A decent day ruined by an hour of idiocy

How is it that the entire call center could have a decent day all the way up until 9pm and then suddenly enter The Fucktard Zone? This isn't anything that could be reliably predicted, mind you. It happens all the time, but there's no particular day or time. There doesn't seem to be any way to know when this is going to happen but, suddenly, starting at 9pm, I got five calls in a row about computer issues that had nothing to do with their ISP (me). Five people of well below average intelligence IN A ROW.

Then, the kicker, was a woman who had just gotten two cable boxes and neither were working. She had a third that was working, and even the first two outlets worked just fine plugged straight to the TV. First available appointment was 4 days out.

Now, first of all, when a phone rep says FIRST AVAILABLE, they don't mean "first available unless you pitch a fit like a three year old." They mean first available. If they could give you something earlier to get you off the phone, they would. That you decide to show just how immature and retarded you can be does not, in any way, help anyone.

By the way, for anyone out there that hasn't figured it out yet, an over the phone customer service rep's priorities are, in this order:

1.) Make the biggest paycheck possible with the least amount of work and
2.) Get each customer off the phone as quickly as possible without breaking any rules that would endanger the paycheck

You start out wanting to be helpful and wanting to make things better, but people in general will knock that urge right out of you within a few months.

So anyway, this woman was going on and on about how she wanted me to "send a signal" and "program the box" etc etc (people often make things up when they have no idea what they're talking about) when the box wasn't even booting. We went round and round with me telling her, over and over again, "If the cord coming from the wall is plugged in to the cable in, and the box has been plugged in for 20 minutes with no response, then there's nothing I can do. A tech has to come out, and you have the first available appointment."

How hard is that to understand?

It doesn't matter if you say "So I just got this box and now I have to wait?" It doesn't matter if you tell me how much money you pay for the service every month. It doesn't matter how long you've been a customer. None of that matters. It's as pertinent as telling me your curtains are blue, or stamping your feet and screaming, "But I don't want the sun to be hot!"

That's the way it is and nothing you can say will change it. Saying the same thing repeatedly will certainly not help.

Anyway, for maybe the 5th or 6th time in the year and a half I've been there, I had to hang up on her. The conversation was over for a good ten minutes before I did it, but that certainly didn't keep her from talking.

Well, the original point of this was to marvel at the fact that dumb people always manage to move in droves. The argumentative twits all call the call center at the same time. The non-tipping jerks always called the pizza places at the same time. How does that work? There has to be some sort of science to it.

So if anyone out there argues with tech support or stiffs the pizza guy, let me know if there's some sort of moronic collective out there or something. That way I can find it and destroy it.

Open ended questions

I think a lot of people aren't aware that open ended questions can be extremely rude, especially under certain circumstances. By asking an open ended question, you're assuming that the answerer has the time and inclination, not to mention information, to give you a decent answer. If you're interviewing someone, that's fine, it's expected.

If you call tech support and ask open ended questions, you'd better know what you're talking about, otherwise you're going to make a huge jerk of yourself. Not that many people seem to care anymore.

Example: Customer calls in and says his PS3 can't connect to the web, gives a DNS error. I immediately inform him that this is a known issue with the PS3, Sony has a fix, and to call them up. First off, had he checked his computer, he would've known it was working fine and there was no point in calling his ISP in the first place, so he's already under the table in dumb-points.

But then he has the gall to ask, "Well, what do I do if Sony can't fix it?"

I've already told him it's not my problem. I've already told him who to call. I've even go so far as to tell him, under no uncertain terms, that they have a fix. It couldn't be any clearer that I have nothing left to say on the matter, so an open ended question at this point is about as rude as you can get. He could've cussed at me and hung up and I would've been far less irritated.

Another good one. After troubleshooting a cable box, and the customer being very, very confused through the entire process, we get to the end of the line of what we can do over the phone and set up a trouble call.

And she asks, "What could cause this?"

For one thing, you couldn't figure out how to unplug your box, what makes you think you're going to understand what caused the problem? If you think you did something to cause it, how about you tell me? Why do you even think I know what caused it? I'm not out there fixing it. I'm on the phones, talking to you, and scheduling someone else to come fix it. I'd say that's pretty good odds that I have no clue, nor do I particularly care. I'm already passing it on to someone else; obviously I'm done here.

Even more irritating, sometimes, is open ended silence, or asking someone to hang on while you do something that has nothing to do with them.

Customer: I can't connect to my wireless router.

Me: Okay, it looks like you don't have wireless through us, so there's really nothing I can do with that. I would suggest you call the router manufacturer.

Customer: (silence)

Me: Is there anything else I can do for you?

Customer: Come on, you can't just help me out?

Me: No, it's not our equipment, therefore I can't do anything with it. Is there anything else *company* related that I can help you with?

Customer: (silence)

You can see that this is going nowhere, yet they persist. They're like little robots that don't know how to go around an obstacle so therefore they just ram it over and over again until they run out of battery power. Only the robot is funny.

That's never happened before.

So I went up to my place of work with every intention of calling it quits. I was done stressing over going in, done with the calls, done with the crap in general. I didn't know if going back to delivering pizza was going to be lucrative enough to live comfortably, but I was ready to give it a try.

So I walk in, carrying a gift that I'd bought for a previous supervisor a while back and hadn't given it to him yet, and my current supervisor just happens to be where I walked in...which, by the way, was a very odd place for her to be. Anyway, I tell her I'm done, I'm out, I'm just not confrontational enough for the job.

Her jaw dropped; she was shocked. So another boss/friend walks up. She's also shocked, and telling me how good I was back when she sat near me when she was on the floor.

So they take me over to my previous supervisor, the one I had the gift for. He told me totally understood, would probably be doing the same thing in my position, and even that apparently since I was quitting and not getting fired I was rehirable.

So, theoretically I could go deliver pizzas for a while and still come back. Interesting.

The weirdest part of the whole thing, though, was that when I walked in the building, I didn't have the "Hell yes, I don't ever have to come back here again" feeling. I was actually kind of sad. So I didn't do it. I talked to the HR person and she said to call in for the day and take a few days to think on it.

So that's what I'm doing. Decisions suck.

So irritated and depressed...

I had gotten my head all ready to go back to the hellhole I call (or called) work. I've been waiting for HR to get a part time schedule for me, as per my psychiatrist, to see how I handle the stress. The person in HR basically told me she'd get back to me and has ignored me for the past week, emails and voicemails. I already have no idea how I'm going to pay bills since this 30 days that I could barely afford is rapidly turning into 60 days.

And now, not only are they expecting us to hard sell (offer, then attempt to overcome objections when they say no) customers calling in with tech support issues, regardless of if we're able to get it fixed, but apparently now it's considered a sellable call even if the customer's equipment is the issue (as in, they don't know how to turn on their TV or their PC is dead, which, sadly, happens VERY often). On top of that, we're supposed to inform them if they have a late balance as well, AND a new set of notes saying we verified their security info...all under the same metrics that no one was meeting before.

How much stress and confrontation can they stack on to one person before it's considered abuse?

Going back to delivering pizza is sounding better and better...I simply don't have the will to learn a new job right now.

It's hard trying to see the good in a situation that was ridiculous a year ago... sales and tech support will never go together, and just because they get a trickle of income out of it, somebody seems to think it's worth making the turnover rate far worse than it used to be due to sheer stress.

I have to believe that I'm not the only IT minded person in the world that has a problem being confrontational 60-70 times a day, rapid fire, with no break in between except for two 15's and an hour lunch. I'm talking, one customer hangs up, the next one is immediately on the phone. You go from one confrontation to another to another...

Maybe sales people can do it, but hell, even car salesmen don't deal with that many people a day.

Ooh, psychologist burn...

So I've been seeing a councilor about some of the issues I've been having with work, and life in general. The fact that I dread things that may or may not even happen, and spend days off dreading going back to work, thereby giving me pretty much no time off.

He's been giving me some ideas on how to target negative thoughts and deal with them, though a lot of them seemed kind of silly, mainly because I don't feel that negative thoughts are the problem.

My main problem, with people in general, is willful stupidity.

"I don't know how, and I don't want to know how, but can you make this work for me?"

I don't know if anyone has ever actually used that particular verbiage...but some actually get very close. You'd be surprised how blunt people can be about their own stupidity.

My response, at least internally, has always been:

"Well, obviously you do want to know how, and you need to know how. You called, right?"

When something isn't working correctly, the customers don't want to troubleshoot. They don't feel they should have to stand up, reset their modem, or router, or cable box, or whatever. They just want it to work. Which is a pretty idiotic premise, since it's obviously not working, and some action needs to be taken, and unless they have to, they probably don't want to wait for a tech. But they made the phone call assuming the problem was not theirs.

Anyway. To me, ignorance and stupidity are two completely different things, one acceptable, one not. I can take ignorance. In fact, ignorance is very healthy, because you don't know what you don't know until you admit that you don't know, thereby proclaiming ignorance. And a lot of times, I will get a call like:

"I don't know how, can you tell me? I'm not very good at this, though, so you'll have to go slow."

Okay, yeah, definitely. That's a good call from the beginning.

Well, my councilor got me good today. I mentioned to him that it might help if I could get inside their heads, understand why they won't take these simple steps when they're the ones that called in, and they're the ones that need it fixed.

Everyone wants to learn how to use the things they want or need to use...right? Pretty basic stuff.

Well, he told me that, the frustration that I feel with people when they don't want to listen, and don't want to learn what they called to learn...sometimes that's how he feels about my reactions to some of his suggestions.

*Insert sound of screeching brakes here*

So, my immediate response, which thankfully I didn't say out loud because I would've felt like a total douche, was:

"But the problem isn't mine, it's theirs. I'm not the one who is refusing to learn."

Crap. I'm doing the same thing.

Whereas they thought just making the phone call was going to do something useful, I apparently thought just showing up was going to make things better in my head. And it's not as if I've done nothing. I have tried. But I've also resisted.

So I go back to all the times I've thought "This is so simple, just unplug the damn thing, and plug it back in," and realize that, as simple as I thought that was, I'm trying to fix things that are in my own damn head. From an outsider's perspective, it couldn't get any simpler.

I think, now, it'll be easier to deal with people, if for no other reason then I'll feel like, to a degree, I've been there and done that. I've fought the bad fight against someone trying to help me. I've resisted the simplest, easiest steps, because I didn't think they were necessary. And, at the time, though I have no idea why, I've felt right in doing so.

Life decision, coming up

So I have a decision to make.

Nebulosus is either done, or nearly done. Tomorrow I'm going to email the manuscript to at least one agent, likely many more. I figure, by the time I finish whatever tweaking they suggest and it actually gets moving, an optimistic guess at actually seeing money would be this time next year.

In the meantime, we have to pay bills. Already we're going to come up short next month.

If the company that I'm currently working for decides I can't do part time, I'm considering delivering pizzas again part time, to make enough money to get by while being able to continue writing and pushing my writing.

I can't work 40 hours at my current job, which requires me to do tech support and hard sales on every call, and push a book, let alone write much of anything. It's just not feasible. Maybe I lack drive, or energy, or whatever, but I know it's not going to happen.

So...deliver pizzas, or give up on writing for a while except on the rare occasion that I have the energy to do something when not at work? Blargh.