Category Archives: Human relations

Editing/writing life, Homeownership, Human relations

Filtering referrals

December 24, 2014 jkkblog 2 Comments

Today, I give myself a little permission to wander and reminisce.

Where possible, I think most of us prefer to select vendors and providers by referrals. There’s only one problem with that: motive.

Many years ago, I served in the trenches of the IBM/Microsoft War as the rough equivalent of a corporal. I did this in downtown Bellevue, Washington, about five miles from the Microsoft campus in Redmond. It was easy to tell a fully vested Microsoft guy, because he was likely to come in looking like hell, spend a few thousand dollars at whatever price you quoted, and do wonders for your numbers. I made $500 per month plus 15% of the gross profit on whatever I sold, which meant that if my margin (profit) stayed good and I had a good December, $30K per year was achievable enough. Like most sales-driven organizations, the sales staff ran the store, and functioned as the default executive committee. Whoever generated the most money for the company had the most say. As I look back, it was a sign of the owner’s wisdom that he took such good care of the non-commissioned support staff. Had he not done so, we would have been tyrants.

The owner was an American success story. As I understood the history, his family had fled the Chinese mainland for Taiwan with the Kuomintang when the Nationalists lost the Chinese Civil War to the Communists. They had killed his father. The family had emigrated to the United States, where young Chang Te-Lung–whom I would know as just ‘Telung’–became a Hoosier, and a Boeing electrical engineer. As he would remind me now and then, Mr. Chang had been an American citizen longer than I had. Sometime in the early days of the PC revolution, he and his wife Mei-O had started a retail PC business, which had grown through a combination of hard work and Mr. Chang’s technical understanding of electronics. By the time he hired me, I think he had about twenty-five employees, nine of whom were sales staff.

Mr. Chang had some eccentricities, including a certain amount of preachiness about his Buddhist beliefs, and was a man of his times in terms of mild general prejudices, but he was also a hell of a businessman and a fundamentally good man. When I decided it was time for me to move on, he offered to list my reason for leaving as ‘position eliminated,’ so that I could collect unemployment. Later, when I became a bookkeeper and began paying payroll taxes, I understood that this had been a very generous gesture on his part. Mr. Chang has passed on in recent years, and I miss him. I learned about a third as much from him as I would have had I been more mature and less selfish, but even that third made a difference.

In those days, for me, referrals had far less to do with “This provider provides excellent products and/or services” and more often meant “I see an opportunity to send some business this provider’s way.” You might say that I tended to be in referral debt, and was always trying to find ways to catch up. Now I’m in the same position, fielding the same referrals. I am gearing up to sell a house. Everyone I know has an agent s/he wants me to call. Almost none of those I have called have impressed me; most have just chanted the usual fifteen minutes of real estate bullshit, then seemed irritated when I asked anything of substance.

It was immature, certainly. I should have made referrals based only upon my perception of the person’s best interest seeking goods or services. And nowadays, in more mature years, I do. I learned yesterday that a typesetter has completely jacked around a client of mine. When you demand advance payment before releasing inferior work, full of mistakes, you do bad business. I don’t even know this typesetter’s full name yet, but I can tell you two things:

Nearly every new client asks me where to go for typesetting. I need capable typesetters to whom I may refer clients.
I will make sure I get her full name, so I make sure never to send anyone to her. She has also tarnished the name of her referrer.

That also is part of the dance: referrals reflect back.

So, the moral here is this: when someone tries to refer you to a friend, take a look at who that someone is. Is s/he in sales? If so, is s/he in a mode of needing to make sure one hand washes the other, in a way that could mean that s/he made the referral simply because they are in the same Leads Club (every Tuesday morning at Denny’s)? If so, then it’s questionable. Because with certain people in certain economic situations, it’s not disinterested. My home inspector tried to steer me to a listing agent. I heard nothing from that agent that would make me see why I should be impressed. I do know for sure that home inspectors get a lot of referrals from agents, and this inspector won’t get the chance to make any more money from me in life, so he must look to those from whom he can. That’s why the referral. It has nothing to do with actual endorsement of a blowhard part-timer who can’t even mail a damn business card when asked.

Have a great Christmas Eve, and remember: a lot of folks tonight will turn keys in cars when not in condition to drive. I hope that the ‘Lancer’s faithful will not be among them. Be safe, and ride only with those who also be safe.

Human relations

A thought on outliving people

October 11, 2014 jkkblog Leave a comment

As we age, there’s a terrible temptation to think in terms of outliving: our enemies, witnesses to our humiliations, those who know secrets. There are two problems with the mentality, both serious.

The longer you live, the shorter-lived your pleasure with each outlived person/mistake.
The more you adopt this mentality, the more the world looks forward to the years without you.

Have a good weekend, and think positive.

Human relations, Married life

Is the relationship a jail or a resort?

July 31, 2014 jkkblog Leave a comment

My wife recently posted something about toxic relationships. Since she and I have both experienced those, we know a bit about why people don’t just leave them.

As I thought about the difference, I recognized that in broad terms, there are two ways to maintain a relationship. I think some people commingle the two. The paths are simple: one can either make it perilous, cumbersome, or guilt-fraught to leave, or one can give a partner incentives to stay because life is better.

In other terms, one can run a relationship as a jail, or as a resort. Some relationship jails are humane enough, just hard to escape from. Others are places of constant, brutal interrogation. I know people who, if their partner transgressed against them, would never leave the relationship–and not out of fear. “And miss the ability to punish him/her for years?”

If one manages one’s side of the relationship like a resort, giving him or her reasons to stay, one is a partner.

If one manages it like a jail, presenting mostly barriers to escape, one is a prison warden. And if the reason for confinement is to inflict suffering, one is also a terrorist.

Then again, the same could apply to much of life.

If a parent assures filial devotion through kindness, wisdom, support and gratitude for past sacrifice, that’s a parent.

If a parent commands filial devotion through browbeating, passive aggression, fear of disapproval, withdrawal of affection, and/or threat of disinheritance, that’s not a parent. That’s a jailer and and a terrorist.

If a supervisor retains employees through competitive pay, a positive environment, quality leadership and personal growth potential, the workplace is a resort.

If a supervisor keeps them through fear of starvation, gaslighting, constant dicking over, and changing expectations on the fly, the workplace is a jail. The supervisor isn’t a manager, but a terrorist.

If police spend most of their energy in the primary role of preventing harm to people who generally do the right thing, and helping them when they have problems, they are resort security.

If police are mostly occupied with reasons to catch right-doers in the occasional wrong, they are jailers. If the purpose is to intimidate, they are also terrorists. If the purpose is revenue, they are organized criminals. If the purpose is their personal gratification, they are sadists.

If a soldier points a weapon at your enemies, and blocks their path to reach you, s/he is your defender.

If a soldier points his or her weapon at you, to compel your obedience or submission, s/he is your jailer.

If government spends most of its energy figuring out ways to empower and help people, it is resort management, inspiring voluntary compliance for the common good.

If government spends most of its time inventing new reasons why people can’t go here, do this, have that, it’s a prison warden. If it does so mainly through bullying and fear, it engages in terrorism. Its minions who take pleasure in this are sadists.

Maybe if one spends a portion of one’s life in a virtual jail under intimidation and terror, it’s easier to accept that jail, intimidation, and terror are just normal life, the eternal state of humanity.

Maybe if we’re going to fight against terrorism, we should begin with our families, homes, workplaces, streets, and highways.

Adventures, Human relations, Social comment

A fairly typical shopping trip

July 19, 2014 jkkblog 2 Comments

Like most mild misanthropes who work for themselves in home offices, I don’t make excuses to go start my truck every day. When I need to be out and about, I try to fit in as many accumulated errands as I can. Today was such a day. After I finished the first editing pass on a ms (that’s literary insider snob-speak for ‘manuscript’), I girded up my loins to face the surface friendliness and automotive overpopulation of the Boise metropolitan area.

Why don’t I just use public transportation? Because the Boise public transportation system amounts to an old guy named Fred with a van, and only goes from this one spot to that one spot, and only makes two trips a day. Every time Fred suggests expanding the route, his employer changes his schedule, cuts his hours, and reminds him that in Idaho, short of tying him up and torturing him in a manner resulting in permanent disfigurement, legally his employer can do to him whatever that employer wants. Jobs more than 25¢ above Idaho’s Federal minimum wage are hard to come by, so Fred doesn’t make waves. His second and third jobs are worse, anyway.

When it gets over 90º F, my truck isn’t that much fun to drive. I’m too cheap to equip it with air conditioning, making it a high priority to avoid long stretches at a complete stop. The drag: the most convenient/typical area for my errands is Eagle Road, a.k.a. Idaho Highway 55. It’s one of those horrible non-highways that still has a highway speed limit, even though development has turned it into a congested arterial street. Everyone expects you to compete for pole position in the Boise 500 by speeding up to at least 50 mph, then braking back for yet another red light. Turning left from Eagle Road into a parking lot, or onto it from one, is for Boise novices. One plans Eagle Road in terms of right turns and side-street escape routes.

The first stop was to get my mail and deposit an insurance refund check. Other than the giant peanut bus in front of the grocery store (what, yours doesn’t have that? Heart. Eat. Out.), I was bored already and would rather just have said a bad word and gone home, but then I got the inspiration to stop into the juice bar next to my mail place. The fancy juice fad began about thirty years ago, far as I’m aware, and I had never tried any before. I’m told they are a major thing–people say things like “I didn’t juice for two days,” as if juicing were a verb, akin to pooping or bathing. There’s a clause in my life contract that says I must turn my nose up at all fads until they become passé, so by my calendar, I was right on schedule.

The juicery offered a dizzying selection of tutti-frutti slushies, plus wheatgrass juice. “Okay. My kidneys aren’t too great, so how about a slug of whatever you think is detoxey, with some wheatgrass juice.” The young lady explained that the normal method was to have the wheatgrass juice on the side as a shot. “Oh, like tequila,” I beamed, happy to leverage my core competencies in a synergistic paradigm. I stepped over to pay ($8.65, most of which was for the fruit slushie…good lord), then sat down to watch what they might do.

The young lady went to the back wall of the juice bar and took down a small lawn. It resembled what I had mowed earlier this morning, only smaller. She extracted a bunch of live grass from the little yard, put it in some sort of machine, and out flowed about a shot’s worth of something you’d expect to see seeping from Spock’s spear wound when the Cowabunga tribe of Beta Testis 2 took exception to Kirk horning up on the hot princess. She brought it to me with an orange slice. “So is this going to be like Fear Factor?” I asked. “Not quite. You’ll only make it worse if you fool around.” (Translation: “Don’t be a wuss.”) Thus admonished by advice of competent counsel, I picked up the shot cup and pounded Spock’s blood. It was not nearly as disgusting as I’d expected; it tasted like a lawn, but with a note of sweetness. She encouraged me to munch the orange slice. “Ma’am, if I do that, I will have a beard full of sticky OJ. This is probably not a problem you’ll ever have to confront.” She agreed that this was so. The fruit slushie was fine, though I wouldn’t say it was $8 fine. Two hours later, nothing bad has happened to me, so I guess we’ll see if it does any good. If I have Saturn V-level colonblow later, I’ll know who to thank.

Off to Dick’s Sporting Goods, where my mission was one of retribution: I sought the nastiest, most ear-piercing whistle I could find. Of late, I have endured daily scam callers claiming to be from ‘Microsoft Support.’ They explain that my computer has a virus, and I should go to a certain webpage so they can fix it for me. After trying answering in Hebrew or Irish, bellowing bad words, claiming not to own a computer, even accusing their ancestors of frankly revolting sex habits, I’ve decided that pure pain is the way to go. I got a cheap orange boat whistle for $3. When I got into the truck, I elected to test the thing in a closed space.

We won’t be doing that again. I’m surprised my windshield didn’t shatter. I will actually need to cover my ears when I cut loose with this bad boy. Go ahead, suckers, give me a call.

The grocery shopping was dull, except for smiling young lady bagging groceries at Rosauer’s, author of the wrong kind of suspense. For some reason, Rosauer’s has a great grocery store with the worst baggers in grocery history. Blueberries? Broken open and dumped out due to careless tossing in sideways. Big chip bags? Stuffed together so that one couldn’t possibly lift that bag by the handles. Gods only know what happens if you get anything at the deli–they’d probably put the hot stuff right next to your ice cream. Not planning to complain, just bag my own in the future.

The conventional wisdom says that you are supposed to complain to the manager about stuff like that. But really, why? Why get in trouble a poor, rather dense minimum wage serf who really has no reason to give a damn about my groceries or her job, thanks to Idaho’s general working conditions and wage situation, which are in the category of ‘Enslaved Inca Silver Miners’? “Well, so that the manager can fix it!” But why is that my job, why do I think that will happen, and why should I even care? This manager has presumably had months to supervise and observe, and has made not one dent in the situation. Furthermore, I’m the customer. I’m the one who pays. Why am I to provide a volunteer service to a for-profit enterprise? Manage your own people, lady. I’ll just deal with it on my own henceforth. And if it slows down the register, oh, gee, well, sorry about that. Smile, smile, smile.

Boring things done, tried something new only thirty years after it was introduced, set myself up to start punching back at slimy creatures, managed to control frustration and not embarrass minwage serf. Was not rear-ended while braking for yellow light, harassed by bored deputies. Flipped off Hobby Lobby twice.

Around these parts, we count that as a good outing.

Human relations

Aging

July 17, 2014 jkkblog 4 Comments

Aging is when:

You finally start to figure out what is baloney, and what is real.

It’s too late in life for you to profit much from that.

You look around for people who can, who have more time.

You learn that most of them just aren’t ready to absorb it.

You understand, because at their age, you wouldn’t have absorbed it either. How else did this take you so long?

You either make peace with that, or not.

If you do, you at least aren’t alone.

Human relations, Social comment

You’ve got fermented fish!

June 4, 2014 jkkblog Leave a comment

Wouldn’t that have been a nice, amusing option for AOL’s mail announcement?

A long time ago, when I was in my fifth year of college and taking three languages at once, I had a part-time job delivering mail in Mercer Hall at the University of Washington. Mercer was part of what was called the South Campus complex of Terry, Lander and Mercer Halls. Mercer was smallest, housing perhaps four hundred residents. It was a quiet dorm with two separate wings, and had a high population of rather laid-back Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders. In 2011, UW demolished it to make room for a larger dorm (scroll down, look for a short brick building).

The South Campus central mailroom was in Terry Hall (also now demolished), which also provided front desk services to all three dorms, so that’s where the mail landed. The gal who did the Terry mail had a great gig, and the Lander mail was also pretty good–you could get from Terry to Lander without being rained on, and there was only one mailroom to service. The worst job of the three was the Mercer mail. When the Lander job opened up, I asked to transfer, but the supervisor refused. Mercer had long been a source of acrimonious complaints about the mail and its bearer; my arrival had ended them, and he didn’t want to risk the complaints coming back. I learned an important lesson about management: they don’t care about rewarding you. Management does what is expedient for management, and if that means rewarding good work by keeping you in a worse position, that’s fine with management. This is why ‘loyalty to the employer’ means nothing unless personally earned by a given manager.

Doing mail in Mercer required sorting it by wing, carrying 1-3 plastic bins of mail about half a block through the rain, then delivering one batch while either a) closing oneself in a stuffy little mailroom, or b) leaving the top of the Dutch door open, enabling students to ask one to just hand them their mail, and having to tell them no. (Many thought it was asking too much to expect them to use their keys to unlock their own boxes, and felt I should just hand it to them.) Repeat for the other wing. Trudge back to Terry in rain.

Handing them the mail was an issue, because the management impressed upon us that we’d better obey the rules. Specifically, the rules of the almighty U.S. Postal Service, which gets to be a business when it wants to market itself, but a government agency when it wants its rules enforced. In particular, we were advised, we had better deliver every scrap of the voluminous junk mail that often burdened me with two extra bins of nothing but crap, lest we face hefty fines and potential imprisonment. I believed them, and I almost never just handed anyone their mail.

Thus, I delivered everything. For parcels, I left package slips. I checked the mailroom shelves, and if residents did not pick up their parcels, I made out reminder package slips. I didn’t know how to send anything back, nor if we could, and in any case I was more than a little intimidated by the warnings. As long as I kept attempting conscientious delivery, I wouldn’t be in trouble. No one expected me to be responsible for people’s refusal to pick up their care packages.

One autumn day, I believe, a padded hard-cardboard mailer arrived from a town I recognized as being on the Warm Springs Reservation in central Oregon. I filled out the package slip and delivered it. For days, then weeks, the package was still there every time I checked the shelves, and I continued to prepare and deliver appropriate package slips. After six weeks, a brown and reeking fluid began to seep out of the parcel. At that point, I was pretty sure it was smoked fish of some sort, and that it was now well past the lutefisk state. I didn’t ask the boss what to do because I didn’t want to risk being accused of unwillingness to deliver the package, or of obstructing the mail. Seems stupid at this remove, but that was a good gig to have, and I was young. I didn’t want to lose it, or even to risk it. It was easier to just keep filling out the package slips, and for three months, I did so.

I also picked up some work substituting in at the Terry desk, and one fine day a young lady showed up with a package slip: she of the many notices. At last! I saw no point in mentioning anything about the past package slips. I retrieved the mailer, its leakage having dried up to a disgusting brown stain on the underside. She signed the slip, accepted her parcel, and began to open it as she headed for the elevator bank.

The expression on her face when she opened it was not one of pleasure. Seems she released and inhaled the full confined force of the goodness. I tried not to be heard or seen laughing, but it didn’t last long. She soon tossed the wretched mess into the handy trash can by the elevators.

The moral of the story is to check your mail now and then. What if someone sent you smoked fish?

Adventures, Human relations

Queen’s guard

June 1, 2014 jkkblog Leave a comment

I once was, of sorts, for a day. And on that day I learned a great lesson.

Back in 1983, when I was in Army ROTC at the University of Washington, Reagan had invited Queen Elizabeth II to visit the Pacific Northwest. I suspect everyone was stunned when Her Majesty took the President up on his offer. One stop on the Royal tour was a visit to UW. She would do whatever else she did, put in an appearance and give a speech at Hec Ed (the basketball arena), then move on.

The word went out at the Husky Battalion in Clark Hall: no more than twenty volunteers were needed, with the duty of assisting the Secret Service and UWPD (or ‘U-Pud,’ as it was most often called) with security. A similar number were accepted from the AFROTC squadron and NROTC battalion, both of which also headquartered in Clark Hall: I think the Air Force was on the third floor, Navy on the second, and we were downstairs. A lot of us knew each other, especially through our Ranger FTXes (‘futtockses,’ or Field Training Exercises). The Marine Option NROTC midshipmen were most interested in joining us for fun-filled weekends getting soaked and freezing our asses off at Ft. Lewis, but a few Air Force cadets also participated.

The volunteer list filled up in record time, and I was fortunate enough to secure a spot. When the day arrived, we were to show up at some side entrance at Hec Ed, very early, in dress uniforms with white pistol belts. We would not be armed. One of our cadre officers, a captain in Special Forces, wore a pistol in a skeleton holster under the back of his dress jacket. If I recall correctly, a Secret Service officer at least perfunctorily searched us, or at least ritually asked us if we were carrying any weapons. We gathered around for a briefing from a Secret Service officer.

Each of us would be stationed at some specified point, shown on a chart with sections described by who would inhabit them. Mine was the Queen’s Tea Party, from whom no threat was expected, just in case you got the impression that I was about to have to do anything brave. The SS explained the pins worn by the various security contingents; a small enameled sheriff’s star pin would denote Secret Service personnel. A similar pin with the EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) emblem marked those. Cheaper pins with one letter each would signal armed personnel, whom I presume mostly came from UWPD and were not in uniform, and others with varying duties.

In those days I was bursting with nationalism and patriotism, vastly honored to be representing my nation before an allied head of state, and even though the former have been beaten out of me by life, the latter honor hasn’t faded for me. It was the rarest of privileges. While the SS didn’t expect trouble, it had already been made clear to us (by the cadre) that in the gravest unforeseen extreme, we were to act toward a threat by sacrificing our lives if necessary. Not that I’d get much chance to, in such a case, since I would be facing away from the bleachers, but the point was made.

So we served at first as ushers, helping people to their seats, and that’s where the lesson came to me–but I’ll finish with it. Then we took our assigned posts, stood at parade rest, and stayed there while the royal entourage entered from my far right; I was too far from the center aisle to see anything without moving my eyes, which one may not do at parade rest. We came to attention as the PA played God Save the Queen. There were speeches; the Queen has a rather powerful speaking voice, and some University dignitaries said or did something or other. As you can tell, beloved alma mater’s administration left lasting impressions on me.

No disturbances occurred of any kind, except for the media overstepping the bounds of their designated kennel. The SS had put the NROTC Marine Option midshipmen over there for a reason. Meanwhile, at various times, SS and EOD team members would pass by. One guy had an attaché case; another’s arm was in a sling. One didn’t have to be a mental giant to figure out what that was about.

Then the entourage came back down the center aisle, and exited to my left–thus passing directly before me. There must have been twenty people, more women than men. The Queen herself wore a blue suit and a matching dog dish hat; she is shorter than I had realized. I am pretty sure I recognized a RAF officer’s uniform. Prince Philip stopped to speak to one of our cadets, who promptly promoted him to King by addressing him as ‘Your Majesty.’ I cringed inwardly. A tall officer whose uniform and bearing shouted ‘Colonel of Royal Marines’ came to a sudden, very military halt in front of me. He did a precise left face immediately, looking me directly in the eyes. I did not return his gaze, because I didn’t move, and he was taller than me, so I believe I stared directly through his nose.

One wonders why he did that. A little test of the military discipline of future officers of his nation’s most powerful ally? Simple puckishness? Did he see my last name, and think to himself–with the IRA supporters demonstrating outside–that he might have in (extremely remote and unlikely) theory had to trust his monarch’s life to this uniformed, unarmed teenager with a quintessentially Irish surname? I will never know. The entourage continued out, and the event closed. Consensus was that UW represented itself well, with those of us representing the armed forces doing our part.

But as we were ushering, and before we took up our posts, something interesting happened. An ancient lady, a bit heavyset and apparently about ninety years of age, was struggling up into the lower bleachers. I and a Navy midshipman were close to hand. We each took a side and half helped, half hoisted her into her assigned bleacher seat. As she was settled, she looked at each of us in turn. I don’t remember her face, but I won’t ever forget those clear, alert, intelligent eyes. She said, “Thank you, you young gentlemen. Someday someone will do this for you.”

It may have affected my nautical colleague as profoundly as it still does me, what must be at least two decades after she has almost surely passed on.

Human relations, Married life, Social comment

Children in the museum

November 20, 2013 jkkblog 6 Comments

Today Deb and I decided to go Boise museuming. This is easy when there are three museums in one cluster, just across from the main library (which is itself quite nice). We were disappointed to find the Idaho Black History Museum closed on weekdays, but the Boise Art Museum was definitely open. I think both of us had hoped for more paintings and less sculpture, but it is a nice, genteel, sedate place with many exhibits and sights to take in.

I’m congenitally weak in the area of visual art, and I know it. Most of the time, I have not the faintest notion of what I’m supposed to be grasping from what I see. Doesn’t matter. To me what’s important is that we have an art museum to visit, because I believe the arts provide valuable social comment and food for thought. Whether or not I ‘get it’ means nothing; I just like that we have one, evidently thriving, and what it says about our community.

Then we went to the Idaho Historical Museum, which only had about twenty kids but they sounded like fifty. They ran around, squealed, played with the playable exhibits, and generally acted like the first-graders I believe they were.

My reaction? Hurrah.

Yes, hurrah. Yes, me who normally has scant patience for children (or childish adults).

Hurrah!

Here is the logic: I love museums. I have always loved museums. Like many history majors, I also think long-term. The desired end result is that the children associate museums with fun and happiness, because that will tend to grow into lifelong affection and support for museums. A museum already teaches them some things even at young, attention-span-impaired ages, and later it will teach them more.

When I look at the girl intrepidly trying to balance the load of her Lewis & Clark canoe, I don’t see a child. I see an archaeologist in her forties who will dream of locating and excavating Tell Akkad, and who will be well equipped to do so because she happens to read Akkadian cuneiform. And it probably all began in a museum, where she went home happy because she liked it, and kept returning as she grew to adulthood, deepening her appreciation each time, causing her to continue asking if the family could stop at museums in its travels.

When I look at the boy playing cowboy on the McClellan saddle, I don’t see a child. I see a distinguished professor of American Literature teaching undergrads to appreciate Faulkner and Twain, wearing his eccentric bow tie and engaging his class with hilarious dry wit. It began in museums, where he came to love knowledge and to value the past, and always went home feeling that it had been great fun, and can we go to more museums?

I look at the shy girl gazing upon the mining display, and I don’t see a child. I see a rangy thirtysomething geologist in jeans, developing a better way than fracking to get access to mineral resources. It all started in a museum, where she looked upon the mineral samples and wanted to know what was in them, in between playing with the stuff that’s put there for kids to play with. And went home happy, loving all museums and asking Daddy when they could go again, and could they also try some gold panning? What’s in that rock, Daddy?

All hinges upon the result obtained in youth: the museum was fun, the museum was happy, the museum was interesting. It could all be blighted away by one grouchy stare or admonition from an adult who ought to be acting more like the adult. Museums’ survival depends upon raising children to love museums, and anyone incapable of seeing that–or who thinks his or her tranquility is more important than that fundamental purpose of a museum–has missed the entire point of the exercise. Museums are not restaurants, where people spend $30-90 and have a right to expect that people either parent their children or not bring them, unless they’re prepared to pay for the meals of everyone whose experiences their kids disrupted. Museums are places where children’s dreams begin. If you love history and revere its study, a covey of children enjoying the museum is sweet music.

Hurrah for children in museums. Send some more. I hope that every time I visit one, I hear children’s joy.

Human relations, Social comment, Technology

Why computer store techs are rude

November 5, 2013 jkkblog 6 Comments

It’s not your imagination. In the main, except for the Apple world, they really are rude. They don’t listen well. They bombard you with technical lingo that you will not understand. They don’t do it the way you asked them. And if you ask too many questions, they get increasingly testy.

Ever wonder why it’s that way? Why can’t computer stores hire competent technical people who also have people skills?

I used to sell computers. I sold PCs about five miles from the Microsoft main campus, many years ago when a 386 machine was hot stuff. I was a combatant in the trenches of the IBM/Microsoft wars. Back then, your local independent computer store had sales people and technicians, and where possible, we kept most of the techs away from the customers. It was better that way. Nowadays, however, more likely everyone in the store is a tech on some level, so you could end up dealing with anyone.

The first major thing to absorb about the computer support world is the pace of change. Imagine trying to be an electrical engineer, or an attorney or a doctor, and your knowledge set has to turn over every three years. Only the basic methodology and accumulated ‘gut feeling’ problemsolving skills remain with one; the rest becomes unimportant in three years and obsolete in about six. Not that many people can keep pace with that level of change, and most of them are socially dysfunctional because a lot of them have some personality syndrome that enables them to focus on fixing or puzzling out something for hours.

So you aren’t always dealing with highly adjusted social butterflies, and it’s uncommon to find a great tech who is also a people person. Computer store owners are small businesspeople, who pay people for a reason. The Aspie who cuts you off short and gives curt, opaque answers to reasonable questions is probably a reliable worker who generates income for the company and doesn’t steal the inventory, and the owner reasons that odds are against getting a better replacement. Plus, the owner is probably of the same personality type, and doesn’t see a great deal of value in worrying about people’s feelings. If they get it to work, or their policy protects them against having to do something, far as they’re concerned, case closed.

What is evident to me: the longer people work in the business of making computers work, the more jaded they tend to become about the public. They’ve heard all the lamentations before, and they deal with a lot of ignorance from the public. Much of the public doesn’t even see a difference between a software problem (usually created by the user, foolishly installing a wide variety of garbage and rarely bothering to invest in virus protection or backup) and a hardware issue (which is fixed, by and large, by swapping stuff out until the problem goes away); it just thinks, “So why don’t you just FIX it?” If it were that simple, they would. It often is not. However, good customer service requires one to take each customer at face value and offer a bit of education.

The service people don’t do that, because their general perception of the public is that it is too clueless to understand what they say (when in reality the problem is the service person’s poor communication skills). Why bother if people won’t understand? goes the reasoning. Another reason, more understandable, is that often it boils down to having to tell the user that s/he is an idiot. “But I LIKE my WeatherBug!” whined so many of my clients, when I told them that this noxious piece of spyware needed to go. “I never use the shutdown button,” smirked so many clients. “I just flip the switch on the surge.” Their expressions said: I’m so cute, such a rebel. No, you’re a fool, and you probably caused your own problem. “But my machine came with McCAFFee! I can’t have a virus!” Yet they never subscribed to virus definition updates, and even McAfee is better than nothing. All those discussion paths lead to the point where one must refrain from telling the paying customer that he or she did something stupid. There are only so many tactful ways to say that, and tact is not many techs’ strong suit.

What is more, most of the public won’t take advice. Shut down your machine using the shutdown mechanism in the operating system (Windows, for many). Keep a virus scanner up to date. Don’t just let everything install itself, and uninstall stuff you just don’t need. Defrag the thing now and then. Figure out a means of backing up anything you care about. One tells them all of the above, and as a staff colleague back in the dorms once said about getting residents interested in activities, “Their lips say ‘yes, yes’ but their eyes say ‘FOAD, FOAD, FOAD.'” The techs tried, and tried and tried, to convince people of the value of these forms of maintenance. After the five hundredth person listened politely, smirked a silent ‘in your dreams I’ll bother with that crap,’ and kept right on doing it the wrong way, they got tired of bothering.

So that’s what we’re up against. Socially awkward, often personality-dysfunctional people whose good advice was mostly blown off, who don’t have much respect for the public (partly deserved by said public), and who just hope to get out of the conversation as fast as possible. They are happiest when benching the machine without anyone saying, “My Internet Windows won’t download my Works documents off my hard drive, and Explorer doesn’t get my mail, and my machine is slow even though I’ve only had it for six years, and I can’t program my data off my CD. Can you just fix it?”

That’s no excuse for not listening well, and it’s no excuse for being rude. If you suck at dealing with the public, the boss should make sure you never have to. But if the boss also sucks at it, he doesn’t even realize that’s a problem.

And there you go.

The Editorial Maverick