{"id":1580,"date":"2010-11-09T08:14:21","date_gmt":"2010-11-09T13:14:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatsociety.org\/?p=1580"},"modified":"2018-10-30T16:39:47","modified_gmt":"2018-10-30T20:39:47","slug":"customer-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/?p=1580","title":{"rendered":"Customer Service"},"content":{"rendered":"

My day job, as you\u2019ve no doubt gathered from the customer service transcript posts<\/a>, is fucking insane.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t demand much brainpower, and, in fact, I have enough spare time to run a publishing company, act as a consultant for another publisher, and juggle a handful of freelance writing gigs as well as maintain silly shit like this blog. I probably shouldn\u2019t complain.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Who cares about how stupid the job is, or how intrusive and petty my co-workers are.\u00a0 A paycheck\u2019s a paycheck, and crazy co-workers are handy to have around so I can seek therapy through feeling superior.<\/p>\n

The problem is the customers.\u00a0 Those transcripts I\u2019ve been posting are just the tip of the iceberg.\u00a0 The ones with entertainment value. I\u2019m on the phones for five and a half hours every day, dealing with a clientele of PhD\u2019s, or those on track to get their doctorate.\u00a0 Mental health professionals. People who should be understanding and calm, responsible and intelligent. And, yet, they are universally irrational and remarkably angry.\u00a0 So much so that, as a member-based organization, we\u2019ve been forced to bow and scrape to them, to roll over whenever they bark a command. We refund with little debate, our front line of defense is to reduce the dues by 80% without question. We waive other fees whenever the slightest hint of a raised voice comes over the phone. Whatever the customer wants, they get.<\/p>\n

Sadly, they rarely know what they want. I believe, half the time, that they simply call to release steam in between patients. Instead of a punching bag, they use an anonymous bystander and take great pleasure in bullying them.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve had phone service jobs before \u2013 harder, tougher ones.\u00a0 All day, no break, high stress jobs. But never have I encountered such a collection of consistently cruel bullies. Without provocation, and even when they\u2019re getting everything they ask for, they call me names, they lecture me, they threaten me and, on occasion, they\u2019ve come to me in person and threatened me face to face. They come to my office, and once sought out my apartment, and I get calls on my home phone all the time.<\/p>\n

All of that started after a 2008 article in the Washington Post about my small press which, sadly, tied me to my day job forever.\u00a0 The article opened with a description of the job and my office, and gave enough clues to the industrious to find me at home.<\/p>\n

The article has dispelled my belief that I was just an anonymous punching bag.\u00a0 Someone to yell at because, by nature of the service industry, I was a non-human, a non-entity.\u00a0 Now they had a name, a face, a history.\u00a0 But that only increased the bullying, and seemed to give them more focus.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe speed you\u2019re working at right now makes me wonder if the pain came back.\u201d Just got that remark, delivered snidely, a few days ago from some stranger on the phone I\u2019ve never spoken to before.<\/p>\n

Over the last two years, personal attacks like this have come with no rhyme or reason.\u00a0 There\u2019s no single customer, or group of customers, that I can point to. It\u2019s a random mix, and it\u2019s gotten so frequent that I no longer answer direct calls to my line, and I avoid transfers from customers who ask for me specifically.\u00a0 When I am forced to answer the phone, I do so with a nervous tremolo, an unsettled stomach.\u00a0 It\u2019s gotten so that I can\u2019t even answer my cell phone if I don\u2019t recognize the number.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve had this job for ten years, and have been in some sort of high-stress customer service job for 20 years, but these last two years have nearly killed me.\u00a0 If I didn\u2019t believe in the inhumanity of Man before, then it\u2019s certainly been illustrated recently ad nauseam.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My day job, as you\u2019ve no doubt gathered from the customer service transcript posts, is fucking insane.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t demand much brainpower, and, in fact, I have enough spare time to run a publishing company, act as a consultant for …<\/p>\n

Customer Service<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,13],"tags":[265,263,400],"class_list":["post-1580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crazy-customers","category-wage-slave","tag-crazy-customers-2","tag-customer-service","tag-wage-slave"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1580"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1582,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1580\/revisions\/1582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}