Working with the public for many, many years, even tho it was over the phone, and not face to face, I also had my share of a**holes to deal with. I would normally let them ramble on and on with whatever their "issue" was, and then try to calmly resolve it for them. There were also many who took their rambling to the abusive stage, at which point I would simply hang up on them. Every business tries to live up to the old "the customer is always right" b.s., but there are exceptions to every rule. Upper management always told the people where I worked, that we absolutely did not have to tolerate any verbal abuse from anyone, and we were well within our rights to simply hang up on the offending party.