Kirsty Bosley: Signed, sealed and delivered in a fit of rage

When my phone bleeped on Tuesday lunchtime, I knew something was wrong. A text from our Alix confirmed my suspicions. "I'm so angry," she had typed in a roundabout way, and I took my break to find out why.

Sitting in her house (possibly wearing pyjamas, almost definitely playing World of Warcraft) my best pal had been alerted to someone knocking on the door when they banged so hard the keys fell out of the other side.

Before she could get the words 'it wasn't me officer, honest' out of her mouth, she was confronted with a driver from a parcel delivery company. Phew. Only she might have been better off had it been a cop on a power trip, as the delivery man treated her with less courtesy.

"I've been trying to deliver here for three days!" he snapped at her, as though he'd had to interrupt Christmas dinner with his kids to make it to her house, rather than just do a job he's paid to do. "Where have you been?" he demanded, frustrated.

Surprised by the question from a grown man she'd never seen before in her life, Alix's dander immediately went up. Fortunately, she's got enough about her to stand up in the face of this apparent maniac and tell him to cool his jets. Well, for so long at least – she's not the Dalai Lama.

As the driver continued to show his frustration at her not opening the door in under a minute, her fuse became shorter and shorter and she exploded. What is it to him where she's been? Maybe she was tending to a frail family member, god knows she bathed and washed her beloved nan Lil before she died peacefully of old age at 98. Maybe she was trying to juggle three kids under 10 as a single parent? Perhaps she was at work?

What if she'd been a meek and mild lady who'd cower, terrified by this driver's demeanour?

The crux of the point here, I feel, is that it absolutely doesn't matter where the hell she was on Tuesday morning, because she's coughed up for a parcel delivery, and this man is paid to make it happen. Had she known when to expect it, she might have made arrangements to be in, but she didn't. Does it matter?

Unless this company is being run by slave drivers with whips and brands who flagellate their staff for not delivering first time, there's no reason why he would ever need to talk to her this way.

After an uncomfortable discourse, she got her parcel and called the company to lodge an official complaint.

She might have blown off steam over the phone to me, but on the whole, this guy ruined her day with his stinking attitude.

Now, before my regular trolls pop up and tell me that this is not news, that this kind of thing happens to us all, just know two things. One, this column is an opinion piece and not a news story (even if it does appear in a newspaper), and two, there's no excuse for this kind of thing to be happening regularly to ANYONE. Not you, not our Alix, never.

Can you sense my frustration? You see, this situation benefitted absolutely no one. That guy can't have taken any joy in being a doorstep jerk, Al certainly didn't, and nor did the poor customer service agent on the other end of the blower who had to apologise on his behalf for her upset.

Strangely, Alix and I both worked in customer services at a parcel delivery company some years ago, immediately post-university.

Despite the company winning awards for their investment in people and my colleagues being some of the coolest, down-to-earth people I've ever met, largely devoid of overpowering egos, I hated it there. Not because of the job, but because it turned out that a lot of people are just really horrible when they're awaiting a parcel.

I remember one particularly difficult Christmas, the year known as The Big Freeze. At our customer service centre in Birmingham, we were overwhelmed with calls from customers countrywide that were awaiting deliveries.

Christmas packages were stranded in depots, the roads between them and houses, or the central hub and them being impossible to drive huge trucks along.

Naturally, the company's responsibility was to their drivers – they'd rather an employee with all his limbs than a few parcels meeting their 'next day delivery' schedule. Santa is lucky, he has a sleigh and reindeer to pull it, but we have doubled-decked lorries with a dozen wheels.

Maybe they should have ordered parcels earlier, I thought, though I'd never say that to them. I was a saccharine sweet example of customer service perfection.

At least for most of the time.

Try telling a furious parent that had ordered a mobile phone for their kid with speedy delivery that they're not going to get it in time for the big day though. Sitting there in the office with a headset on, having never even met one of the drivers, I was taking the front line flack for the delivery being missed.

I heard it all from the general public over that awful period. I was called names I'd never been called before, people dropping C-bombs, F-bombs and stupid-effing-T-bombs. I was branded an idiot for not calling up a driver to demand he return to an address where he posted a 'sorry we missed you' card, my bosses threatening to hassle me if I did, as such a thing wasn't allowed by call centre staff.

When I wanted to pop off to the loo to sob quietly in a cubicle, the clock on my computer was ticking. We weren't allowed more than 10 minutes a day away from the phone unless it was our allocated lunch break, so even my sobs of despair were rushed.

We chugged through more than 100 calls in a shift, weathering the fury and anger of those that have been waiting just to have their calls answered for up to half an hour. It was a miserable time, but you just have to try and treat each person you deal with with kindness, understanding and consideration.

Now when I encounter bad service, I handle myself with firm decorum. I don't suffer fools, but I don't shout my frustrations at those who have no power to change it. I try to look for solutions rather than dwell on problems, and I never EVER scream at people who are just doing their job.

It seems that sometimes, like in Alix's case, it's not just customers that have to remember to keep their cool.