> Actually, where it bugs me is in customer service. You never use he/she, 
> but you use sir, mam, miss, mrs, etc., and its too damn easy when tired 
> and/or distracted to mess that up. Something like "ker" which was used 
> in C.J. Cherryh's Chanur series as a kind of general honorific would be 
> a whole hell of a lot less a) embarassing, b) insulting to people that 
> are offended easy, and c) likely to be misused. So, yeah, I would vote 
> for some set of gender neutral words too.

Quoting a site:

I took a call from a customer who sounded like quite a nice old lady. 
Querying the customer database through the serial number, I found the 
customer's name to be "Carol" and her surname to be impossibly long and 
presumably Eastern European. Fortunately -- or so I thought at first -- 
she didn't want tech support and was only calling to claim a free 
software offer that was a part of the packaged bundle. I checked on the 
issue and the offer had expired a good three months before.

  * Me: "I'm sorry, ma'am, but the offer has expired."
  * Customer: "What?"
  * Me: "This offer has expired, ma'am, I'm sor--"
  * Customer: (her soprano turning into a growling contralto) "What do 
you mean it has expired? I've got the right to get my free CD! I paid 
for it! You will give me my CD."
  * Me: (explained again)
  * Customer: "Oh yeah? I'll talk to your supervisor, then."

Sure, escalate the call, but she wasn't going to get it. I told her so 
in the nicest and sweetest of the tones I'm capable of.

  * Customer: "I'M NOT TALKING TO YOU ANY MORE. GET-ME-YOUR-SUPERVISOR!"

Wow, talk about getting emotional. I called my supervisor who would take 
the escalated call and try to talk some sense into her, but he failed. 
The call escalated a second time as the area supervisor took the call 
and once more as the shift supervisor took over.

I couldn't believe it. There we were, all four of us sitting in a row, 
listening to the call that -- for an encore -- got escalated once more. 
A customer satisfaction specialist took the call and didn't do any better.

We decided to roll it around once more and patched her through another 
tech, who finally placed and solved the ACTUAL problem.

  * Tech Support: "Your name is Carol...what? Oh sure, yes SIR...sure, 
I'll fix your entry in our database right away."

Or hanging jaws nearly hit the floor. "Carol" was A GUY -- even though 
he sounded like a Powerpuff girl -- and we had all been calling him 
"Ma'am" all along. The whole company laughed at this for almost a week.

-- http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_comeagain.shtml

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