Let’s see. The last time we talked, Henry had been sick all day Monday, and Elizabeth threw up at the bus stop on Tuesday morning. Since then we’ve added Edward starting to throw up right after school on Tuesday, and Paul coming right back home from work Wednesday morning. I just deleted a paragraph about Paul, because I’ve talked too many times already on the topic of Paul/illness/divorce. I’ve been dealing with barf since Sunday morning at 1:30, and it is now Thursday afternoon; it is not the right time to evaluate relationships and life choices.
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Two people on my friends/family Facebook recently posted rather hostile lists (why do people post these lists?) from the point of view of clerks/nurses, scolding customers/patients for being awful. When I read those lists (why did I read those lists?), I ended up brooding/mulling over several things:
1. One item on the list had a clerk asking the customer to “look up” and understand that there was a REAL PERSON (i.e., the clerk) standing in front of her. Yes. Okay, that is true, and everyone should treat clerks nicely, and as a former clerk several times over I realize MANY customers are not doing so. But in such situations where one person is resenting another person, it’s a good idea to flip it around for resentment-justification verification: the clerk should think to herself, “And am _I_ seeing the customer as a Real Person, or am I seeing ‘A Long Line,’ or ‘Irritating Group of Customers Who Don’t See Me as an Individual’?” Maybe the clerk will answer, “YES, I am seeing her as a Real Person! I TRULY CARE about THIS PARTICULAR CUSTOMER’S human needs and wants, and I want HER SPECIFICALLY to see my humanness in return!” But this is a list addressed to “Customers” as a bulk unit, and the tone is unkind and triumphantly group-spanking, so it seems like the context already gives us the answer I’m expecting, which is “Er…..no. Ahem.”
This may sound like I’m advocating all of us holding hands and reaching out and seeing each other as Real People, but actually I think that’s too much intensity for the customer/clerk relationship. I’m only advocating the general practice of double-checking both sides of the equation before getting indignant—particularly if the indignation involves self-pity. See also: “No one noticed I disappeared from Twitter” and “No one remembered my birthday” and “No one ever invites me to things” (equation check: “Do _I_ notice when other people take Twitter breaks? and if so, do I tell them so, so they’d know I noticed, or do I worry I’d sound naggy/stalkery?” “Do _I_ remember their birthdays?” “Do _I_ invite other people to things?”). Sometimes the answer will be yes (in which case perhaps the individual might want to consider changing his or her own behavior/expectations in order to stop banging his or her head against this same wall), and sometimes it will be “Er…..no. Ahem.”
2. There is an extremely valuable and admirable trait that some people have and some people don’t, and it makes ALL THE DIFFERENCE in performance/happiness in certain careers. I don’t know what to call the trait, but it’s when someone can hear the same exact question a thousand times from a thousand different people and see it as one thousand people each asking it for the first time, rather than seeing it as one person asking the question a thousand times. If you’re asking someone a question, and that person sighs and acts like they have told you a THOUSAND times, you are encountering a person who lacks this trait and/or has finally hit the limit of that trait for this particular job/question.
3. It’s a group-bonding thing to group-mock the group of people a particular group has to deal with. So for example, it makes perfect sense to me for clerks to gripe about Customers, and for nurses to gripe about Patients: it’s a tension-reliever and also a bonding experience, and de-humanizing others with mockery can take some of the sting out of the hurt feelings they cause. The problem is that it gets out of hand extremely quickly, and soon one group is seeing the other group as an amorphous blob of irritating traits. The resentment builds, and soon a polite and reasonable customer gets treated the same as a rude customer, and a polite and reasonable patient gets treated the same as a jerky one. This sucks, and I wonder if there is a way to avoid it while still getting the benefits of group-bonding and tension relief. Perhaps by also talking about the good customers/patients, and aiming for approximately the same amount of time on that topic. It seems like that would have good tension-relieving properties as well, while also giving an increase in job satisfaction. Griping, yes—but BALANCED griping, to keep from turning into a churning perspectiveless cloud of surly resentment that has to deal with THESE ANIMALS all day long.
4. It seems as if the venting/bonding griping should be shared only with other members of the group. When shared in a general way on Facebook, here is how it hits: other members of the group will like/share/enjoy/bond; people who should be taking justified scolding from the attack won’t read it and/or won’t recognize themselves and/or won’t agree and/or won’t care; people who are already being good customers/patients will feel attacked, hurt, and unjustly accused, and will end up feeling hostile toward the attacking group (in this example, the clerks/nurses) for being so MEAN and UNFAIR, and will take that feeling into future clerk/nurse situations.
I am six months pregnant. Last weekend, I left my husband with the kids to go to the Minute Clinic where I was diagnosed with an eye infection, an ear infection, a sinus infection and bronchitis. I was coughing my head off and couldn’t sleep. Pregnancy made me unable to take anything to help besides antibiotics.
My husband:
1) complained bitterly to family that he had to finish his breakfast with “the kids running wild” while I was AT THE MINUTE CLINIC (not a spa weekend away as his tone implied).
2) sighed deeply about having to prepare all three meals Sunday and go grocery shopping after the kids were in bed (while I shivered on the couch and was too weak to go upstairs).
3) complained my coughing was annoying him
4) tried to leave the kids in the bedroom with me after I had PUT IN MY EYE OINTMENT THAT BLURS MY VISION FOR 20 MINUTES. 20 minutes he couldn’t let me be? Wanted me to watch a 4 yo and 1 yo after ample warning that I had this ointment 4x a day I needed to use? Seriously?
5) sighed and lay on the couch 2 days after I was diagnosed saying “My throat feels scratchy .”
6) made it sound like I owed him for him being on kid (HIS KID) duty all weekend.
I did not murder him outright, but it was REAL close.
Oh the rage. And I’m not even pregnant! I kind of want to slap your husband FOR you. I’m really good at taking up offense on other people’s behalf- I’ve broken up with boyfriends for people, quit jobs for people… I’d be happy to take this one on as well! Free of charge!
Hmm. I may have a problem? Perhaps someone could seek therapy on MY behalf.
Omg!
I’m so like that! When the rage meets the max.limit, I too quit-breakup etc. However, my safety is I that i always express my discontent/concerns/olive branches.
Warnings are issued – thereby freeing me of guilt.
My comment got cut off. Shoot! What I was trying to say was I thought of your posts about Paul and sickness all weekend.
I hope your whole family is well soon!
A few months ago I read a similar post on Facebook from the perspective of a dentist and I am still fuming about it. What bothered me most about the post is that EVERYONE goes to the dentist (presumably), so everyone is being shamed by this dentist and the dentist is making an experience already high on the Not Fun List even worse. If it was a dentist complaining about dental hygenists, I would be more forgiving. The group being shamed would be smaller, as not eveyone is a dental hygenist. But when a doctor, dentist or nurse shames a patient, they are shaming everyone who has ever received medical or dental care. Also, if you really dislike the people you provide this service to every day, perhaps you should find another profession (where you will presumably find someone else to complain about).
I teach freshmen composition, and it occurred to me reading this that #2 kind of applies to me. Mainly because I spend a LOT of time saying the same things over and over to my students only to have them turn immediately around and ASK me a question that I’ve been answering by saying those things over and over. Hmm, I’m not quite sure I have that quality you’re talking about, but I do relate to that constant, repetitive questioning. Phew.
I teach an online sociology class, and I have been trying *so* hard to develop traits related to one and two. It’s hard sometimes to not react with frustration to the 30th question or paper that does something I specifically warned them NOT to do, and I have to take a deep breath and remind myself that each student only made that mistake/asked that question once.
It’s also the time where I have to take another deep breath and ask myself “Did I actually explain this well enough for my students to understand what they should be doing?” Maybe I should rename the file that is currently called “Things to Fix for Next Semester” to “Er…no. Ahem.”
I don’t do Facebook, which makes me an ALIEN with my family, friends and random contacts—but I swear to you, *THIS* is why. People are so dumb about the difference between b***ing to a very specific peer group about their job/life issues v. taking that crap to THE WORLD AT LARGE which just ends up being needlessly shaming to large numbers of people—and you KNOW that the people who end up FEELING SHAME are NOT the offenders. And I say this as a middle-management person who can competently b**ch about both customers and executives until the end of the world. Very well articulated, as usual, Swistle.
Ha! I don’t do facebook either and, I swear, people are downright SUSPICIOUS of why I don’t have a facebook page! I agree, there is so much I don’t want from facebook that I always wind up not setting up a page when I feel like I should have one (since everyone and their Grandma seems to be on it).
Oh god, I interrupted reading this post to comment that point number 2 describes my job to a tee and is a quality that I most emphatically DO NOT possess. Hearing the same question (or set of questions) week after week year after year has left me an eye-rolly, slightly snappish mess.
A few weeks ago I came down with the plague- high fever, sore throat, cough, congestion- the whole works. It was miserable. I missed work and ended up at Urgent Care because my PCP couldn’t see me for 2 weeks. I have a 6 month old and am breastfeeding so even though I wanted to quarantine myself I couldn’t. I still needed to breastfeed and my son is quite attached so I couldn’t just lock myself away. After about a week, I finally started getting better but then my son got sick with a milder version of my illness (thank goodness!). So even though I was feeling a little better, I was up a lot with him because when he feels icky he wants to nurse and cuddle more and doesn’t want to take a bottle.
Then late last week my husband got sick. I was able to convince him to go to the doctor, a minor miracle, and they thought he had the flu even though his flu test was negative. He’s the most pitiful sight you’ve ever seen. He literally lays in bed or on the couch and moans. He’s been in the guest room since he started feeling sick and I can hear him from our bedroom on a different floor, moaning all night. He can’t/won’t help with the baby because he’s sick and when you ask him if he’s feeling any better or how his day was it’s a litany of woes. Every cough is the worst cough imaginable and no one has ever coughed that hard. His throat is more sore than anyone else’s has ever been in the history of the world.
I know he feels awful. I HATE that he feels awful. But, life doesn’t stop when I’m sick and I’m tired of it stopping because he is.
Apparently, I really needed to vent. Whew! I feel better.
I give all observations in this post an A plus plus with extra credit on top. Hallelujah, amen, preach it sister, etc etc etc.
Also I wish you a family-wide recovery that comes soon and lasts a very long time. This sounds like one of the worst weeks ever.
Reminds me of the GIHoS post! Bless you all for not killing your spouses. It’s a close call sometimes.
Oh Swistle, I hope the illness ends SOON.
I haven’t seen the lists you are referring to, but I did read a recent article (NYT, maybe?) that was such a list but DISGUISED as helpful advice to potential ER patients! You start reading it, believing there will be useful tips! But really it is about how ER patients are all whiny, frustrated, entitled jerks who don’t know their medical history and who think a cold warrants a trip to the ER. Which, okay, maybe true! But it is as you point out in point 4! The people who want and try to be good patients wind up feeling bad and unconfortable and defensive! I came away feeling like I would be sure to never go to the ER. Which… Is dimb. I also came away feeling tricked because there was no advice aside from poorly disguised suggestions to smarten up and not be an ass.
I read this same article and had the same reaction! I felt like I was being accused of being a narcotics seeker, just reading the article. Not Helpful.
YES, I think I saw that same one! If it was the same, there was one that was like, “Don’t try to tell me that your temperature runs low so this is a fever for you.” I was like, “So…you want me to withhold personal medical information that would help you to make your diagnosis? Should I also not try to tell you that I’m allergic to Percocet, or that the blood pressure reading you just got from me is significantly higher/lower than is typical for me?” I HATED that article. It made me feel like I could never go to the ER for anything involving pain, because they’d just assume I was an addict looking for narcotics.
I’m a professor, so I actively like being asked the same thing a thousand times, most of the time. But when I was in grad school, we had a whiteboard in our office where we kept particularly egregiously awful or funny student mistakes/comments from the compositions we graded. This was only visible to other grad students. So we got the release, but no one else’s feelings were hurt. It was a great compromise — much less public than Facebook.
This is why I almost always feel lousy within about 20 seconds of opening Facebook. I’m pretty sure every complain-y list and open letter is specifically about meeeeeeeee. Because I am a narcissist, but bad at it.
Now I think I *finally* understand the point of “customer of the month” awards. They always baffled me, but I can totally see it as a way to introduce the “let’s all talk about customers whom we like” topic without it getting brushed off as being too touchy-feely.
I’d only ever looked at it from the POV of a customer (are they just rewarding the people who spend tons of $? playing favorites to make the other regulars feel a little awkward?), and it didn’t make much sense in that context. But I can totally see the point from the staff perspective, now.
(I also love how your post wasn’t about all of the things I should stop doing as a customer, but it’s probably made me more a more empathetic one more effectively than those lists ever have. To be fair, I like etiquette-type columns so always have hopes for those kinds of lists/articles, but since most of them are just thinly disguised venting sessions, they often miss the mark.)
I would so buy a book of “Swistle’s Guide to Life.” I love the way you think. You have a remarkable talent for situational analysis.
Oh, man. I hope the barfing stops with Paul and your ordeal is over soon. And then I hope you go out aloe for a restorative and peaceful bargain-shopping trip.
I agree with Laura; you do have a remarkable talent for situational analysis. So many times you have written something, and I say, “YES! Exactly!” because you have put into words something I didn’t even realize I was thinking, and then it becomes part of my regular vocabulary. See: “it is a DROP and it is IN THE BUCKET” and “startling expenses.”
I like this point of view very, very much, so perhaps I shouldn’t comment on it because I’m in the group that agrees with this? I DON’T KNOW. THERE IS NO SPOON, SWISTLE.
First of all – may the bad stomach germs be gone from your family soon and for a long, long time!
Being asked the same question repeatedly happens a lot when you are trying to teach elementary school aged children. When I’m teaching (which, I’m only doing as a sub this year) and I get to about the third instance of the same question I generally stop everyone and say something like, “I notice lots of friends are having trouble with x, let’s talk about that.” I TRY very hard to remember that these are new questions to the children, even if the same questions are asked of me time after time.
I kind of got a chuckle imagining a receptionist/clerk handling it like that – making an announcement to an entire waiting room or line of people and calling out an often misunderstood prompt on a form or screen. Ha!
Pretty much ANY list that shows up on facebook entitled “X things never to say to an XXX” (I started to list the types that pop up the most often in my feed but then I realized I was probably going to incite a riot and anyway, I don’t think it is a characteristic of those groups so much as the type of friends I have), and I immediately roll my eyes and click away. Those lists are almost ALWAYS “nine sources of my own butthurt that the rest of the world needs to stop.”
Yes to #2! My husband owns a gas station and has had to explain to the odd employee that people who ask questions that have been asked by others before don’t already know the answer. I wish there was a name for this quality because he would totally list it in the job description.
This is exactly what I think about all those “Ten Things Not to Say to an xxxx” list posts. If they’re good tips, chances are you’re preaching to the choir and anyone who SHOULD take any of it to heart won’t. But most of them are a few good tips with other ones thrown in to round out the list, and I’m left thinking “but I bend over BACKWARDS to be sensitive, and it HAS occurred to me to ask or say that”. I was brewing a “Ten Reasons Not to Write a ‘Ten Things Not to Say’ Post” post, but I figured discretion was the better part of valour on that one, and also, SQUIRREL!
Sending happy, non-nauseous thoughts.
I am so sorry you’ve had to deal with so much sickness. I hope it’s over soon.
OMG YES. Number 4 specifically reminds me of when the entire group of women at my office received lectures from the higher ups about “appropriate attire” and at the end of it, all of us were looking around and whispering “who IS it? who are they TALKING about?” and NO ONE KNEW. The people with the problem never know it’s them.
In general I like those lists of things that annoy the clerks so that I can make sure not to do those things. I especially like the ones that Reader’s Digest does. I rarely go to Starbucks, so I don’t know all the little insider things, so I love the lists. I make sure to behave correctly! ;)
OTOH, I just read the Buzzfeed one about Chipotle and I’ve never been to a Chipotle and now I am totally afraid to go because there were so many ‘rules.’ I don’t want to be the one holding up the line because I don’t know how to order!
My favorite store is Aldi but even that grocery store has a little bit of a learning curve! You have to bring a quarter to rent a cart, when you empty your cart onto the conveyor belt, the cashier puts your things in the cart from the previous customer and your empty cart will go to the person behind you. You have to bring your own bags or pay for theirs. There’s only one kind of each food, not different brands, and most things are the Aldi store brand. I like the lack of choice (I don’t get decision fatigue and it’s faster!) but if you don’t like that item, there aren’t alternatives. We do *most* of our shopping at Aldi with a little bit at bigger stores once a month. Many items are in their original boxes just in stacks on the floor. The first few times I had to pay attention, but now I looooove it. Plus the prices are amazing.