I like to talk about my experiences at work. I like to hear other people’s experiences at work. This is called Communication and given that we do technical support, I find it immensely useful to hear about other people’s experiences, even if they’re not directly talking about technical issues, but rather with their experiences in dealing with people on the phones.
Sometimes this comes out of people, myself included, as sounding like complaining. If you’re a high minded ass, this is cause to complain about other people and their complaining. If you’re paying attention and willing to learn, this can be a great chance to consider how YOU would have handled the situation and possibly even mentally prepare yourself for the same call.
We have a technical support chat room at work in which we are supposed to talk about issues and find solutions.
Months ago, the junior moderators (some of whom no longer work there) and the high minded asses got so negative about it that they poisoned our management’s minds about this chat room and they almost shut it down. I like to think that I had a strong part in changing our Director’s mind because I had a conversation with him where I showed him that some of us were actually learning something from what was being described to him as nothing but whining and complaining. After that conversation, and I do mean IMMEDIATELY after that conversation, all discussion about closing the chat room came to a screeching halt.
When we had an influx of new people last month, a pretty fair number of them depended heavily on that chat room, and a good number of them would even chat me personally to ask my opinion or for my help on things that were not necessarily directly related to technical issues, but were related to relating to customers and dealing with situations.
And yet, we have three High Minded Asses who have decided to target me personally and make snarky comments and play junior moderator on me whenever they are in a bad mood. I post a comment that perhaps sounds like complaining, about how I’m dealing with a difficult personal issue with a customer. I get one guy asking what this has to do with troubleshooting. I get the one woman in that group telling me “who cares?” When truthfully, I could have used some advice or encouragement. Another day I post up a solution to a difficult issue, but perhaps foolishly, make a comment about my customer’s six professional qualifications (Associate Professor, Director of a Children’s Hospital, etc). From Mr. Grumpy Old Man, I get “Then put that in your notes and stop telling us about it”. Hello, asshole, if you read it, you read one possible solution to a common problem that we (or at least I) tend to deal with several times a week. One that had not been known to me before and I had never heard discussed by anyone else. Something other people might want to know and use before they reach the point of throwing in the towel on the issue, which happens all too often because it is a complex issue involving several software packages.
One day, the first guy posts a question, in his usual “only part of the issue and not well communicated” and I point to a certain technical article that deals with that issue. Only the title of it is about something else. So dumbass reads the title and slams me in the chat room for wasting his time. Fifteen seconds later, someone else says “it is (article number), (name)”. Dumbass thanks that person, not a word to me. An hour later, he posts another incomplete question. I point at another article, which was the wrong one because he had failed to post the most significant part of the problem he was working on. I get slammed with a lot of nastiness, way out of line. I post my first and so far, only defensive answer to this crap “Harsh responses to attempts to help you only guarantee less help in the future”.
They stilled the voices of several new people by being excessively harsh, until those people got really careful about the questions they asked in the chat. Irritated the fuck out of me, because I’d rather have people asking stupid questions to simple problems and getting the right answer, and then doing a good job, as opposed to spending an afternoon like today, where I took five calls in a row where I ended up resolving people’s issues within just a few minutes after each of those people had quite literally spent HOURS on the phone with multiple people doing the wrong fucking things to resolve the issue and completely failing. One woman had spent over six hours on the phone with five agents completely fucking up the job, and I resolved it in SIX MINUTES. Another came to me with a demand to speak to a manager because four agents had completely fucked him over and left him worse off than before, then were refusing to return his calls. I gave him a plan of action, assured him I knew exactly how to resolve his issue - and had already done the exact same thing for two other people today - and he’s going to call me first thing in the morning to get it done.
Seriously people, get off your high horses, stop whining and crying about what your limited vision and mentality can only perceive as complaining, start realizing that your sniping and snarking is every bit as bad as the “complaining” YOU complain about, wake the fuck up and learn how to learn from everything that crosses your desk. Learn how to let people complain as a way of learning, learn how to listen for the real issue and learn how to resolve it, without getting clouded over with negativity over the way they voice it. Because that’s what we have to do with our customers in order to do our job, and you should fucking know by now that the same thing will work with your co-workers and everyone else in your life.