What If It IS You?

The other day at work I spoke with a really unpleasant woman.  One of the things I’ve been working on lately is trying to hold off on judging people based on first impressions, but from the second I started speaking with her, it was pretty clear that this conversation wasn’t going to go well.  Despite my efforts to help solve the problem she had hoped to address, she was pushy, impatient, not too bright, and indignant — a pretty miserable combination.  And when she was done being unpleasant with me, she asked to speak with someone else.  When she was done being unpleasant with that someone else, she simply hung up.

Five minutes later I got another call… from the same woman, asking to speak to management two levels up.  “Not your manager, sweetie,” she said, not realizing that it was me she had spoken with earlier, “because I’ve already tried talking to that level of management.  Now I need to speak with his manager’s manager.”  She explained that she understood that the role of managers is often to support their employees, but every time she had asked to speak with a manager in the past — and this, apparently, was a frequent request of hers — she never received any kind of satisfactory resolution.  “And I’m perfectly reasonable,” she continued, in a not-particularly convincing faux-pleasant voice.

A quick review of this woman’s account information revealed a bit of a pattern.   Note after note described unpleasantness.  “This is just not working for me,” she’d say, and yet time after time, she’d refuse offers to cancel the service, to provide a pro-rated refund.  “No!” she’d shriek, “Fix it!”  We’d try to fix it, and time after time, she’d refuse to cooperate.

So it occurred to me as I was speaking with her for the second time in one morning, as I listened to her trying to play herself off as the sympathetic victim, that no matter how often she received this same response, she would never consider the possibility that the problem, here, was her.

Remember that scene in the Indiana Jones movie, when the teenaged Indy gets separated from the rest of his boy scout troop,  looks around and says, “Hey, everyone is lost but me…”

As popular as the “It’s not you; it’s me” line may be, sometimes it really isn’t me.  Sometimes it really is you…

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