I hate that there are always different versions of events depending on who is telling the story. I think it is normal to want to explain why you may have done something, but it seems like people always tend to just re-write events to put others down for no reason.
Yesterday morning I got a call from Helen, one of our clients. The restaurant she works at was having internet problems. In fact her internet wasn't working at all, and therefore neither was her highspeed debit/credit card processing. She told me she had already called Shaw who said her modem was working fine and that she should call us. So, I asked her to reset her router. This didn't work, so I asked her to reboot her computer. This didn't work, so I was thinking perhaps her router was just not working, and I asked her to plug the modem directly into the computer. Well Helen she said she'd prefer that her manager do this, and that she'd get him or her to call back in a few hours.
An hour or so after I got off the phone with her my shift on support ended, but I was curious what the trouble was so I checked the phone records and saw that she hadn't called back at all. I thought that maybe her internet restored on it's own, but decided I should call her to see if everything was ok. She answered the phone and obviously didn't know I was the same person she spoke to yesterday, and she proceeded to tell me how she spoke to 'a guy who didn't know what he was talking about'. Then, with criticism dripping from her voice she started to recount to me steps we had taken to fix it. She was not hiding how completely contemptuous she was of the steps I asked her to do, and even though we had only tried two things before SHE ended the call, she was quite vocal about how that 'guy' didn't get her internet up and running. I listened for a while and then ended up telling her that she didn't need to say anything more because I was the person she was talking to. Actually my words were "that 'guy' was me, and I *do* know what I am talking about, and I am a girl."
As silly as it sounds, I was honestly upset by this. There was a time when I would jut have found this amusing, but these days I am more sensitive. She started to apologize, but I just interrupted her saying I was putting her through to Patrick and then I hung up on her.
I have spoken to Helen before, and I know she doesn't have a clue how to use a computer, let alone troubleshoot it, but there she was colouring the events to make me sound like an idiot - even though I only asked her to go through some perfectly reasonable steps. I cannot for the life of me understand why she'd want to be so critical of what I had her do when she hasn't even a rudimentary knowledge of computers.
3 comments:
so did you get her computer running again or not?
No, she didn't want to do what I suggested, so she got off the phone.
Then when I called her back she made fun of me so I passed it on to Patrick.
As it turns out he had to go there to fix it. They had plugged another computer into their network, and that new computer had the same IP as the one that didn't have internet.
ugh! that pisses me off. let's go find her and give her a good beating!!
jo
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