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Saw on AITA:”AITA for joking with my employees about an irate patron?”

I (25F) work as an assistant manager in a university call center. All of my employees are college students there who work part time, while juggling a full-time course load. Earlier this summer, we had an older man (~60M) who was accepted into a graduate law program at our school. He has been repeatedly calling our center about financial aid, and whenever our student workers try to help him but have no luck, this man (call him D for short) would berate them on the phone to the point some would cry. He would get angry over the fact our workers couldn't get the FA officers to answer their phones, so he'd scream and yell stuff at them like “how dare you speak to a grown man this way” and “now I guess I have to get aggressive.” He has since become a topic of conversation in our office, and…


I (25F) work as an assistant manager in a university call center. All of my employees are college students there who work part time, while juggling a full-time course load. Earlier this summer, we had an older man (~60M) who was accepted into a graduate law program at our school. He has been repeatedly calling our center about financial aid, and whenever our student workers try to help him but have no luck, this man (call him D for short) would berate them on the phone to the point some would cry. He would get angry over the fact our workers couldn't get the FA officers to answer their phones, so he'd scream and yell stuff at them like “how dare you speak to a grown man this way” and “now I guess I have to get aggressive.” He has since become a topic of conversation in our office, and my student workers find it helpful to let off some steam from his calls by joking about him when we aren't on the phones.

One day when I had some free time, I decided to search this guy's name, just so I could learn a bit more about his back story. I found an article about him, where his face was shown three different times, and he was being interviewed about his life story. I thought my workers would get a kick out of it, so I posted it in our team group chat. They loved it, even my co-manager did! However, my supervisor pulled me aside after work that day and was visibly upset I posted that. He claimed I wasn't setting a good example for my workers, and that what I did could be considered 'cyberstalking.' I told him I understood, and we were good from there.

Well fast forward to last week, D called again about his Fall financial aid and asking where his honors/distinctions could be found for his grades. He once again continued to berate my workers, and at this point, I had enough. In our call center, we have a white board with a “question of the day” section where we take turns writing a silly question and the rest of us give silly answers. The QOTD happened to be “Is Mayonnaise an instrument?” from SpongeBob, so I thought it would be funny to erase 'mayonnaise' and replace it with D's name. My worker who had been harassed by D many times already, wrote “no, he's just a grumpy old man lol” underneath. My supervisor returned from his vacation the other day, saw this on the board, then pulled me into a meeting saying I wasn't setting a good example for anybody and that what we wrote was inappropriate. He said we should instead just “kill this guy with kindness instead”, but idk. As long as us operators only see the board, I personally don't think its troublesome to joke around a bit about this jerk. AITA for this, though?

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