The Background

I don’t like to gripe too much about things that go wrong in my life. Now, don’t get me wrong, I gripe. Some (my husband and friends) may call it whining. I prefer venting. But whatever you call it, verbally releasing frustration is very therapeutic. I’ve been dealing with something since March of this year, and I just can’t not vent about it. My friends and family have heard about it from the beginning-so now I’m sharing it here.

This will be a series of posts, because it’s a fairly long story; but it does have a happy ending.

Do you ever just want to crawl through the phone and punch someone in the throat? No? Ok so just me then. Well, let me just tell you about who I want to smack around, and why, and we’ll see if it brings you over to the dark side (Hey, we have cookies over here. Just sayin.)

First, I have to say that I have a pretty high standard when it comes to customer service. I’ve worked in Customer Service in one form or another most of my adult (and some of my teen) life. I started out as a grocery store cashier at 16 and people have been my business ever since. When I worked on a helpdesk taking customer service calls, we attended numerous trainings to ensure our customer service skills stayed on point. I am proud of the customer service that I provide, because I’ve worked hard to develop it. I say this because when I call in to places for help or questions, I expect good customer service. I expect to have my concerns heard, and my issue resolved in a timely, efficient manner.

You don’t have an answer yet? Fine. Let me know that. Tell me when you think you might have an answer…and if you don’t have one by then shoot me an email or text. Call me; tell me that you’re still working on it so that I don’t think that I’ve been forgotten. And I think that everyone wants the same thing.

Everyone wants to feel like his or her issue is important to someone else too. So I try to have more patience when calling places for help than in pretty much everything else I ever do. Patience is not my forte. At all. Just ask my family. Or my friends. Or my co-workers. It’s not a secret; it is a struggle sometimes (ok, most of the time). Especially when I feel like I’m being pacified or not taken seriously. Maybe it’s being the youngest-some people really buy into that birth order stuff-maybe it’s just my stubborn nature. Either way, at this point in my life I’ve decided that it is what it is. I’ll just deal with it.

The problem is that, it seems, kindness is treated as a weakness. It seems like calmly, patiently explaining a problem and asking for solution is code for “give me a pat answer to get me off the phone and do absolutely no work to solve my issue” with a side of “regardless of what she says, don’t keep in contact, make her call back.” Super fun. Makes me SUPER happy.

Like I said, patience is not my strong suit. So much so, that when I truly try to be patient I can go too far the other way and not be forceful enough to make people understand that I’m serious. So let me start getting to the point. Fair warning, I tend to jump around some when I tell stories. Makes my husband crazy. Stay with me, it all loops back together in the end.

Tune in tomorrow for the next installment of “Why Sarah’s Annoyed”…