{"id":983668,"date":"2026-01-06T11:34:16","date_gmt":"2026-01-06T06:04:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/?p=983668"},"modified":"2026-01-06T11:34:16","modified_gmt":"2026-01-06T06:04:16","slug":"microsoft-engineer-who-has-been-with-the-company-for-30-years-shares-what-happened-when-irate-customers-wanted-to-speak-to-bill-gates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/2026\/01\/06\/microsoft-engineer-who-has-been-with-the-company-for-30-years-shares-what-happened-when-irate-customers-wanted-to-speak-to-bill-gates\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft engineer, who has been with the company for 30 years, shares what happened when irate customers wanted to speak to Bill Gates"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Microsoft had a specific method for handling angry customers who demanded to speak with Bill Gates. According to veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen, the company used to transfer these customers&#8217; calls to a special phone line where operators pretended to be the CEO&#8217;s secretary. In his \u201cThe Old New Thing\u201d blog, Chen noted that the software giant\u2019s operators would tell customers that Gates was unavailable, take their complaint details, and route the information back to tech support, which would then call back, claiming, &#8220;Bill Gates asked me to contact you.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>He explained that support teams followed this process when important customers became upset. If saying sorry and trying to fix the issue didn\u2019t calm them down, the call was sent to a special internal number that sounded like Bill Gates\u2019s office. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Microsoft had a specific method for handling angry customers who demanded to speak with Bill Gates. According to veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen, the company used to transfer these customers&#8217; calls to a special phone line where operators pretended to be the CEO&#8217;s secretary. In his \u201cThe Old New Thing\u201d blog, Chen noted that the software giant\u2019s operators would tell customers that Gates was unavailable, take their complaint details, and route the information back to tech support, which would then call back, claiming, &#8220;Bill Gates asked me to contact you.&#8221; He explained that support teams followed this process when important [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87,4,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-983668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-it-2-the-times-of-india","category-newspapers","category-the-times-of-india"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/983668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=983668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/983668\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=983668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=983668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=983668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}