is just further adding to an unmanageable order volume. I feel bad for the low level production team.
On principle, work is already something I hate doing but right now it just sucks extra. Just needed to vent a little bit.