Mrs.fadermd.com

I wish it were Friday.

I’m really, really tired of flaky people.  Not just flaky people, but people who call themselves your friends and yet refuse to ever show how this is so.  It’s annoying when it’s a friend of mine, but it’s extremely upsetting and maddening when it’s a friend of my husband’s.

I’d much rather spend time with our families, but living 30-45 minutes away doesn’t always make that easy when work is 30 miles the other direction.  So we make plans with people, they flake out at the second, and my husband is discouraged because he doesn’t understand why no one wants to hang out with him.

I’ve been looking for a plugin for WordPress that will send a link to Twitter letting any followers know I have a new blog post.  I’m not sure that it all really matters in the long run, but I just think it’d be nice to have.

On a different subject, I’m really glad the weekend is here.  I got off of work about two hours early tonight, which was awesome.  I had to go back to pick up Will later, but just knowing I didn’t have to talk to any more customers and deal with their usually annoying and selfish wants for the rest of the night and the two days following was a relief.

If you have ever worked in a call center, you know how ridiculous people can be.  I have been working call center jobs for about a year and-a-half if not two years, and I am still amazed when I speak to these kinds of individuals.  You have no idea how many people each and every day I talk to have no respect for me as a human being, have no concept of the way things work, and no reservations when it comes to their requests and demands.  Honestly, it isn’t news that everyone wants something for nothing, but to hear people literally say that they deserve something for free or at a greatly discounted cost…  It’s truly hard not to just laugh these people off of the phone.

If someone calls in and I’m the one who gets the call, mostly likely it’s someone wanting to remove a service from their account, because those are the calls that only my department is supposed to handle.  And, understandably, most of the time they’d like to remove whichever service due to cost.  It’s my job to ask why they’d like to remove the service, remind them why this particular service is so wonderful, and offer a discount (if applicable) towards their bill in order the keep that service on the account.

But what gets me is when I ask the reason for wanting to get rid of whatever “it” is, and the customer goes off on how ridiculous they think it is that we would even think of charging them so much for something because they have been a customer of ours for years and they deserve a better price (or to have it for free altogether) than our other 18 million customers.  The sense of self-entitlement that some people have is absolutely incredible.  It’s really fun when they get into the, “Well I see all the offers you have for new customers.  What about your existing customers?  Why don’t you do anything for us?”  because if you look into their account history and previous calls, they’re the same people who refuse a gift (like something free for 1-12 months) because they’re convinced we’ll try to charge them for it when the free period is over–which, by the way, we don’t do.

Now because it’s my job, most of the time I have to offer these people the discount they’re looking for because otherwise, they’ll take the service off of the account and instead of just getting some of the money from them, we’ll get no money.  Sometime I wish I had a trash can next to my desk, because to feed the already obese egos of these particular individuals quite frankly makes me sick to my stomach.  It also really doesn’t help the situation for the future, because they’ll remember getting something for nothing when they demanded it, and they’ll call back and demand it again.  It’s the same way with asking for a supervisor.  Just some advice for everyone reading this, when you are told something can’t be done by a customer service representative, that means it can’t be done.  That doesn’t mean they just don’t want to do it for you.  If there were things that could literally only be done by a supervisor, then supervisors would be taking your calls.  You wouldn’t have to ask for one.  It would waste a lot of a company’s time and money to have certain functions only accessible by people who don’t even deal with the customers directly.  I really don’t know how this doesn’t make sense to people, but apparently it doesn’t.  If someone makes a ridiculous request, I tell them it cannot be done and THOROUGHLY EXPLAIN WHY it is this way.  Instead of realizing that every single company has hundreds and thousands of policies that are permanently in place for a reason and cannot be overriden, they demand to speak to my supervisor.

The best part of all of that is that when I come back to the person after speaking with a supervisor, there is usually something I need to tell them before I can transfer them.  The reason I say this is the best part is because the response I usually get, sometimes even before I’ve finished my sentence, is, “Didn’t I ask you for a supervisor?”  I even had one guy once say to me, “I asked you for a supervisor, did you do what I told you to do?”  and when I explained to him that I was required to give him information from my supervisor before transferring him, he interrupted me to say, “DID. YOU. DO. WHAT. I. TOLD. YOU. TO. DO?!?!”

Honestly…  I don’t care if you are the President of the United States of America.  I do not, and will not, be treated like a bag of dog feces simply because you’re in a bad mood.  Why do people think this is okay?  Is it because they can tell by my voice that I’m young and female?  Is it because they don’t know that I’m actually a person?  A man I spoke to over the phone once said to me, “If you were a person you’d know what it was like to try to pay your bills.”  Um.  Excuse me?  If I were a person?  What, do you think you’ve been talking to a chimpanzee for the past 30 minutes of useless conversation?  How do you even say these kinds of things to people and still sleep at night?

Needless to say, I’m not very happy with my job right now.  I really have very few problems with the company I work for, but as you can see, my annoyances and anger towards the job is driven virtually completely from the people I have to talk to every weekday for eight hours straight.  I’m really not the kind of person that wants people to feel sorry for me while I tell you why my life is so difficult.  My life is easy.  So far we have not had any problems making ends meet, and I am completely aware that there are soooo many people out there who have been out of work for a very long time, or who are working as many terrible jobs as they can in order to feed themselves and their children.  So I don’t mean for anyone to feel sorry for me and the job I have.  But I hope more people will soon understand that when they call customer service for any company, the voice that answers is coming from a human being that probably doesn’t want to hear you talk about how long you’ve been a customer and that because of this you deserve to have something without paying full price for it.  I don’t go to Wal-Mart and tell them that I’ve bought my groceries there for years and this time I expect them to cover the cost of my cart-full.  I’d probably have the police called on me.  Just think about that, please.

I’m hoping to use this blog mostly for pictures.  Right now I don’t have any pictures I’ve taken that are worth uploading, so you’ll have to stay tuned.

I’m reading into the basics of photography on this awesome website I found (you can find it, too, at http://digital-photography-school.com/digital-photography-tips-for-beginners).  This part of the site just explains the basics, but as it is with most things, understanding the way something works gives you really great insight into how to use it.  Learning more about the way a camera with adjustable setting functions helps very much when it comes to taking the kind of pictures you’re looking for.

It’s kind of funny that I’m looking at a website for digital photography because my camera (besides my decent Sony point-and-shoot) is actually 35mm.  But we did recently get my husband a great Nikon D40 Digital SLR, so hopefully I’ll be able to use it a bit and also transfer what I learn from digital to 35mm so I can use mine better as well.

Aside from taking pictures, I’ve also gotten back into beading recently.  It’s something that I really like to do anyway, but just recently realized that we do have enough extra money to fund this hobby to an extent.  Will is often busy airbrushing something or using his new camera, and it’s nice to have something that I can do, too.  Also, being able to make jewelry could, in the long run, save us some money on birthday and Christmas gifts every year!  With my beading, Will’s airbrushing, and our picture-taking, we could probably make virtually all of the gifts we give each year.  Now actually doing this…  That’s a different story.