It amazes me how people in business get away with outright rudeness these days. Here is a forinstance (yes I am aware how I spelled “forinstance” — I’m not in business here, I can afford to be rude). As part of my job I called a business today which does tax returns to get some information. Now I realize this is the busiest time of the year for such businesses. But the fact is, I get this same information from the business every couple of months, plus my deadline for passing along this information is Thursday and the information I seek — when I ask the person I normally deal with — takes only five seconds to confirm.
But the person I normally deal with couldn’t talk until next week, or so said the receptionist. She finally put me on the phone with her boss who barely heard three words out of my mouth before slamming the phone down on me.
I realize these people are busy, but I am not calling for frivolous reasons plus I do so every two months and not to mention the fact these people have agreed to provide us with the specific information we are looking for.
I put such experiences in the context of the work I used to do as a newspaper reporter. It was similar in ways to the part-time work I do now in that it can be telephone-intensive. Also, regardless of one’s schedule sometimes, the caller’s deadline is not going to go away nor can it wait.
Personally, I didn’t like getting calls when I was on deadline either. And especially was that the case with some of the callers I got such as those who had long-winded stories about how some government officials and a secret cabal of multimillionaire merchants were conspiring against them. But sometimes I just had to sit there and take it and slap myself silly to keep me from shouting obscenities at the person on the other end of the line. Why would I do that? Well, it’s called business. It’s called human decency.
There really isn’t a lot of sense in being rude no matter how much you want to be. It might make you feel better temporarily, but in the end what does it really accomplish? You pig-headed, pea-brained hyena.