Meet my inner b*stard

This morning I got a phone call from 4imprint.com who supply our branded goods. Our invoices are paid by our lovely finance department in Portsmouth, however an invoice from December hadn't been paid. Unfortunately paying invoices isn't part of my job so I phoned up the invoice department, introduced myself "Hi I'm calling from department 875511 and have Mike from 4imprint on the line, I'd be grateful if you could you explain to him why an invoice from December hasn't been paid" connected Mike to the finance guy and hung up.

In the past I would have looked into it, made various polite phone calls and ensured that the problem is rectified as quickly as possible, however one of my colleagues told me I've been too generous lately and people are going to start abusing this. So the b*stard from within has surfaced. I even got into an argument with a customer last week. Before we can assist anyone we need a reference number for each call (SR number). This is obtained by a customer filling in a simple web form which takes less than 30 seconds. Granted, I could fill it in for the customer, but that used to happen in the past and wasted a lot of time. So, this customer I had on the line, who for argument's sake shall be known as Steve (because that was his name) was arguing that he had never had to use the web form in the past and refused to do it. Good ol stubborn me simply replied "I'm afraid I can't help you without an SR number" over and over again. Ever since he's behaved very well, and I've received a pat on the back here since some of my colleagues have struggled with this customer in the past. So, who's next in line to test my patience?