In which I go on and on about a boring topic.

Most of my waking life is spent at work, and so it’s a topic pretty high up in my awareness. Whenever I think of composing a post lately, it starts with the topic of work and devolves into a rant I’ve already written a dozen times before.

Apparently, I’m going to write it again.

Everybody already knows that working for a living sucks–there’s no need for me to say yet again that while I’m grateful as fuck to have a job at all, if I didn’t have to I gladly wouldn’t. While I did worry about money a lot while I was unemployed, my quality of life was measurably higher: I didn’t get get screamed at. I didn’t silently and uncomfortably lose my temper once or twice a day. In fact, when I was unemployed I had no awareness of my own temper at all, because I rarely ever got mad.

Not to mention all that free time meant my laundry was always done, the mail didn’t pile up in the corner, and I got enough sleep.

For as high-energy and obnoxious as I come across socially, I really have a very mild temper. I don’t get mad when a driver isn’t paying quite enough attention and does something stupid. I don’t get mad when I come out of Starbucks and someone’s knocked my bike over and not bothered to pick it up. I don’t get mad when someone gets their food before I do or if a waitress forgets my extra salsa or if someone cuts in line at the post office. In general, I assume there’s a good reason for these things. Shit happens.

But when I’m representing a company, I cease to be a live human being and become instead a target for generalized consumer rage, and let me tell you what: getting shit on by strangers for things I didn’t do MAKES ME MAD. Having to listen to adult human beings pitch fits as if they were four-year-olds pisses me off. Being yelled at, insulted, talked over, and emotionally abused enrages me, and I can’t tell you how many times a day I don’t say, “You’re butthurt and you wanna bitch about it but I SWEAR TO GOD: NOBODY FUCKING CARES about how mad you are right now, not your mom, not your wife, not God, and especially not me. Why don’t you just shut the fuck up so I can do my job? How you FEEL about this is NOT RELEVANT, HELPFUL, OR USEFUL. What are you, twelve years old?”

The worst part is that I know better. I know it has nothing to do with me, and I know there’s no reason for me to engage, but I can’t help it. I’m a human being, and when you’re a vicious cunt to me over the phone, I get mad. PARTICULARLY when your anger is actually at your own incompetence, the incompetence you’re too vain to admit to.

It’s an embarrassing cycle. Every time they make me mad, it makes me mad, and that makes me mad. Gah!

Last night, in an effort to explain why the installation instructions for mobile broadband weren’t more detailed, I said, “It is expected that the user already knows how to insert a CD- or DVD-ROM into their computer and access the contents. It’s basic knowledge, like how to use a mouse or turn a computer on. If I were to give you driving instructions to this office I would not include anything about how to operate a car in those instructions because I would assume you already knew how to drive your car.” I thought it was a great fucking analogy, but the customer talked over the entire last sentence, complaining that I “wasn’t listening” (???) and going on irrelevantly about how she “used to sell computer hardware and isn’t completely ignorant, thank you.”

Oh, you worked in sales, did you? Twenty years or so ago, was it? Well that certainly does qualify you to be a fucking bitch to your support technician! Gosh! I’m so sorry I expected you to listen to my instructions!

(Please be aware, dear reader, that installing a mobile broadband product has a mere two steps. 1) Install the program from the CD. 2) Plug in the USB device. That’s it: two fucking steps. To use the product, open the software you just installed and click the HUGE GREEN CONNECT BUTTON. This should never, ever result in a 58 minute support call… but it does when you don’t know a fucking thing about computers but want me to behave as if you had a fucking computer science degree.)

The altercation with that particular customer came early in the call when I told her I wasn’t a Windows technician and that she would have to read the security pop-up herself and determine what to do.

Guess what? I don’t give a fuck about your ego either way, I just want to solve your problem. I can talk to you like you’re an engineer or I can talk to you like you’ve never sat in front of a machine before: IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE TO ME, lady. And your feelings about it all are equally uninteresting to me. Oh, you felt frustrated? Yeah, that’s a bummer. Oh, you’re feeling stupid because I just told you that you lack basic, fundamental knowledge about how to operate a personal computer? Sounds like a personal problem to me, maybe you should work on that sometime WHEN YOU’RE NOT ON MY PHONE.

Ah, hell, another stupid fucking post about the obvious, the fact that people are childish and emotionally stunted and angry and hurting and needy. Sorry.