i know it’s almost certainly a cultural issue, but seriously, damn! I work for a very large company that employes people from pretty much everywhere. I take a couple of phone calls a week from people needing help with something or to be directed elsewhere.
What is it with young Asian (specifically Chinese) women being utterly helpless and hesitant on the phone?
Let’s start off with basic phone etiquette. When I answer, I state my name and my department. What I get are: Long pauses to the point of me repeating my greeting and sometimes an additional 'HELLO?" right before I hang up in frustration. ONLY then do I get a really hesitant and very very quiet “Um, hello?” Ok, YOU CALLED ME. I told you my name, I told you my department. At this point I’m waiting for you to tell me who you are and what you want. NOT hesitate, stall, not answer and then just say “hello”, which then forces me to attempt to draw you out into real HUMAN conversation.
Seriously, if you can’t handle basic phone greetings, you should completely fuck off, because you’re being incredibly rude and unhelpful and wasting both our time.
After that, get to the fucking point. I hate having to work so hard just to get you to tell me the very basics of what you want. Almost hung up on this young woman this morning because I was getting really annoyed at the hesitation and non-cooperation with actually fucking communicating.
The phone, like email, is an important business tool. Learn how to use it in a professional manner or get some retraining.
Chimera, could it be a language issue? I’m wondering if they have been assigned to make the phone call because they “speak English” only they really don’t, or only a little. Maybe they did well in English study in school, but have little or no real experience speaking to a native speaker. I found this a lot in Japan, and then there was the gender difference - boys or men would stumble through as best they could, while women would hem and haw, afraid to make a mistake.
Got an IM from a co-worker, asking if I could come by and help her out. Given that this is the same co-worker who will ask me to give her the traffic report for her evening commute, or what the weather will be like for the week, I was fully prepared to us my Google-Fu.
I walk to the other side of the office and ask her what she needs. She’s creating a form that is a hybrid of two different Word files. She wants to have a data entry field for her “Item #8,” just like the one that is in “Item #7.”
Apparently, the concept of copy & paste is completely unknown to her.
Coworker, I seriously want to know WHAT you don’t get about this job. Our main function is to collect money from one party and issue it to another party, according to a court order. I shouldn’t look at your “Payments in suspense” screen and see THOUSANDS of dollars not issued because you either were too damn lazy to deal with it or because you didn’t know how to get the money out the door. Either way, there are people who rely on these funds and your inaction is totally unacceptable.
Our boss is aware that you are just not getting it. Supposedly you are on a work plan. I have not noticed ONE iota of improvement. This is just not okay. Why are you even here?
I feel racist for demanding that others not play by their culture’s “rules”, but I just don’t have time to wait while you play your mandatory “five minutes of self-effacing and tangenting before you can ask your question.”
And then when I finally drag your problem out of you and answer you (quickly, clearly and completely) and ask you if you understand and you say *Oh, YES, of course, thank you SO much, *I really have to believe you…
…only to find out weeks later that sometimes you say YES because to say you still don’t understand would mean that I would bring shame upon myself as a Not A Good Answerer and you want me to avoid that heartache… Huh?
Can we just put aside these silly “rules” that our culturally-bound parents ingrained in us… for the sake of actually fucking communicating?
digs, get them to repeat back your explanation. It’s perfectly possible that they actually are convinced they got it, or that they have taken incomplete notes / will forget some detail that turns out to be necessary when they’re actually trying to do whatever.
Me, I’m still having this little issue with my coworkers spouting rows of TLAs at me with no instructions or addresses, but hey, I get paid for the time I spend writing back “Sorry, I’m going to need more details. What exactly is an ATF and where do I find it to fill it up? Who do I send or assign it to?” (I still don’t know what it is, but I’m still reasonably sure it’s not the Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms people).
Had to take a series of courses on computer security for my company.
Then almost-identical ones for the client.
A series of courses on the client’s industry for the client.
Now taking an almost-identical copy for my company. I’m wondering if the voice is computer generated. Whether a computer or an actual guy, it keeps mispronouncing a word which appears in maybe 75% of the sentences in the course. I used to work in that industry and I’ve consulted for them before, plus it’s a common enough word… the reason I wonder if it’s computer generated is that this word actually gets pronounced correctly about 10% of the time.
I also had to take duplicate courses on “the importance of sitting up straight, with your elbows at 90º angles”. I happen to have a Masters in Labor Safety, qualifying me to give that training If they tell me I have to take a course about Chemistry, I reserve the right to send my scanned diplomas as “proof of completion”.
I don’t understand why you aren’t using email. I know management thinks face-to-face, or at least voice-to-voice, is the best way to communicate and resolve issues, but that is obviously not the case here.
If they take the time to write out the question they will be much more at ease; if you write down the answer, they will have something to refer to.
My OST file is 12GB (sorry, I get a lot of email, not my fault). This machine has 8GB of RAM. Saving it by right clicking, copying, and pasting it ISN’T GOING TO WORK. You’ve tried it 10 times in the last half hour, with me watching over your virtual shoulder, and I’m ready to reach through the screen and virtually throttle you. cmd, motherfucker.
Congrats on managing to download the new version of Silverlight for me. Do you think you could actually manage to double click the actual file you just downloaded, instead of the one sitting next to it named Silverlight(1).exe with a time stamp of a year and a half ago? And when I tell you that you just ran the wrong version, actually check your work instead of telling me that it’s up to date and you’re closing the ticket?
Grrr… I usually stick up for the poor service desk slobs in threads where people bitch about IT, because I know what a tough, thankless job it is, but the Devry Alumni Association at my current job seems to have a special talent for picking wildly inconvenient times to work my tickets and leaving things worse than they found them.
The mistake would be thinking that we initiated this or control the medium.
We take calls. Not that many, but people can call us. It would be rather bad form for me to tell this person ‘I’m sorry, I don’t have time for this crap. Can you email me?’ or something similar.
I mean, when people are giving me large complicated database names or asking questions about details of something, I can and usually do tell them to put it in an email and send it to me. But we actually have to get through that pesky “communication” part to get to that point, and listening to silence and hesitation isn’t communication.
To the co-worker who was told on last Friday that s/he had until Tuesday to comment on a procedure and then told us they would need more time on Thursday afternoon:
Guess what, some of us don’t wait until the last, how shall I say?, god-damned, shit-licking, final fucking minute, - or in this case, more than an extra day later, to accommodate lazy-assed mother-fuckers - to do our jobs.
Yes, I waited more than an extra day for you, because everyone knows you pull this last minute shit, but today I did my job and submitted the work, so, hell yes, I pushed backed, and tomorrow when I am asked to maybe see if I can maybe do something, I will push back again, because I am really, really sick of this piss-ant, petty-ass, power game you play.
Well, I was thinking more along the lines of, “Let’s set up a phone appointment to discuss in greater depth, when I know I’ll have all the time you need. Could you also send me an email describing the problem, so I can do some research before hand?”
My response would be “ok, I’ll make sure I’m giving you much much less help next time.”
But of course, I have no idea if your ‘too much help’ was you stepping in front of co-worker, doing the work yourself and embarrassing this person in front of others.
I have a co-worker who we just found out has had a line like this as his answering message. **And has for years! ** “I’m sorry, I won’t be checking messages today or tomorrow. If you need immediate help, please email me: idontneedtochat@notwastingtime.com.”
And the amazing thing? He’s helpful enough once people email him that NO ONE has ever complained.
They just email him with their problems (no hemming and hawing, no chatting), he asks a few questions until he gets succinct info, then he solves their problem without ever having to pull teeth or chit chat.
When you insist that you are the final person to review/approve everything before publication to the world, AND insist on reading every last word of every last document we’re forced to send you, AND you’re hypercritical of every last one of those words, you’ve accomplished three things:
[ul]
[li]Our quality inches up half a notch[/li][li]Our efficiency plummets due to the subsequent meetings to get clarity on what your stinking issues are and the many document revisions needed before we can achieve the Holy Grail of your approval[/li][li]Our time to market, hailed by no other august person than yourself as a critical KPI for our company, fails to improve by one iota[/li][/ul]
I only hope you’re not sitting there mourning what a collection of hopeless, useless, stupid employees we are that we just can’t manage to do things right the first time. Because you do this to all of us and we’ve compared notes and are pretty well convinced that when it comes to getting through your review, there’s no such thing as correct.
So thanks. I hope you enjoy being a major roadblock in the success of an entire company because that’s what you are.
We’re cubemates, so it was just us. We have different jobs. I’m a developer, she’s a designer. She’s writing a design guide. (Which is the document a developer, myself or some other, will use to do our work from.)
She asked me to look at a section she was writing to see if it was comprehensible. It wasn’t, and I nicely explained why. She began to argue with me about it, and I said “Dude, I get what you are going for (because she had explained it to me) but this is not it. If you kept it like this and I got it, I would end up crossing it out and then writing you an email asking you to clarify exactly what you meant.” She claimed that was probably okay then, since I got the basic idea. At this point I suggested a way to write it that was easy to interpret and she declared that to be much helping.
We’re pals, she’s just stubborn to a degree I find impressive.
So, coworker, I take it it’s OK for YOU to be buddy-buddy with a manager but it’s not OK for ME to be buddy buddy? Isn’t that interesting? Wait until you get the hard fact on paper that management now knows why your productivity is down and you’ve been taken off your favorite tasks because of it. I’ll just be watching it all and trying not to snicker.
I realize I was just here complaining about my coworkers not having lives but . . .
I put in a vacation request, about 6 weeks in advance. My manager said OK, but the person I will be working with at the time is worried because last time I was on vacation I “disappeared.”
Was I supposed to take my work with me?
If I go on vacation and still do whatever you need me to do, will I not have to use vacation days?
Is this just a difference between working for huge corporations and small companies?
I’m starting to consider calling a recruiter again.
If they tell me I have to take a course about Chemistry, I reserve the right to send my scanned diplomas as “proof of completion”.