( 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.

Ohhhh, preach it, MM.

That's terrific.

I wish I could read the whole book right now, MM.

MM, is it OK if I forward that to some of my coworkers? I think they'd find it relevant--we're not CS, but we/they are professional compassion-givers who are chronically overstretched and often burned out.

Yeah, sure, Susan. Rock on.

Thanks!

If you want a beta, I'll do it, MM.