I'm getting some feedback on my writing. Most of it is great, but one piece of advice really sounds wrong to my ear - involving dangling objects. But maybe my adviser is right. Here is an example, the first two sentences of a paragraph:
Such subsidies must be managed carefully. For example, they should only be paid if the job is done for a reasonable price.
Her response is "They who?". She wants me to say "subsidies" again. "For example, subsidies should..."
My feeling is:
1) "subsidies" is the only object that "they" could refer to. Therefore, not a dangling object - and clear to the reader.
2) Saying "subsidies" again in a sentence immediately following its use is repetitious. It makes what is already not the most exciting paragraph excruciatingly dull. A "dangling object" is the better choice.
So, am I right on this? Or is the use of objects in this way a bad habit I need to get over? (I tend to do stuff like this as paragraph transitions too.)
I kind of agree with her, though I think the construction of the whole thing could be streamlined.
I agree the whole thing needs streamlining. But having two opinions from people I respect convinces me she is right.
Oh well, having too high an opinion of my dangling objects is probably a natural male tendency.
Not a drabble, a potential essay for the CS book:
Battle Not With Monsters...
I've stated elsewhere that nothing will encourage your latent misanthropy like working customer service. And recently I had an experience that showed me that not only was what I said true, but I was not immune...in fact, had gone so deeply into misanthropy that I realized I am a hateful, mean-spirited person. I didn't like myself anymore. Not a bit.
While I was working at Human Resources Company, a company that handles payroll and benefit administration for a large number of other, small to medium sized companies, a lady called. She was older, as evidenced by the quaver in her voice, her painful unfamiliarity with the workings of the modern world...you get the idea.
Her problem was this: She had a check in her hand that she couldn't deposit or cash. The reason she had a check in her hand that she couldn't deposit or cash was because it was a payroll check made out to her son....who had died a couple months ago.
I coldly noted these facts as she spoke. I didn't notice that her voice was choked with tears, that she was frightened and frustrated and sad. In fact, as she was telling me her woes I was completing another task, jotting down notes on her phone call and thinking three steps ahead as to who would best help her out with this.
(In my defense, this was procedure, the finding who could help her best. This was a payroll issue and I was not in payroll. I was not qualified to help her, and indeed had no idea how to help her.)
The problem was compounded by the fact that the check was a few months old. Not only had he received the check before he died and not had a chance to deposit it, it wasn't found 'til a couple weeks after he died and, of course, was now made out to a dead man.
Older people tend to ramble, especially when frightened and frustrated and sad. But I had become hardened and bitter; so when she drifted off the immediate topic and into why she needed the money, i.e. to pay for her poor son's funeral expenses, I cut her off with a curt "Yes, ma'am. May I put you on hold?"
I reached payroll and related the problem to a very nice woman there who was immediately sympathetic. "Oh, that poor woman!" she said. "Transfer her over, we'll find a way to get her her money."
So I did. I transferred the call and turned back to the task I had been working on...
...and wondered why my stomach hurt.
I thought back on the call. She had been a perfectly nice old lady. She hadn't yelled, or called me names...why did my stomach hurt?
She was a perfectly nice old lady.
I was a shithead.
And that's why my stomach hurt.
Upon reviewing my feelings about the call I realized I had not been sympathetic. I had not been perfectly nice. I was impatient, rushed, unsympathetic, aggravated at her not being concise and staying on topic.
How would I have felt had the situation been reversed? In a cold and lonely time, how would I have felt if someone had acted the way I did? Colder and lonelier, that's how. This jerkoff on the phone was further proof that the world was a chilly, uncaring place and my pain was a brief, quiet note in a symphony of agony. Nobody cared about my little note of pain. And the symphony had become so prevalent that it was background noise...and nobody cared about the symphony either.
I was part of the problem.
I was a fucking scumbag.
I need to get out.
I smoked a cigarette and tried not to curse myself too much. I hadn't been rude, merely curt. I hadn't been dismissive of her problem, I had helped to solve it, right?
No. I had been rude. I had been dismissive.
Why?
Because it had been a rough day? Because I had had to deal with idiot after idiot, asshole after asshole, repetitive problems, repetitive whiners...because I hated my job and the business it was in and the people it dealt with and the whole human race and I hated myself.
Was I always like this? No. And, not to shift the blame entirely, but working customer service (continued...)
( continues...) helped me down this path of fuck-you-worldism. Hateful customers, hateful bosses, me in the middle...you think it doesn't grind you down, but it does and you think it doesn't abrade away your soul, but it does and you think despite it all you're still a good guy and maybe you are, but you aren't as good as you were and you sure as hell aren't as good as you want.
Why do you get crappy customer service? Crappy customers? Sure. Crappy companies? Yeah.
People are crappy in general?
...
And the hell of it is, it's not over.
There is no Dickens happy ending, no "God bless us everyone!" as Tiny CS Rep Tim throws off his headset and CS Rep Scrooge embraces kindness and sends every distraught old lady a Christmas goose. For a week, or a month, I might be better, more mindful of other peoples' anguish and pain.
And then, one day, I won't be anymore. I will be grumpy, abrupt, dismissive. I will be muttering "Get the fuck off my phone already" under my breath as some other confused, lonely, broken person attempts to relate to me. I don't want to relate to you, my attitude will scream, I don't like you, I don't know you, I don't care about you, NOBODY FUCKING CARES ABOUT YOU JUST LEAVE ME ALONE ALREADY!
Because the company won't have had my back, because I will have no power to help, no authority to fix things and no incentive. Because this one needful person, who will probably be perfectly nice, will have come after a hundred thousand stupid, whiny, petulant, aggressive fucktards yelling at me. Because there's only so long any one person can maintain empathy in the face of a tidal wave of fuck you. After a while, you have to shut it out. You can't stand against the tide, you give up and find yourself floating in the hateful undertow, another bottomfeeder living on scraps and loathing.
And I'll hate myself again. And try to float up to the light and the air and be a person again.
God grant me that grace someday.
Please?
Fantastic stuff, MM. Depending on the shape the overall work takes that could be a great anchor - why the way we approach CS is destroying us from within, is symptomatic of our intrinsic societal problems, whatever. Powerful and thought-provoking.
Lord God, MM, I know whereof you speak. I never hated Christmas more than the year I worked Postal Service customer support. And then I listened to the entitled morons working around me as they laughed at the people whose monthly welfare checks were missing.
There needs to be somewhere that Customer/Tech Support people can go to try and hold on to their humanity. A clearinghouse for stories where humanity was not proven to be a lost cause.
I wish I could read the whole book right now, MM.
