How do you deal with someone who is angry and refuses to calm down?

This is something that’s happened to a lot of us, whether it’s a family member, someone from work, someone from school, or even a stranger. Someone has a problem with you, and you try to diffuse the situation by being calm and reasoning with them. Or you react the opposite way and get angry back, which escalates things. No matter what you do, they persist in being angry.

I was in a situation like this about a year ago at my last job. A lady bought something that was missing a piece before my shift started. About an hour after I started working, she stormed in demanding to speak to a manager (me). She was yelling so much and so loudly that I couldn’t even get a word in to solve her problem. It would have been really easy- I would have just given her the damn thing she was missing, because we sold them individually. I tried to keep a reasonable but assertive demeanor as I dealt with her. She knocked something off the counter, said that she was very important and would have my job, and slammed the door. Obviously it was an empty threat and a pretty cheap tactic.

At the end of the encounter my hands were shaking and I thought, “Ugh! That bitch was so unfair!” I called my boss to let her know, and we ended up laughing about it because my boss had a few choice words for a person like that.

If tactics A and B don’t calm someone down, then what? Or failing that, is there any way to come out of something like that feeling vindicated? I don’t really understand what anger like that feels like, but I guess that when it’s directed at another person it’s because the angry one wants to make someone else feel awful. I know everyone’s going to say, “don’t let it get to you, just brush it off,” and that advice is very true, but also obvious. I’m actually looking for tactics to end an encounter with an unreasonable, angry person on a positive note, like conflict resolution strategies.