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...)