There was another temp I worked with, at the job that laid us off a year ago.
Older guy; has seen his share of hard work and hard times (including losing two fingers in a sheet metal press).
Sometimes one of our coworkers -- two guys in particular -- would say something utterly rude and arrogant. "Not my job"-type stuff.
And this guy would raise his eyebrows, crinkle his brow, look at me and say a particular turn of phrase. I can't quite put my finger on it but it was something like "Wow, guess HE'S never had to look for a job."
And here's a perfect illustration of that. This is a shit economy. Work is hard to come by. There are a whole lot of qualified people who would be happy to take this guy's customer support job. He does not seem cognizant of these facts.
Now, I've worked customer support. It sucks. It's frustrating. Particularly when you're inundated by customers who all have the same complaint.
You know what you do in that situation? You write a form response, drop it in Notepad, and copy-paste it as needed.
No, customers do not like getting canned responses. But they like it better than getting responses that just say "Dec 17".
And I've been short with the occasional customer over the years. There was one guy in particular who had a tendency to call at 8 AM slurring so badly that I could smell the booze on his breath through the phone. And the worst thing I ever said to him was "I can either keep talking to you or I can go fix the problem." (My boss was sitting next to me. He raised an eyebrow but told me afterward that he liked how I'd put it.) And there was also a particularly difficult couple who eventually quit our service and then forwarded me an E-Mail from their new hosting provider basically accusing me of dragging my feet on getting their domain transferred -- I hadn't; I had done it as soon as they requested it, there's just a two-day wait, required by VeriSign. I told them, in as polite a turn of language as I could, that their new provider was either lying, ignorant, or both, and good luck with him. I CC'ed my boss and the guy who'd been badmouthing me.
At no point did I tell either one of these customers that they just got told, bitch.
You know what you do when a preorder guy complains that you're offering a better deal to people who didn't preorder? You say "It's out of my hands but you're right, that's not fair; let me ask my supervisor what we can do." And then you do it. j2games once gave me some free magazines when something like that happened with one of my preorders through them; I was mollified.
And of course it just gets worse from there. Not only is this guy going to lose his job, but
this is what a search for his name looks like now.
(Er, what IS his job, exactly? I see him credited as "President of Ocean Marketting [sic]"; if I had to guess, I'd say he's a guy the Avenger company hired for support/promotion.)
And I think the classiest response in the whole thing is when Dave protests that he doesn't want to see Avenger kicked out of PAX on account of this one knucklehead, because they make a product that could do a lot of good for disabled gamers.
Also, as a postscript: the two guys who frequently evoked the "Guess he's never had to look for a job" response from my coworker were the next ones to go, after us temps.
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Topic: I wwebsite as on the internet (Read 14911 times)