Goddamn it, I forgot to mention the fucking Eskimos. I hates them I does.
OP, check your inbox.
Ooh, intrigued.
Apparently he told me that he hates uppity white women in Academia.
(just kidding)
The problem is (speaking as a middle aged woman), we were mostly taught to be ladies, and to agree with everyone. And we have problems distinguishing between assertive and aggressive. If we act the way we were taught, then everyone will steamroller right over us. If we’re screaming bitches, it works more often than not. We might not get respect, but we generally get more stuff done by going into bitch mode than by being the sweet little demure flowers that we were brought up to be.
The thing is, I know at least as many men of all ages who will go straight into confrontational asshole mode when they have a customer service issue. The men might be quite pleasant otherwise, but when they want a refund or some special accommodation, they don’t start off nice and then ratchet up the aggression. Nope, instant asshole.
Personally, I’ve found that being nice to the customer service people pays off.
Well, I’m white, a women and in academia. Don’t know about uppity (since that presumes I ave a “place” I should keep to), though, so he and I should get along swimmingly.
Well, I had that discussion with one of my security officers back in the day. She felt that (and openly admitted) that she had to be a ‘screaming bitch’ to have the truck drivers take her seriously. I told her that it doesn’t make them respect her, it makes them dislike her. I asked her to just be rock solid and tell them what they needed to do, and if they didn’t obey, she had full ‘ownership’ of her post like everyone else and she was free to ask them to park their ass outside the gate until they were ready to comply. And that if they demanded to speak to me, the first words out of my mouth were going to be “why are you not doing what my officer told you to do?” and things would get worse for them from there.
But yeah, this was an odd “why does it seem like these specific groups seem to have a higher than baseline chance of being idiots or assholes under these specific conditions” post that obviously was not understood by a few people who would rather skip the comprehension and jump right into the RO.
I know! It’s not like you were basing your opinion of people just on their race or anything. Now THAT would be racism.
Oh wait. That’s exactly what you’re doing.
It was understood. You just don’t agree with the conclusions some of us are making.
Keep telling yourself that. Maybe some day it will be true.
You know, no matter how much some folks want it to be true, noting the race/religion/whatever of a person doesn’t make them a racist. Neither does noticing that a certain group in a certain area tends to do or say XYZ. And, this one is sure to bring on the screaming - neither is mentally assuming XYZ until proven otherwise.
Racism is hate. It isn’t noticing that there are physical or cultural differences and it certainly isn’t making a mental note that X group tends to do XYZ. Lets take NYC Jews (are we not supposed to capitalize that?) for example, since I know next to zero about them and how they act. Don’t you think it’s likely that because these folks are all of the same religion, living in a rather small area (as compared to the rest of the USA) that a certain way of acting simply becomes ingrained in that subculture? Apparently many of the folk living in NYC are “Demanding, snide, condescending, outright mean and delusionally self-important” since we’ve all heard those complaints before so is it really all that surprising that one subculture there may have taken what is a local attitude and entrenched it?
The OP isn’t saying that he hates NYC Jews, he is saying that he has noticed that a majority of them are assholes on the phone when speaking to a call center drone. That’s it, nothing more - or if there is, he hasn’t said anything to indicate that he hates them or thinks anything else of them, just how they are on the phone.
Racism is a serious problem; lets not weaken it by applying it to every incidence when someone notices that this group tends to do this or that group tends to look like that. We are all different, trying to pretend we aren’t is just stupid. Neither are we expected to like every other person that crosses our paths, particularly when they are acting like jerks.
To which they’d probably reply “Because she’s full of shit, and so are you. Get me a real manager now, arsehole”, based on your usual posts about your approach to your work.
I fully comprehended that you managed to describe the majority of humanity in racially perjorative terms, and are too stupid to realise that.
Your problem is that you do menial jobs - security guard and call centre monkey, for fuck’s sake - that give you a tiny amount of power, and you are determined to exercise that power at any opportunity, presumably to compensate for some deep sense of inadequacy. The only good side is that at least you’re not a cop.
Look, we all know there’s a few arseholes out there. But, if everyone looks like one, it’s not them with the problem.
I get it. I’m supposed to feel bad because you think I hate the world. Nevermind that I’ve always made it clear that these are a very small number of people that I interact with.
Dude, you’ve got your own weapons in the thicket. I know my own well enough.
How in the world can he recognize a NY Jew over the phone?
My guess is he has an opinion of what NY Jews act like, so when someone meets that criteria he gets to say “Hey, those gosh darn annoying NY Jews again” without noticing the Jews that don’t meet his criteria or the other folks he assumed were Jewish.
Also, if he’s calling out all NYers, why make special mention of Jews and not NY WASPs, Asians, Hispanics etc? Very odd.
NY is not that small a region for Jews- you’d have everything from ultra orthodox, Hasidic, purely secular, Reform, Conservative, converted etc etc Jews, living lose together or very spread out. Extremely diverse.
ETA: if it’s such a small number then statistically you shouldn’t draw conclusions anyway.
If we aren’t supposed to take some message away from race being mentioned, then why is it there?
In my few years of customer service, I had jerks of all colors and stripes. But even if the jerks had been limited to a certain demographic, I don’t see myself creating a thread where I specifically highlighted this commonality UNLESS I wanted members of this demographic to either feel bad or offer some kind of explanation/apology.
Also, the OP knows good and well how people operate around here. If we’re gonna fly off the handle when people use “fat” as an unnecessary descriptor, we’re gonna do it with race and ethnicity. Everyone knows this. So I find the OP to be rather trollish.
Heh, spoken like one who has never had to deal with customers on the phone…
I don’t know but I tend to take a poster at face value and not leap to the most negative conclusion possible. How do you recognize a NYC Jew in person?
He was also quite clear that it is only the Jews in NYC that he has problems with, so yes he has noticed many Jews that don’t meet his criteria.
Apparently, the NYC Jews are ultra-NYC assholeish. Perhaps you could ask him what the difference is?
Certainly not as diverse as the non-Jewish population? Or perhaps the OP isn’t aware of all those differences and it is only the, say, ultra orthodox Jews that are the issue? Again, I don’t know because I’m not the OP. What I do know is there were obvious differences in the different “types” of folks that called in when I was doing the phones myself. And I could tell you what race, income level or area a caller was a part of because it was right there on my computer screen.
“Obnoxious fucking Jew York hebes, please press seven”
or
“Welcome to Vandelay Import/Export. Seig Heil! How can I help you today?If you buy our deluxe package, you’re entered into a drawing for a drunken weekend with Mel Gibson!”
Dude, this is the Pit. Filled with the most foul and loathsome demons who pay no attention to facts and context when their ability to froth and rage is on the line.
Fact is, you’re never supposed to ‘profile’ in any job, but to do the job you kinda have to. Hell, as a bearded white guy, before 9/11 I used to get singled out and searched every motherfucking time I went to the airport. Why? I asked and was accidentally told “you fit the profile” before the guy caught himself and tried to backpedal.
I handle every person who calls me as an individual, starting from the assumption of positive until they actually speak to me or I am being told otherwise by someone who has been speaking to them. I have always maintained that the bad people are a small percentage of the people I speak to, and in this thread am only saying that, over time, these particular subsets of Humanity have demonstrated (in my experience) a higher than baseline percentage of jerkitude.
I’m thinking they said “Oy Vey!” at some point, and just possibly “Har! Har! Har!”