The net’s been going down on us with increasing regularity, and not in the curl your toes, forget your name, and hope your Dad didn’t give your site address to Grandma way. It is always the user’s fault, something wrong with your computer, the line in your house, a few missteps during the ritualistic sacrificing of one the neighbor’s hydrangeas as you were laying cable, but never the fault of your provider. That, at least in California, is not possible. As Rick waited on hold for 20 minutes, periodically responding to questions from an automated operator until it understood what he wanted enough to route the call, he discovered something interesting. If you say “Fuck you” the operator will say, “I think you said you want to cancel your account.”
After a lengthy discussion with various persons, none of whom seemed to think our problem was real, Rick said a technician would come test our line the following day. As promised, a technician came to the house, and after checking the line inside (nothing wrong), the line at the pole (nothing wrong), left me with a bill and a smile. Curiously, after his taillights vanished around the corner, somehow what was once flaky Internet service metamorphosed into no service at all. As Rick was at work, I called our provider this time, and brought “Bob” in tech support up-to-date, answered a few condescending questions, and heard the words every customer loves to hear. “You don’t understand how computers work.” Okay. Our DSL was flaky and inconsistent before we had it “serviced”, and now it wasn’t working at all, so I suppose he was right. As he began to enumerate my various technological knowledge inadequacies, I interrupted and said, “I would love to sit and listen to you insult me for hours but as this is not my computer, nor my home, I will ask my brother to call you and you can share this with him. Good day, Sir and goodbye.”
To those who think me unsympathetic to the plight of tech support personnel, put down your torches and pitch forks. I was married to a man who worked in tech support for years and he still has a twitch. However, I too know what it’s like to work with the public, and although the setting was somewhat different, I assure you people within the homecare, hospice, and mental health communities can be just as difficult, demanding, and unreasonable as the best of them. As with tech support, the difference is in the individual, not the problem. There are those who can create calm simply by existing and others who incite riots every time they exhale. I’ve heard it referred to as touch, and those who have it are amazing to watch for they can soothe the wildest storm within the angriest person, diffusing the situation so that once over, both parties can separate without being or feeling shamed by their behavior. There’s no sense of victory or defeat or compromise; rather two people slowing down enough to ignore the static around them and really listen.
And ultimately the core of all complaints are the same: You’re not listening to me. You don’t hear me. I don’t feel heard.
I am not an angry person or I don’t express anger often (though recently have considered that my inability to get angry might be the problem). I don’t honk my horn in traffic or give people the finger if they cut me off. I don’t start at outraged and work my way toward self-righteous indignation. It takes a great deal to exhaust my patience and, even in those situations, I try not to let my emotions dominate my actions and reactions. To the best of my ability, I live my life by the Golden Rule, and when that fails I know I don’t belong wherever I am, doing whatever it is I am doing, and it is time to move on. This is how I manage my personal life.
When dealing with the public, I take “me” out of the equation, because I don’t have biographical information on every person that walks the planet, and you never know the kind of life the stranger opposite you is living. Statistically, the chances that the strangers among us are going through something that, if read about in the newspaper or seen on TV, would provoke a sympathetic response: a dying loved one, a divorce and custody battle, domestic violence, child abuse, chronic illness, loss of job, home, victim of theft, rape, survivor of cancer, war, battling addiction, intimidation, imprisonment, isolation, abandonment. To paraphrase Jorge Luis Borges, time is always living us, and few show signs of the turmoil within. We wouldn’t be able to function as a society if we wore our pains on the surface, as naked as our skin. However, knowing what we know and don’t know, what we can and cannot assume about each other, it is important we handle one another with care, and treat each individual as a potential human being worthy of the same empathy so easily doled out to those names in print and faces lit up by the bright box in the middle of our living room.
There are some people who need to be angry, and no matter what you do, you can’t soothe, appease, please, or alter their course. They won’t always be angry. How you treat someone when they’re at their worst stays with them, and while they may get better, their opinion of you may never change. You are the bully that beat them when they were down, weak, fragile, and vulnerable. It doesn’t matter where they encountered you or how insignificant you are in the ultimate scheme of things. When you are unnecessarily cruel, it stays with that person like a brand (faint but tactile, sensitive), and you become part of the harsh landscape, the “meanness in this world“. We are not the sum total of our circumstances but our actions, and measuring the value of a man’s life when he is on his knees will give you one hell of a shock when he stands up.
What does this have to do with my faulty Internet connection or rude people in tech support?
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
If it concerns my family or friends, I’ll go the distance, and I won’t fight fair because what’s at stake is more important than using an unfair advantage to defend what’s mine against unprovoked attack. However, if it’s me and it’s a choice between fighting or walking away, I usually choose to walk away. I don’t want to spend my life struggling with the people in it; arguing with strangers to prove I’m right and they’re wrong, I’m smart and they’re incompetent, humiliating them so I can feel better about myself when our roles reverse and I am the idiot being subjected to the pompous lecture of someone who sees him or herself as my superior because, at that moment, they know more about a subject than I. That is not how I want to spend my days or live my life. Why add to the damage?I don’t know where “you’re at”, what you are going through at this moment in time. Can you read these pages and honestly get a sense of where or who I am? And I tell you a hell of a lot more about myself than the strangers you encounter throughout your day will ever reveal as they sit across from you on the train, stand in front of you as you wait in line at the grocery store, or change the oil in your car after 3,000 miles. I don’t think anyone would intentionally kick a man or woman when he or she is down but how can you tell if they’re up or down just by looking at them?
Praise and Blame