Angry Communications

[mousme]

I was just reading a post by bodhifox about people being nasty on the phone with him, and it occurs to me that everyone I know who works in a job that has them answering phones has stories about people who are horrible and rude and abusive. It seems that callers fall mainly into two categories: neutral and abusive. For every 100 callers, I'd say about fifteen to twenty are rude or abusive in some fashion, most range from barely tolerable to just polite, and maybe one (if I'm lucky) is deliberately pleasant with me.

I'd really like to know what it is that makes people feel it's okay to be that way with complete strangers. It's not just the relative safety of the phone, either. People are abusive with retailers and anyone behind a counter, too.

People just seem to be angry, a lot.

Comments

[vureoelt.livejournal.com]

Indeed, welcome to the internet era! People are increasingly used to instantaneous everything. -_-

Not to mention that society isn't as structured as it used to be. For instance, etiquette class used to be mandatory...

And, finally, I believe human thought processes skew people's perceptions towards negativity anyways.