A colleague of mine who used to work in product support told me that they had a procedure if a customer became irate and demanded to speak with Bill Gates. (This was, of course, back in the days when Bill Gates still ran the company.)

The product support technician would apologize for not resolving the problem to the customer’s satisfaction, but if the customer continued to demand to speak with The Boss, the technician would indeed transfer the customer.

The customer was transferred to a special internal phone number, and when the operators saw a call on that line, they took the call and said, “Bill Gates’s office.” They weren’t actually in Bill Gates’s office. They were just pretending to be Bill Gates’s secretary. Their job was to tell the caller that Mr. Gates is currently unavailable, but if the customer leaves a message and their contact information, they will pass the information to Mr. Gates.

Of course, the information was never actually passed along to Bill. The information went back into the product support channel with a note that the customer was escalated to “Bill Gates’s office.” The technician who returned the call would probably say something like “Bill Gates asked me to contact you to follow up on an issue you had earlier.”