A Struggle for Power: The Rumble Autumnal
Like many people do, I have a mundane job, In this job, I'm part of a team of people that provides and assists the public in filling out online job applications. It's not the most fun job, and certainly isn't my favorite, but I think it's a noble one. There is a sense of personal reward in helping people gain employment, keep a livelihood, that sort of thing. It's important to people, so I think it's my duty to empathize and provide the best help I can give.
Of course, it's not without it's drawbacks. A common hazard of my job is being faced with some very difficult, oftentimes belligerent customers, who want nothing more than total control over their situation. I have the duty of helping them claim their power and hang up feeling, if not satisfied, then somewhat reassured. I feel like many of us know what it's like to feel desperate. That's often what I deal with: desperate job applicants. Most of the time it's over the phone, for which I'm grateful - I'd hate to have a lot of these conversations in person. But on the Autumnal Equinox this year, I contended a uniquely challenging customer.
It was towards the end of my day, about 15 minutes before I was due to go home, and I received a call from someone who I'd actually spoken to a few days prior, and who I remembered was difficult then, so the conversation began badly. She was calling to find out information for her son about a seasonal program we offer, and she had no shortage of questions. She kept me on the phone for a half hour, 15 minutes past closing time.
Many of her questions had to do with her lack of knowledge in computers, another common complaint I address at this job. Many people in certain parts of PA don't know how to use a computer. I have to remember that not everyone lives in my world, so it pays to stay humble, and I have a hard time outright labeling any customer as stupid. You can't blame someone for not knowing something, and I'm getting paid to help them figure it out.
Even so, this lady seemed to be singularly distrusting of The Computer (that's how she kept referring to it), claiming many times over that the website just plain wasn't going to help her. Even when I referred her to a government-run office whose soul purpose is to assist people in filling out online applications just like ours, her followup question was, "Well, how can they help me if they're using the same website?" Like it was her nemesis. Woman vs. Webpage.
And it wasn't simply her inexhaustible number of questions, it was that she seemed almost impossible to mollify. Nothing was enough. She insisted that I didn't know what I was talking about several times - that the knowledge I'd accumulated and lived every day in the three and a half years at the office was totally wrong, and a few times that I wasn't in my right mind. I couldn't believe I was being gaslit by someone whose face I couldn't even see. That made it feel ever more futile.
At one point I put this lady on speaker phone - my coworker came out and stood by with me until the whole thing was over in solidarity, and I'm bloody grateful. But we both agreed that it was almost impossible to satisfy this woman's inquiries. She wanted to know every infinitesimal detail about this job program, more than any other person I'd ever spoken to.
Now, I don't know this lady's story, but my interaction with her sparked a light in my brain. It was the equinox, a time of year where I find, paradoxically, the world always seems to be out of spiritual balance. It's been a rough year in this country, politically and socially, and on a day that highlights equal hours of light and dark, I find that anything in need of recalibration jumps right into the foreground. It's easy to draw parallels between my mostly inconsequential talk with a paranoid small-towner and the social problems that keep playing on repeat, in news story after news story: one side tries to comply, the other cannot be sated. Over and over and over. And it's the unappeasable side that baffles me the most, because though this caller was a nightmare, she wasn't nasty to me - she didn't swear or shout at me - she just broke my fucking spirit.
I find that everything is individual. Everything has a body, everything has a spirit - not only people, but communities, cultures, countries. The collective spirit. And spirits can be broken when someone insists that you don't know your own feelings, that there's no reason to feel justified in your hurt, or tries to strip you of all control and make you feel powerless and small. Enough of that and any spirit, singular or shared, will break. And all that energy they can't hold in anymore... it can be purely destructive. We might ask ourselves why we have been trying so hard to control something that must flow free, or even why we remain alarmed (or, shit, outraged) when people start throwing things. I'm not saying it's right, but why is it a fucking surprise? How else are they meant to express those feelings, that burning? Breathe it out? Fuck off.
In the wake of this, I find myself concerned with how I express myself, so that I can stop anyone from taking my power away. I had to remind myself that it's okay to turn away. At the end of the conversation, I took back my power. I told the lady I had to go. I couldn't sit there and allow the never-ending deluge of questions to continue, not without doing disservice to myself. And to her, too; she'd have only gotten sub-par customer service.
At the end of the day, I was mad that I couldn't make her see, but once I unloaded all my office angst at home, I felt better for being firm. And I can only hope that in this wacky world forming around us that we can hold strong.
Happy autumn, everyone.
With love,
Of course, it's not without it's drawbacks. A common hazard of my job is being faced with some very difficult, oftentimes belligerent customers, who want nothing more than total control over their situation. I have the duty of helping them claim their power and hang up feeling, if not satisfied, then somewhat reassured. I feel like many of us know what it's like to feel desperate. That's often what I deal with: desperate job applicants. Most of the time it's over the phone, for which I'm grateful - I'd hate to have a lot of these conversations in person. But on the Autumnal Equinox this year, I contended a uniquely challenging customer.
It was towards the end of my day, about 15 minutes before I was due to go home, and I received a call from someone who I'd actually spoken to a few days prior, and who I remembered was difficult then, so the conversation began badly. She was calling to find out information for her son about a seasonal program we offer, and she had no shortage of questions. She kept me on the phone for a half hour, 15 minutes past closing time.
Many of her questions had to do with her lack of knowledge in computers, another common complaint I address at this job. Many people in certain parts of PA don't know how to use a computer. I have to remember that not everyone lives in my world, so it pays to stay humble, and I have a hard time outright labeling any customer as stupid. You can't blame someone for not knowing something, and I'm getting paid to help them figure it out.
Even so, this lady seemed to be singularly distrusting of The Computer (that's how she kept referring to it), claiming many times over that the website just plain wasn't going to help her. Even when I referred her to a government-run office whose soul purpose is to assist people in filling out online applications just like ours, her followup question was, "Well, how can they help me if they're using the same website?" Like it was her nemesis. Woman vs. Webpage.
And it wasn't simply her inexhaustible number of questions, it was that she seemed almost impossible to mollify. Nothing was enough. She insisted that I didn't know what I was talking about several times - that the knowledge I'd accumulated and lived every day in the three and a half years at the office was totally wrong, and a few times that I wasn't in my right mind. I couldn't believe I was being gaslit by someone whose face I couldn't even see. That made it feel ever more futile.
At one point I put this lady on speaker phone - my coworker came out and stood by with me until the whole thing was over in solidarity, and I'm bloody grateful. But we both agreed that it was almost impossible to satisfy this woman's inquiries. She wanted to know every infinitesimal detail about this job program, more than any other person I'd ever spoken to.
Now, I don't know this lady's story, but my interaction with her sparked a light in my brain. It was the equinox, a time of year where I find, paradoxically, the world always seems to be out of spiritual balance. It's been a rough year in this country, politically and socially, and on a day that highlights equal hours of light and dark, I find that anything in need of recalibration jumps right into the foreground. It's easy to draw parallels between my mostly inconsequential talk with a paranoid small-towner and the social problems that keep playing on repeat, in news story after news story: one side tries to comply, the other cannot be sated. Over and over and over. And it's the unappeasable side that baffles me the most, because though this caller was a nightmare, she wasn't nasty to me - she didn't swear or shout at me - she just broke my fucking spirit.
I find that everything is individual. Everything has a body, everything has a spirit - not only people, but communities, cultures, countries. The collective spirit. And spirits can be broken when someone insists that you don't know your own feelings, that there's no reason to feel justified in your hurt, or tries to strip you of all control and make you feel powerless and small. Enough of that and any spirit, singular or shared, will break. And all that energy they can't hold in anymore... it can be purely destructive. We might ask ourselves why we have been trying so hard to control something that must flow free, or even why we remain alarmed (or, shit, outraged) when people start throwing things. I'm not saying it's right, but why is it a fucking surprise? How else are they meant to express those feelings, that burning? Breathe it out? Fuck off.
In the wake of this, I find myself concerned with how I express myself, so that I can stop anyone from taking my power away. I had to remind myself that it's okay to turn away. At the end of the conversation, I took back my power. I told the lady I had to go. I couldn't sit there and allow the never-ending deluge of questions to continue, not without doing disservice to myself. And to her, too; she'd have only gotten sub-par customer service.
At the end of the day, I was mad that I couldn't make her see, but once I unloaded all my office angst at home, I felt better for being firm. And I can only hope that in this wacky world forming around us that we can hold strong.
Happy autumn, everyone.
With love,
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