Now hear this, you whiney old farts: let me get my work done!

Dear retirees with too much time on your hands who come into the town hall where I work, now hear this! We are short-staffed here and you are wasting our time. My co-workers and I do not want to hear about any of the following:

  • Why you think you should be exempt from a particular by-law. You don’t like the by-law? Then state your case before Town Meeting and urge the members to vote to change it. Until you get it changed, I’m here to carry it out. You can stand in front of my desk and yell about how stupid the law is till the cows come home, but I’m still going to enforce it. All your rant is going to do is make you hoarse.

  • Your aches and pains. I’m not interested. Not the teeniest little bit. I am, however, very interested in writing a report that’s due in 20 minutes, and which I cannot finish because you are standing in my office whining about your arthritis. Go see your doctor, unless she can’t stand you either.

  • How bored you are now that you are retired and how important you used to be. I don’t care. Unlike you, I still have work to do. If you need a purpose, teach reading to the illiterate. Volunteer in a soup kitchen. Just leave me alone to do my job.

  • How lonely you are because your children don’t call. I don’t care. I am not your therapist.

In short, old folks of MyTown, Massachusetts, yes indeedy, your taxes pay my salary. But that does not give you an open invitation to walk into my office without an appointment and drone on endlessly, whining about subjects I am not interested in and couldn’t help you with even if I were interested. Volunteer somewhere, see your doctor, have an affair (they make this nifty blue pill now.) **Just leave me alone to do my work.
**

Close your door, put a sign up that says “Do Not Disturb, I’m too Important to Talk to Old People”.

Unless your the worlds greatest actress, I’m surprised anyone does try to talk to you.

Excuse me, miss? Miss? Yes, you need to help me…my arthritis is acting up and I can’t dial the phone to call my children to ask them why they won’t come visit me. Also, my neighbor won’t let me use his trash cans for my trash. Honestly, I can’t haul that heavy thing out to the end of the driveway twice a week, can I? Unless you can come by my house and take my trash out for me? Are you listening to me? Miss?

What is your job, Sonia?

Miss? Miss? I am here to volunteer my services to fix everything that’s wrong with Yourtown, Massachusetts. Before I retired, I was a general in the US Army and I know how to run a place! Eh? What’s that you said? I haven’t been able to hear as well since I started taking the little blue pills. I’m quite popular with the ladies, you know! At least I was, when I was younger…What do you mean you don’t have time to talk to me? Don’t you realize I pay your salary? Miss? Miss?

Young people these days.

If I take that nifty blue pill you mentioned… can we do it without talking?

I agree with you Sonia, though it’s not just seniors and retirees that do this.

Sandra_NZ, let’s just classify me as an administrator, okay? I don’t want to give away too much that might id my town.

So- the dudes that pay your salary- you are too busy to talk to them? :rolleyes:

You’re a Civil Servant. Get with it. At least try the “civil” part. *Your job * is to serve those taxpayers and voters.

You really shouldn’t be in that line of business.

Oh, go roll your eyes all the way up your ass. We have no idea what Sonia’s job is, so how can you go about demanding how she should act?

Unless you are seriously positing that all government employees should be available to any and every citizen at any point while they’re at work. Hey, I’ve got an idea, let’s go down to the prison and chat up the guards, because we pay their salary! Or let’s go down to the nearest military installation and just barrel our way onto the base – we pay for it after all – and walk into the general’s office and start yapping away. After all, we pay his salary! Or maybe there’s a bridge going up somewhere where you don’t like it. Go down to the civil engineer in charge of the project and start demanding changes! He’d damned well better listen to you, because you pay his salary!

Really, the only people your logic works with is your elected representatives, and that’s because it is their job to be your, well, representative.

It is not the job of everyone who happens to be employed by the government to be at your beck and call. Now, if you happen to be talking about someone whose job it is to actually talk to the public, like, say, a clerk at the DMV, then you’ve damned well got a point about civility and dealing with the public. But if dealing with the public is not part of the job, then go stuff your attitude where the sun don’t shine.

I am civil to everyone. Always. The purpose of this pitting was to express what I cannot say in real life. My fellow workers and I are constantly interrupted by people - most of them retired - who who barge into our workplace and who
a) demand that we bend the laws for them, or
b) whine abut their lives.

I cannot do a) and I don’t have the time to listen to b).

I serve the public by doing the job that I am paid to do. Said job does not involve either flouting the law or providing therapy or social work services. When these needy folks keep me from carrying out the job I am paid to do, they are cheating their fellow taxpayers. When residents of any age ask me for services that are within my purview, I provide those services cheerfully.

Well, Sonia, it would help in deciding whether to curse you or support you if you would tell us just one thing: Is it your job to actually talk with these people or not?

That’s a trick question. It’s possibly her job to talk with them on relevant issues. She’s not a therapist and she can’t bend the laws.

We have receptionists at work. Just because they greet visitors and route phone calls doesn’t mean they have to go out and change tires.

Wow, Sonia, I’d have thought you might have hit on the idea of closing your door, or having your receptionist screen visitors, or seeing people only by appointment. What’s that? You have thought of all those, but can’t get permission to implement any of them? Oh. Then, guess what? That means the people who actually run the town have decided that, no matter what you think your job is, it does include talking to these people. And I’ll bet that means exchanging pleasantries and sympathies as well as information, and being generally helpful and friendly even if their concern doesn’t fall within your authority. By the way, if your job is to administer certain regulations, it would probably benefit the town for you to be interested in what exceptions or exemptions people want, or why many people think the rules are stupid. That’s the difference between public service and bureaucracy.

I have no idea how vital it is to the republic that you not be disturbed, but I bet your boss does. Explain to her (or him) how important you are, and how unimportant the old folks importuning you are, and I’m sure you’ll shortly find yourself untroubled by annoying visitors, and perhaps by deadlines and the other pressures of your work as well.

Alternatively, you could try learning how to deal with these people in a way that sacrifices a minimum of your time and their dignity – it’s possible, even if you don’t believe it. Just a skill you haven’t yet learned.

Man, it constantly amazes me the mental acrobatics some people will go through in the effort to “see both sides” of every Pitting and suggest that the problem is really the OP’s fault, or that the OP is actually being worse than the people s/he is complaining about, or something.

In this case, people are wasting the OP’s time (and her municipal employers’ money) with complaints that are either assholish or irrelevant, or both. Sorry folks, but this one is a slam-dunk. Mark it down for being insufficiently controversial, if you like, but attempting to make a controversy out of it just makes you look silly.

I thought everybody understood that the way people express themselves when starting Pit threads doesn’t necessarily reflect the way they handle the situations they’re complaining about IRL. Apparently some people still need that point explained to them.

Heh. Remind yourself of this the next time you’re stuck on your lunch break at the Town Hall or the DMV or the post office behind some idle rambly idiot (of whatever age) who thinks it’s okay to hold up the legitimate business of the office for several minutes on end while they’re “exchanging pleasantries and sympathies”.

Or at least, it’s a skill she doesn’t bother exercising when posting in the Pit. An alarming number of posters in this thread seem unable to distinguish between Pit attitude and real-life behavior.

I used to work with a woman with similar attitude. She’d roll her eyes and mumble under her breath and tell me I had to deal with those ‘fucking old people’ or 'fucking foreigners’ because she was sooooo busy. Her being busy usually consisted of talking on the phone or boring us to tears with stories about her cat, her slow metabolism being the reason for her big fat ass, her NASCAR weekend or any other topic of conversation that revolved around her.

I’d rather talk to an old person who at least did something with their life that was important than talk to that self-involved socially inept bitch for 5 minutes.

Most of the seniors she bitched about did contribute something. They lived through the depression, lots of them fought in WWII or their husbands did. That generation made this country great and they do deserve a little respect. They’ve been paying taxes for probably 50-60 years and probably have a right to bitch.

Like I said before, close your door with a Do Not Disturb sign

Oh, I get it now. People just ignore the OP and fill in some related person from their past, then yell at that person via the thread.

I don’t know about the OP, but I don’t have a door like that. I deal with the public in a hospital, but in my very narrow scope of expertise, research - I can’t help you with billing, can’t examine you, can’t do any tests, don’t know anything about medical school admissions, and definitely can’t get you an appointment to see the department head or dean. I certainly can’t help you with anything from another department in the hospital. I’ll be nice and look up directions to another department or tell you what room to go to in my department for your needs, but unless you have a research-related matter to discuss or need simple directions, I seriously can’t help you.

So if (to make an analogy to the OP’s situation) someone’s sitting there bitching at me about their bill, griping because I won’t tell them research information that I cannot divulge, even though I’ve already explained why confidentiality has to be maintained, or going on and on about unrelated health matters, then they are wasting my time. I will be terribly polite, but I will also carefully make efforts to not let someone waste an excessive amount of my time on something that I can’t be of any assistance on, or when they will not take no for an answer on something that I have patiently explained that I am legally and ethically unable to do.

Fair enough. :slight_smile:

I was really just wondering if customer contact was part of your role or not.

Note that the OP isn’t talking about her personal preferences in conversation partners, though: she’s talking about people wasting her time at work with irrelevant complaints or chatter when she’s supposed to be working on something else.

Fine, then let them bitch to people who (a) are specifically tasked to deal with their particular complaints, or (b) have time on their hands and are willing to listen. Not to employees of short-staffed municipal offices whose jobs are unrelated to the subjects that the oldsters want to bitch about.

Old people are certainly entitled to respectful treatment, and if the OP were actually being rude to the babbling retirees who waste her time with irrelevant complaints, I’d be the first to condemn her. But that doesn’t mean that they actually have any right to be wasting her time like that.

Like I said, just wait till you get stuck behind one of those idle time-wasters (of any age group, for that matter) at a municipal office when you’re in a hurry. Let’s see how sympathetic you are then to people who waste the employees’ time with endless irrelevant babble.

Yeah, I think some posters read just far enough into the OP to realize that Sonia was using some disrespectful expressions about senior citizens, at which point their reading comprehension (such as it was) evaporated in a puff of indignation. “How dare you be rude to those nice old people, you self-important meanie you!” Point missed, dearie.