Angry Communications
Sep. 21st, 2009 08:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mousmeI was just reading a post by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-09-22 02:28 pm (UTC)I've found that the further removed a person is physically from a stranger, the ruder they feel they can get away with it. When I worked as a sales clerk, I'd occasionally run into a rude person but most were either neutral or quite polite and pleasant. On the phone, while working the answering service, I'd say 3 out of 5 were actively rude while the remaining 2 would be neutral. I once had a guy chew me out about the price of coffee when calling a plumbing office about the pipe to his coffee machine and say to me "You'll sit there and talk it you *&%@&& because I PAY you to take it!"...
On the net, it's even worse, we only see pixels and the worst of us tend to forget that there's a human being behind those words on the screen (I say "forget" rather than "ignore" because I haven't QUITE lost faith) and people have now decided that its a "sport" to start arguments and shock and insult people. Trolling is now considered an "art" in some corners...and that's just sad.
In closing I would like to link to this:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/
Possibly the wisest thing I've seen in recent years.