Concerning Cruelty and Clemency
Oct. 25th, 2010 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueI have very deep social conditioning which commands me to be. Nice. On. The. Phone. Doubly so when speaking to (1) a woman who is (2) older than me.
It occurs to me that this is why I don't like answering the phone. It's not about the phone. It's about the fact that people call me on the phone to bitch me out about things which are not my responsibility and about which their information is wrong, and what I say is, "I'm so sorry you're worried. I'm confident that the thing you're afraid of is not a concern, but I'll pass it along." And then the situation is resolved, but replaced by a new situation in which I am very angry and no one has any idea.
It's not that I give ground; I don't. I am friendly, but clear about what I expect from the caller and the limits of my own response. I am some combination of soothing and a blank wall.
I wonder if "such a nice, normal guy" means that mass murderers tend to be nice on the phone. It's a hard one to break.
I wish there was a way around this, and I've wondered whether being more obviously aggressive or nasty would make these conversations easier, but I suspect my way really is the fastest and most painless. What I would actually like is for people not to treat me that way in the first place.
And of course my actual response is not phone-based, and usually involves contacting supervisors. (I don't care how high up you are; there are always supervisors. Even if you think you own your business, I will find an investor or government official who is for all practical purposes your supervisor.) I am not nearly as forgiving as I am polite. And lo, once again, someone whose life I could have made easy will be made hard. Look upon me ye faux-mighty and despair.
Mom and Dad thought it best to conceal the existence of The Prince from me (see also: most Republican operatives from The Plumbers onward), with the understanding that I would immediately take to it and use it as part of a nefarious world-domination strategy. They were a little deflated when I found it on my own in my high school library. It might as well have been pulsing like a beacon. But the actual danger was never The Prince. It was finding out that Machiavelli was a bureaucrat.
[In this case, the incident to which I'm referring is an obnoxious, though brief, phone conversation with someone from outside my organization who mistakenly thought I was captioning something incorrectly and who decided she needed to talk to me about it at a time when I needed to do actual work. It wasn't malicious, but she was pretty assured of her own correctness in a situation where the limits of her information should have been evident to her, where she was obviously not talking to a policymaker or customer service person, and when it was clear I had no time to straighten things out since I was two minutes from going on air for her news station. I try to remind myself of Raymond Carver's "A Small, Good Thing" in these cases, and it doesn't matter to the message much whether I identify with the mother or the baker.]
It occurs to me that this is why I don't like answering the phone. It's not about the phone. It's about the fact that people call me on the phone to bitch me out about things which are not my responsibility and about which their information is wrong, and what I say is, "I'm so sorry you're worried. I'm confident that the thing you're afraid of is not a concern, but I'll pass it along." And then the situation is resolved, but replaced by a new situation in which I am very angry and no one has any idea.
It's not that I give ground; I don't. I am friendly, but clear about what I expect from the caller and the limits of my own response. I am some combination of soothing and a blank wall.
I wonder if "such a nice, normal guy" means that mass murderers tend to be nice on the phone. It's a hard one to break.
I wish there was a way around this, and I've wondered whether being more obviously aggressive or nasty would make these conversations easier, but I suspect my way really is the fastest and most painless. What I would actually like is for people not to treat me that way in the first place.
And of course my actual response is not phone-based, and usually involves contacting supervisors. (I don't care how high up you are; there are always supervisors. Even if you think you own your business, I will find an investor or government official who is for all practical purposes your supervisor.) I am not nearly as forgiving as I am polite. And lo, once again, someone whose life I could have made easy will be made hard. Look upon me ye faux-mighty and despair.
Mom and Dad thought it best to conceal the existence of The Prince from me (see also: most Republican operatives from The Plumbers onward), with the understanding that I would immediately take to it and use it as part of a nefarious world-domination strategy. They were a little deflated when I found it on my own in my high school library. It might as well have been pulsing like a beacon. But the actual danger was never The Prince. It was finding out that Machiavelli was a bureaucrat.
[In this case, the incident to which I'm referring is an obnoxious, though brief, phone conversation with someone from outside my organization who mistakenly thought I was captioning something incorrectly and who decided she needed to talk to me about it at a time when I needed to do actual work. It wasn't malicious, but she was pretty assured of her own correctness in a situation where the limits of her information should have been evident to her, where she was obviously not talking to a policymaker or customer service person, and when it was clear I had no time to straighten things out since I was two minutes from going on air for her news station. I try to remind myself of Raymond Carver's "A Small, Good Thing" in these cases, and it doesn't matter to the message much whether I identify with the mother or the baker.]
