Aaaages ago (early 80s) I worked support for what, at the time, was the second largest software company in the US (#1 was IBM). We got our share of people-being-unpleasant. To be fair these people were supposedly the top tech people in their companies, paid top dollar because they knew how to fix stuff like I was dealing with. They were probably dealing with impostor syndrome (and from my interactions, some were actual impostors). Either way, their coping mechanism was to be nasty to the people trying to help them (because they were under stress and because they could).

One of the supervisors hit on the solution of turning a Teddy Ruxpin doll into a phone extension. It worked perfectly. Transfer the rude person to the Ruxpin room and you have all this abuse coming out of a cute little teddy-bear doll. The natural reaction is to emote: "There, there, it's gonna be OK - we'll fix this together."

I had a few of these folks, including one at the NSA* call me back later and apologize.

I moved from there to developing software shortly after that

*NSA trivia: if you try to return a call there on an internal line, they (at least used to) answer with the last four numbers of the extension. Makes sense: enough info for a caller to realize they might have called the wrong number - and nothing more.