Comment by thewebcount | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thewebcount | Hacker News Reader

While I’m sure this is a real problem, I’ve been on the other side of this equation where you’ve tried your level best to get a problem resolved, and not only haven’t had it resolved, but have been repeatedly screwed even more.

For example, many years ago, I signed up for a landline phone (when that’s all there was), and signed up for a particular special service that Ameritech was offering that would allow me to have a computer on a modem running 24/7 without getting unreasonable charges. Eventually, I get the first bill and it’s charging me the regular rate. I sigh and call them. They agree it’s their mistake and they’ll fix it to remove the charge and it will be reflected in the next bill. It isn’t. I go around in circles for 6 months, with my bill increasing to thousands of dollars. Finally I call them up and just start screaming at someone, and that is what finally got it fixed.

I’m not proud to have done that, but sometimes it’s the only option. The person I was yelling at wasn’t the one who caused the problem or lied to me, but I didn’t know of any other options at the time. (I was raised by wolves, it turns out.) And, ultimately, it worked.

None of the examples given in the article make me think it would consider screaming at a representative of a company that’s wrongfully cost you thousands of dollars after you’ve spent months trying to rectify it as part of the “5%”. That’s totally reasonable, even if it want directly the representative’s fault. Screaming at a service worker because of a hair in your food isn’t—that’s psychotic.

No, screaming at a worker whose job is to answer the phones is not reasonable. It shouldn't have cost them anything either - you shouldn't be paying incorrect bills.

Had they filed official complaints? Gone to any regulator? Had the issue escalated?

Miss Manners reported her newspaper delivery going astray and calling the paper. The nice man told her "We don't do anything about that, unless the caller is really angry."

She asked if he would put her down as being irate, and he agreed. Her newspaper delivery resumed.

So yes there are other ways :)

The OP clearly said they tried for months and stated they did not feel good about being pushed past their limit, so yes, I'm assuming they tried less extreme solutions over those months.

Otherwise, I agree with you. I'm trying to say it's psychotic for your _primary_ reaction to be rage.

I will say that I have since grown and become more emotionally intelligent and am far less likely to do that now. My comment about being raised by wolves was intended to convey that I was brought up poorly and not taught how to handle myself in situations like this without yelling.

> Had they filed official complaints? Gone to any regulator? Had the issue escalated?

At the time I wouldn’t have known how to file an official complaint or even that there were regulators who could do anything. What fixed it was that my screaming got it escalated to an appropriate person who could actually do something. I didn’t know the term “escalate” in that context at that time, and customers shouldn’t have to know how customer support works to get things escalated. That should have just happened when I described the problem the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or 5th times.

I think your comment was fine by the way, I got the raised by wolves part and you clearly stated you weren't proud of it. It's entirely understandable as a response, and it's not like it's some mortal sin. I was more responding to someone saying that was the right thing to do.

I didn’t say it was the right thing to do, I said it was reasonable. Maybe “understandable” would have been better.

While I agree, I’d also argue that some companies put out purposefully bad policies and then staff customer service reps to handle the blow back. These situations are often really bad for the consumers and the staff.

I have screamed at support people, but only in the rare cases (maybe three times on the last 30+ years would qualify) where they personally acted unreasonably and reasoning with them did not work, and they refused to pass me to a supervisor. The last part being key to me.

In the vast majority of cases I agree with you - if it's the company's fault it's not fair to scream at people with no power to do what you ask (but if there are no other means it may be fair to be intentionally difficult to force them to escalate - but you don't need to be rude to be difficult).

Yes, this was my question. Are 3-5% of people horrible all the time, or are we all horrible 3-5% of the time? Or more likely at any given time 3-5% of us are horrible, with some of us entering the group more often than others.

Off the top of my head, I can think of a half dozen people I've known who are just horrible all of the time. Nasty to their family, nasty to coworkers, nasty to strangers. I can think of another half dozen who are just in the habit of mistreating service workers.

Some people you're just catching on a bad day, but there is definitely a portion of the population that are just crappy people.

Disagreeable personalities are definitely a thing, and some have some other stuff stacked on top that can make for persistently unreasonable people.

Off the top of my head I knew someone who had a really hard loss that they couldn't cope with, and you could basically just see them reeling it in all the time, and that was expressed outwardly as anger. Really tragic situation though, and if you didn't know the details you'd just assume they're a raging prick.

I find it hard to mine compassion when I don't know someone's backstory, and I usually default to filling in the details with some kind of dismissive story about them just being self centered and belligerent (probably true some of the time though). I find life goes better when I try to fill in the blanks with some kind of reasoning that would explain that behaviour better (while still not excusing it).

>Disagreeable personalities are definitely a thing, and some have some other stuff stacked on top that can make for persistently unreasonable people.

I score in the bottom 3rd percentile for trait agreeableness. I'm mostly polite unless perhaps I know something is not right and someone is trying to pull a fast one. I can totally see how low agreeableness combined with being towards the lower end of the distribution on intelligence would make a default strategy of loudly saying your piece and being too dense to a) know you shouldn't do that, b) consider your lack of understanding might be the root of the problem and c) comprehend the implications of what you're being told so that you can calm the heck down.

I really feel for those people.

It isn't your fault. Support systems are designed to triage and remediate. This means the loudest voices get served the best, or, that the squeaky wheel gets what they need. Of course, there are limits to this. One thing I've noticed is when I am in an automated call tree with voice recognition, speaking loudly (almost yelling), gruffly, and demanding a human will often get you an level 2 or higher support tech. I tend to shut this off when a human gets on the line, but the call does get dispositioned and often white-gloved.

You are talking about the same problem. 3-5% customers are terrible and so are the 3-5% service personnel

Assuming they called back every month for 6mo and always got a rep in that 3-5%, that's some supremely bad luck...

...unless call center support is a biased sample.

I think it’s more likely that most of the call centre staff were reasonable people who followed the process they were trained to do, but the process is broken. Some of them may have known it was broken, but either not known how to work around that, or faced barriers to doing so such as having to talk to an a-hole boss about it.

I think it's more than 5% on the service personnel side. Customers are a more reliable random sample than service personnel, who are likely to not like their jobs in the first place.

No this should not be correct (that is if you are assuming the 3-5% rules is correct and I'm not saying it is). The people who work for companies are vetted by the company so in theory the percentage of people who are bad would have to in theory be less simply because of that filter. The people a company (or someone is dealing with) is unfiltered hence the probability in theory again should be higher.

Some percentage of managers, including hiring managers, will also suck, and these can make crappy employees out of people who otherwise have potential to be good.

You mentioned Ameritech, which reminded me of Amerispec:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xtgH74hh6pQ

Haha! Always a classic!

I think the rule applies in both directions.

Speaking in colloquial English, basically 5% of time, you have to say : Enough is enough, I have had it with these MF snakes on this MF plane :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com