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Comment by unsupp0rted | Hacker News Reader

The other day I phoned a service provider and the lady’s kid was babbling in the background and a children’s show was playing throughout the call.

I couldn’t get off the phone fast enough.

Either invest in voice isolation or don’t work from home.

Functionally this lady brought her kid to my home office and blasted a cartoon during our meeting.

Is this harsh of me and an unpopular opinion? Yes.

I agree that Human beings should be able to have work-life balance and kids are a natural and necessary part of that balance.

I just don’t want them in my ear.

If the lady had had gangster rap music or 8-bit video game music on in the background of the call I’d have been equally annoyed.

Work calls are for doing work.

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I totally understand the reaction. Then again, people with kids have it hard enough, let alone those that with low paying jobs. When that happens to me, I get annoyed, but then, I remind myself that I get to exit the call while the other person has to stay in that environment, trying to hustle for money, and I try to show them as much kindness and grace as is possible for me in that moment.

When this lady applied for the technical phone support job, did she mention that her toddler would be on the calls?

If her manager were to “secret shopper” call in, how much kindness and grace would they show for being forced to sit though a children’s cartoon while quoting 5-figure invoice numbers back and forth?

To emphasise she probably didn’t realise their was background noise. I don’t phone call centra much but the background noise in some is very frustrating.

Eh, your initial argument sounded neutral enough but this is bad. Would you jump this hard on the support person if the noise was a office cacophony?

What is bad? Stating that her company would find this to be an unacceptable standard of service quality?

Sharing experiences and opinions on HN that are unpopular?

I didn’t complain to the worker, the company, or give her any attitude about it. None of that would have helped me get my task done.

They have other agents who are more professional, so next time I could get routed to somebody else.

To answer your question:

If the noise was an office cacophony then I’d put the blame on the company that tolerates it.

The noise was a children’s cartoon and a babbling child.

The worker has a responsibility to either get noise-canceling tools or work from a quiet area of the home. It’s 2024- it’s really easy to do either one.

> It’s 2024- it’s really easy to do either one

It's easy if you earn $100k+ of course. It's not easy with $40k in a two-bedroom house with a toddler as a single parent.

"But then, she's not supposed to have that job if she can't do it," I can already hear you say. To that, I'd say sure, you could do that, if you're willing to pay for a several year long maternity leave from your taxes until the parents can place their kids in kindergartens.

She’s not supposed to have that job (from home) if she can’t figure out voice isolation software or alternatively buy an appropriate headset.

Even minimum-wage construction workers know that they’re gonna need to invest a bit up front into work stuff.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213683

> If her manager were to “secret shopper” call in, how much kindness and grace would they show for being forced to sit though a children’s cartoon while quoting 5-figure invoice numbers back and forth?

Hopefully the identical amount? I don't know why the answer would differ in any meaningful way.

this is a cultural problem. in asia and africa people take their kids to work all the time. part of this is because parents can't afford childcare, but part of it is also: "why not?".

i find our western attitude towards kids disturbing. after living 15 years in china i have come to realize that western, and even more so the european, and especially the german and austrian attitude towards work and school is much more conservative than i thought.

and as a parent, i find that very sad.

i wish every parent the opportunity to spend as much time with their children as they can. and if that means that they play where the parents are working, then i am all for it. rather that than sending them off to daycare. (there are exceptions of course where the environment is not safe for kids to play)

As an intentional non-parent who lived for a decade in several Asian countries: work calls are for doing work.

Serious people don’t let their kids talk over their meetings.

Chill with the attitude, you have no idea what she’s been through with her kid. Maybe the kid just got off from a tantrum or something.

I find it equally probable she just doesn’t give a shit. People bend over backward to give people like this the benefit of the doubt for some reason.

/wfh parent of two

The thinking is if they have a kid then they’re the victims of heartless monsters (e.g. me) who expect them to work at the same level of professionalism as people who don’t have kids.

The biggest benefit of working from home, which i have been doing since my older daughter (now an adult) was an year old. Self employed too, so have flexibility. I also home educate which would not have been as easy without working from home.

My last employer had childcare available onsite at work, and that should be more common too (I did not use it because my now ex did not work, but still very good for a lot of my colleagues).

I also find it sad how little time many parents have with their kids. We really need to make employment a lot more family friendly in general.

Not everyone loves children, is the unspoken unpopular thing to say. Even more unpopular: dogs. These are things I wish not to see in an office, nor a bar environment. Actually see isn't the issue, it's the uncontrollable, but considered normal, noise that I find stressful.

See I adore dogs and yet I can easily visualize and understand what your reaction would be like to having a dog around during your work day.

I find this or that sound a dog makes endearing- you find it annoying or worse. I find the mess a dog makes a mild inconvenience- you find it disgusting.

Instead of telling you you’re overreacting or that you’re being insensitive to people who are obligated for some reason to include their dog in your meeting with them, I can agree with you that you shouldn’t have to have dogs in your working life if you never chose this.

And it’s not me doing you a favor by accommodating your unique sensitivities; the default should be your version, not my version.

You posted 16 times about this in this thread. That's excessive. Please don't perpetuate flamewars.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Feedback gratefully accepted.

I’m defensive on this topic because I get a lot of flack for it. I’ll stop now.

I agree about dogs. Children however are just like adults in how they're all different and have their own personality etc., so I think society is suffering from delaying this integration into society. We all grow up and eventually have to integrate with others, and it seems because of this separation of ages that we will have a less cohesive society and culture in so many ways (which I think is visible already, as mentioned in this thread).

I'm not annoyed at these things because as I have gotten older, I've realized that society has become fiercely anti-child in the west. You get nasty looks if your infant cries virtually anywhere in public other than a hospital. Again, you get nasty looks if your child acts up anywhere. There are no "safe spaces" for parents of young children other than schools and playgrounds, we've ostracized them very effectively in our current culture.

Thus, when I hear a babbling babe, I smile and move on. We're going to have a Japanese population pyramid situation if we keep discouraging parenthood and punishing child-rearing. There are virtually no societal or financial benefits to doing so these days, its a total sacrifice of self.

I've had it happen and my reaction has been "I get it, everyone is going through stuff, it's awesome that they get to be working during the pandemic"

I do despise the call center background noise where I'm hearing other people making calls. but the person on the phone has no control over that. I'll take WHF over RTO any day

Huh, I have the opposite reaction. Whenever I’m on a work call and my colleagues apologize for their children shouting in the background I’m mostly fine with it.

If anything it makes them seem more human when they’re otherwise just some disembodied voices.

I think it depends a lot on the specifics, if the background noise is loud and persistent enough it makes it harder to understand the other person. Hard to tell from OP's description but I'm guessing it was actively impacting the conversation if they're complaining about it.

Admittedly it wasn’t loud enough to make it hard to hear words.

You know when you call your cell phone company and you’re routed to a Call Center in India/Philippines and you hear snippets of other people’s support calls in the background?

It sort of throws you off throughout the call. You wonder if the agent is getting everything you’re saying, given the distraction.

It was that, but with a children’s cartoon and a toddler.

I think this is an overreaction. It was likely as simple as hanging up and calling again, if it bothered you so much. Or did you consider providing some polite feedback that the background noise was distracting you, I have had people buy headphones advertised as noise canceling and assume they work well but only realize they didn't until pointed out to them. Or did you even consider that she might work from an office and just had an off day - had a malfunctioning headset for the day or had a sick kid at home and so opted to work remotely for the day.

Also, is this even about working from home? I have worked in multiple offices which had open layouts and other meetings/conversations going on in desks around me and very distracting too.

Personally, imho, I work remotely and have a quiet room to myself but I also understand that other people I work with have lives too, and if it really bothers me I just tell them that politely, if you are courteous then its likely most people are going to be to you too, and do what they can to help. It makes me wonder if you have already made up your mind about the person you spoke to and about work from home and are finding reasons to justify it.

What was an overreaction? I ignored it and got on with the task.

My reaction was to comment about it later under a post on Hacker News about WFH.

What you ignored was a confrontation but made assumptions and judgements about the person, their work, and their ability to work from home and concluded the issue was with working from home, without providing feedback or attempting to learn more about the situation, and then complained on the internet. How would you like it if your work performance/feedback was handled this way? IMHO, I don't think that's a very professional way to handle a work issue/relationship. I would have been more sympathetic to your issue if you had made an attempt to provide feedback or tried to resolve your problem, and if the other party failed to help.

What assumptions did I make, other than that if they can hear a toddler and a cartoon in the room, and if their job is phone calls, then they should take care that this isn’t distracting on phone calls?

I don’t have a relationship with them- they’re one agent of a handful, whom I’m obligated by my client to call a couple times a year.

I’m not in a position to give feedback on their work performance. Nobody needs me to have a confrontation with them. I’m not their coworker, boss or direct customer.

This is a HN post about WFH and I’ve shared an anecdote about somebody’s toddler babbling during our work call.

I admit mine is an unpopular opinion- we’re supposed to celebrate parents who work so hard to balance their duties with their entirely elective decision to have children.

Sounds like you take work too seriously.

Eh, some of the people I know with the worst WLB are people that do not take work that seriously during working hours. They end up living at the office basically because it takes longer for them to finish their tasks and they also end up with their social life/break time tied up in the company.

In this case, if it is disruptive enough to the call then that makes it take longer to get done what you need to do. The quicker you get done what you need to do, the quicker you are done with work. I'm not a fan of judging things just because they are "unprofessional" but there are unprofessional things that actually make everyone else's lives more difficult.

You can always take your business elsewhere.

Because one support agent isn’t doing the WFH thing to my standards?

It’s an anecdote for HN, not a nuclear event.

I presume you said nothing to alert her to the issue, of course? Just got emotional about it and secretly resented the woman for having children…

Of course I didn’t mention it. What would this have accomplished, other than upsetting her and establishing an adversarial call?

I was calling in to get a task done. I got it done as quickly as possible and moved on.

Next time if I get her again, I’ll request a different agent by name, who was professional and capable last time.

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