I used to work at a call centre, representing a major telco, and yes, it's just like you described. At one time, the company policy was that a rep could never hang up on a customer, which is ridiculous. To compel employees to take abuse from customers just ain't right. Though the thing was, at this telco, and probably at many companies, there were many, many customers who slipped through the cracks, whose problems could not be solved for systemic reasons - nobody in the call centre knew how to fix them. So naturally, these customers called back over and over trying to solve their problems, and eventually blew up. That really made the job harder than it needed to be.

When I worked for a company which generally treated their customers better, things went a lot more smoothly. Instead of dealing with angry customers every day, it was maybe once a week.

But of course, you still have the odd entitled asshole who thinks that it's alright to treat people like crap because there won't be any (immediate) social consequences. Once when I was going door-to-door, I had a woman slam the door in my face and say to her kids "That's how you do it," deliberately teaching her children to treat people like dirt instead of human beings. I had pretty tough skin by that stage, but I still thought it was awful that she thought that could possibly something worth teaching.

Humans learning patience and compassion is a slow process, but to put it into perspective, at least nobody uses the words "pistols at dawn" any more when they're confronted with an insult.