"... at the end of Lonely Street at Heartbreak Hotel..."

[mousme]

*curls up under desk, sticks thumb in mouth and ignores coworkers*

Am miserable, and am going to wallow now. Read no further if you're not in the mood for self-pity.

This bites. Due to a scheduling glitch I have to work half an hour later than I thought I would have to. I'm also working customer service on an activations schedule. This won't mean much to anyone except me, so let me explain: customer service have MANY more tasks than the activations department. So we get time offline to do all this administrative crap. Activations doesn't get that. So I have to take time off my own breaks to do it, or else get in trouble with my supervisor. Naturally, I'm not even paid for this, it's just expected of me to go above and beyond without getting paid.

It also means my stats have gone to shit, which means my supervisor will be breathing down my neck. Equally it means that I'm more stressed out and have even less time to de-stress, like during my lunch break.

Then I spent 40 minutes with a woman screaming at me on the phone. I managed to get her calm enough to get through to a supervisor, but by the end I just wanted to either strangle her or sit down on the floor and cry. I mean, she was shouting at me and would not for a moment believe me when I told her that the reason I couldn't change her file to meet her demands was that because her rate plan already coincided with what she was asking for.

I don't know if I've ever mentioned this, but customer service is a damned lonely affair, and incredibly stressful (the latter I know I've mentioned). The lonely bit comes from being surrounded with people that you can't really speak to because you're all speaking to clients who essentially are either really mad at you or else don't really consider you much more than an organic answering machine.

So on especially stressful days like this it's nice to have someone online to talk to, except that today everyone seems to be either working like mad and unable to talk, or else they're just simply not there/not answering email.

So yeah. I'm lonely and stressed out and overtired and basically feeling like crap. Hence the self-pitying moan above.

Comments

[kimberly-a.livejournal.com]

This is why I almost always try to take time to actually talk with customer service people when I'm on the phone with them. At one point, our DSL provider had some sort of major problem (I don't remember all the details, but a local provider with whom they contracted had gone suddenly bankrupt or something) which caused hundreds or thousands of people to lose their DSL service ... for a few weeks.

I called them every once in a while (sometimes waiting on hold for two hours or more, because they were receiving so many irate calls) to find out what was going on and when we might expect our service to be restored, but I always made sure to tell the person I spoke to that (1) I wasn't angry and I knew this wasn't their fault, (2) Even if I was frustrated, it had nothing to do with *them* personally because I knew that they and their company were trying to help me, (3) I understood that they had hundreds/thousands of other people to help as well, (4) This must be really difficult for them, having to talk to absolutely livid people all day long, so how are you doing?

Universally, people are glad to be treated as people and not as tools. I don't know why more customers don't realize this. And you end up with a much more pleasant conversation than if you'd spent the phone call ranting and raving. I know I would rather spend my time making someone laugh than making them cry.

Re:

[mousme.livejournal.com]

*sigh*

I wish we had more callers like you.

*hugs*