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Comment by warent | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully you're not saying this as an excuse or justification for runaway hubris and just awful customer support.

All we can hope to do is to understand.

When someone deals day in and day out with abusive customers who are sure of things that are just flat wrong it has a predictable effect on the persons handling of legitimate cases.

It's not good, it's not just, but it's understandable. Armed with that understanding we can at least try to self-help by making ourselves look as little like the bad customers as we can. Should we have to? Not according to how things should be. But how things should be isn't what counts in the world, how things are is what matters. And at the end of the day-- do you want your package or not?

Grinning and bearing abusive customers is not the default state of the world, there are societies where abusive customers are not tolerated at all and thus very rare.

An elderly person coming to the post office every day to check for a package may be annoying to the people working there, but they should tolerate it. What's the alternative, chewing out the old person? That's cruel. Banning them from the post office? Unconscionable.

How does this relate to the practices of other societies?

> I get the impression that post office staff quickly become jaded from being nagged about packages, especially by elderly people. After all, the elderly don’t have to work, so they can come to the post office every day and ask insistently for packages they know are on the way, but haven’t yet arrived. So, by the time you went there with your problem, any last bit of good customer service had been burnt out of the clerk.

Yes I read the parent comment when I replied. How exactly do your comments relate to my prior comment?

I probably shouldn't have even said abusive in my post-- it's not actually the operative part. It's sufficient that the customers are frequently wrong.

I think I'd also say that abusive from the perspective of the recipient isn't a bright line and you'd be hard pressed to find a culture in the developed world where the misguided interactions don't begin to feel somewhat abusive to the recipient after dealing with them day after day.

Of course, there is also outright abuse that is tolerated in the US and probably ought not be which only makes the matters worse.

What exactly is the point your trying to say?

i'm curious now, can you tell me specifically which societies are immune to basically the human equivalent of a DDoS?

'Immune' and 'human equivalent of a DDoS' are pretty extreme conditions, far from what I had in mind, but even in that case there's at least one well known example, North Korea.

I’m saying it as a force of nature that one just has to deal with. I’ve observed it in many post offices across many countries.

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