Since he had a question for her, she had a couple for him too.

Because of Japan’s strict customer service standards, almost all companies dictate employees give a thorough greeting when picking up the phone, generally something along the line of “Thank you very much for taking the time to call us here at Company X of industry Y. This is so-and-so from the such-and-such department, How can I help you?” Due to the length of the greeting, it’s pretty easy for the caller to discern the gender and approximate age of the employee who picked up the phone, which leads us to Japanese Twitter user Yuki (@BIGBONG).

Last Tuesday, Yuki, who’s a young woman, was in the middle of her shift when the office phone rang. After she picked it up and went through her greeting, however, the man who’d called made a very unbusinesslike request, asking:

“What color are your panties today?”

That’s obviously not a question that most people will give an answer for, and so in phone calls like this the pervert is just as likely to be motivated by the sense of excitement they get from provoking anger, embarrassment, fear, or some other emotional distress or discomfort in their intended victim. But Yuki wasn’t going to give any of those deprived distillations of satisfaction, and instead responded to the quarry in a purely professional style, saying:

“I’ll check on that and get back to you at the earliest opportunity once I have the information. In the meantime, can I ask you to supply your name and contact information?”

The caller realized his quest for skeevy thrills had hit a brick wall. “And just like that, he hung up,” Yuki reports, and her table-turning strategy had other Twitter users thoroughly impressed, as they showered her with compliments such as:

“What an awesome comeback.”
“That’s some seriously quick thinking.”
“Brilliant job keeping your cool.”
“When he saw he wasn’t going to win the fight he turned tail.”
“When my mom was younger, the same thing happened to her at work. ‘My underwear are black! So what about yours, huh?’ she snapped at the guy, and he hung up right away.”

Up until now, Yuki’s most-liked tweet was her Initial D cosplay photo…

…but as cool as she looks on the road, she’s even cooler on the phone.

Source: Twitter/@BIGBONG via Hachima Kiko
Top image: Pakutaso