>Yes, some people thrive on talking to a lot of people. For everyone else, it can be exhausting. It's hard to navigate social differences talking to 15+ strangers every hour for 8 hours a day.
Okay. It's a job. I know choices are slim, but "its hard for my mental state" has never been a satisfactory excuse to further displease customers.
>So either I would have to lie and say "wow, that must be so frustrating", which is not empathy,
Sometimes a little white lie is easier than a cold hard truth. Just ask any salesman.
>And that brings me next to the next thing I don't understand... either that person was also lying or somehow people have the ability to just contemporaneously download the feelings of other people, feel them, but also not act like they're feeling them
Given the author is blind, I imagine he's better than average at reading the tone of voice. He could have interpreted it wrong, but I'm sure this dismissive tone isn't new to him.
>Finally I ask the question of am I evolved to even be able to socially interact with 120 strangers in a given day?
Probably not. But I'm not sure what you want me to say. I don't want to be the same as Karen and say "suck it up, it's a job. But this is such a commin feeling on modern society. If we aren't going to collectively rise against its, we're bearing the flood alone.
Given how we're still actively drowning people, I don't see us coming together soon.
This is missing the forest for the trees. You are ignoring the wider corpus of the individual's experiences in favor of a single negative interaction, and then using that single interaction, isolated from all their other experiences, to judge the entirety of their character.
> Okay. It's a job. I know choices are slim, but "its hard for my mental state" has never been a satisfactory excuse to further displease customers.
The chemical reality of the the frontal lobe getting exhausted is not an "excuse". It still misses the forest for the trees: if your frontal lobe (the part of the brain responsible for social understanding, reasoning, executive function, and information recall [0]) is taxed, you are way less likely to even understand that you're displeasing the customer! The ultimate irony here is the tool needed to understand how to not do that thing anymore is also the frontal lobe.
> Sometimes a little white lie is easier than a cold hard truth. Just ask any salesman.
That's a nice way to soften it, but pretending to empathize with someone who you're not actually empathizing with sounds psychopathic. I don't want to model my behavior nor do I want anyone else to model their behavior after an industry that is known for dark triad personalities [1]. A lie is still a lie and lying about something so intimate as feeling their experiences doesn't sit right with me at all. You should read the link I posted in my earlier comment which discusses surface acting and how it is very taxing on the individual.
> Given the author is blind, I imagine he's better than average at reading the tone of voice. He could have interpreted it wrong, but I'm sure this dismissive tone isn't new to him.
Reading a stranger's tone is a guess and negativity bias affects our perception of a stranger's intent [2]. The sum of their total negative experiences absolutely can make them interpret someone else's tone as having "dismissive" intent even though it's just as likely to be what I already described: braced speech in anticipation for a person responding to something they don't want to hear.
And there you can see negativity bias on both sides! The difference is that the representative gets no post-call time to consider what happened before they have to take the next call and they have the issue of not really having the foresight to actively introspect and keep a strong sense of understanding the situation the customer is going through. (As a reminder, both foresight and introspection require some level of functioning frontal lobe, which is already getting juiced for the next social interaction that's about to happen).
> Probably not. But I'm not sure what you want me to say. I don't want to be the same as Karen and say "suck it up, it's a job. But this is such a commin feeling on modern society. If we aren't going to collectively rise against its, we're bearing the flood alone.
I'm not sure what you mean, you effectively said "suck it up, it's a job" at the beginning of your comment when you said "Okay. It's a job". Of course no one wants to be the same as Karen, Karen doesn't want to be the same as Karen, but as I've already explained, is incapable of extricating herself from the dysfunction! Her frontal lobe is shot!
But the author? He does have that capability after the interaction. He is an author, with time to introspect. He chose to be an ass hole instead. Of course, his growth over the years has been stunted by the way he has been treated. I am not in the business of dredging up someone's life experiences and putting them on display, but he has painful experiences beyond being blind in a society not built for blind people.
But I have the privilege of being able to see all that and take it into consideration. Karen does not. She doesn't have the hint about his upbringing that I do. She probably doesn't have the time or mental capacity to introspect, and consider, if what she's doing makes people feel bad.
I can fault neither of these people for being ass holes, because that would amount to faulting them for their upbringing, faulting them for the situation they're in.
> But I'm not sure what you want me to say.
I don't want you to say anything, I want you to think about what empathy really means beyond the surface level. That this isn't a situation where anyone should be trying to say "who has experienced the most hardship" so we can pick who wins empathy and who gets labelled an ass hole for perpetuity.
I want people to stop doing the thing where they only empathize with the person most like them and instead try to feel what it's like to be like the person who is least like them. Sometimes that's not intuitive. Just because the dude is blind doesn't mean he isn't more like you than the person who isn't.
And where's the reaction of Karen using her apathy to harm someone who just wants to get their benefits and not go homeless? Apathy is an emotjon as well.
"Karen" is following procedure. She didn't create it. She's not choosing to harm anyone. The "no email" policy is not hers personally. She's entirely innocent here.
Nintendo much be in an especially hard place. They just released their new generation of consoles, but from what I hear holiday sales did "fine". Not great, fine. So they definitely don't want to stunt their entire generation by raisig their prices in the first year while they are already worried about hardware sales. Maybe that's a part of why they recently reported the price differences between physical and digital games.
Yeah, but the previous US price increase was both smaller and much much later than the corresponding increase that Microsoft did with their xboxes. That's what makes me think this is more about strangling Xbox than anything else.
Especially because they were willing to piss off their lucrative European and Asian customers by raising *their* prices in response to US tariffs instead of raising the prices in the USA, effectively making all their worldwide customers subsidize lower costs in the USA.
That politician would cancel their re-election. Assuming it gets that far. Even this federal administration can't handle the pushback of straining benefits. A local government stands zero chance with such a maneuver.
>the author didn't make anything harder for anyone because the "fax" wasn't ever even printed, much less caused a backup or even a slowdown at all.
You underestimate government inefficiency. You are correct, but I can also see a system that naively prints whatever is verified as a valid entry automatically.
Mentioned it in another comment, but I used to intern at a large physics facility in the UK some 15 years ago, and we had one of such old fax machines on a desk next to mine.
I only ever saw it print some automobile-related ads, about one-two per day, so I'm pretty sure if someone did the thing described in the story to our number, it would absolutely keep printing until the upstream aborted. I also know the whole floor section would be disturbed, and we wouldn't know what to do other than to unplug the machine and file a ticket with IT.
Now, fortunately, that fax machine was not a part of anyone's daily work there. In the situation/story described in the article, however, the fax machine is a critical dependency and disabling it like this pretty much shuts down part of the office. It really only ruins the day of individual employees, and possibly ruins the lives of fellow disabled. To the extent the government will care, they will chase the author/protagonist for misdemeanor, as they should.
possibly! but I'd put some actual money on it. when I was doing student loan collections for incarcerated (or assumed incarcerated) people, we had to deal with a ton of city and state offices to track down whether or not we needed to pause collections. there are plenty of software vendors offering services, but you tend to hear the same four or five from most places and the places that don't use them would usually reference them like "ours is like westfax" or whatever.
I'm not so naive as to think there's no podunk, crossroads "town" out there that has some mayberry-ass fax machine just spitting out whatever you send it. But given how attractive government offices are to people for either pranking or ...ahem redressing via their fax machines since the late 70's, it's more common than you might believe for even the smallest little townships to have a contract with a company that turns faxes into emails.
They were fucked over already. I can't speak for the but I'd see this as a small bit of retribution.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong here, but: fax's have a timestamp on them, right? If you can confirm that it was sent before a deadline, they'd accept it, right? It's clear in this story that Karen ditn need to read all 500 pages to mark the author on.
Per the story, the protagonist DoSed the fax machine. Fax machines are dumb, and employees often don't know how to operate them outside of the most common flow.
I file this under " don't be a dick, especially to the disabled". You wonder why most bankers avoid a lot of this, despite handling one of the most stressful aspect of modern humanity? It's becsuse they tend to be thr friendliest talkers out there. They know the reputation and trust of the banking system is what keeps their money in. They can be just as slimy as a used car salesman in tactics, but we're still interfacing with a human, and humans generally like to feel like they matter.
I'll admit, this is the authors bias. And we know such hackers are not the best a social cues. But taking him as his word: I can 100% visualize the kind of tone Karen made here at the author. The kind that says "I've done this 1000 times and I know how this works. I know most people won't bother. I just need to get person over with and move on". An all too familiar tone in this cold, lonely world.
I'm not going to say she deserved it. But I have no sympathy either. And sadly, this is the only legal channel we have for this without any lawyer funding. I don't see any other way to really make them listen than to reveal enough inconvenience in the real world, not in a civil matter in a townhall.
Many people go into public service with an attitude of 'I want to help people'.
The catch is that unless it's some form of care or perhaps fire-fighting, there's a high risk that it'll be pretty nasty stuff. Things like denying people decency, perhaps even life, because they were slow to respond or for once didn't get help filling out some form or whatever. Throwing suffering, poor people out on the streets, and then someone else employed by the state hound them until they're almost invisible.
HR people usually say the same and realise too late that they're not going to be as appreciated as they'd hoped, at least not by the people they initially thought they'd help out.
I'm sure some do. But the federal government is the biggest employer. I see that as inevitably doing a job because its a job.
I'm not saying to be perfect on the job or anything. I'm sure like most jobs it grinds on you. But I've never seen a situation where taking it out (passively or actively) on the customer directly has ever ended well. And there's many, many times where I wanted to actively do so.
>No amount of beating low level employees will change whether they can accept pdf sent by email or not.
I disagree. I'm sorry Karen here needs to bear the brunt, but if this kept up, at some point Karen's boss will take notice, And then it moves up the chain to someone who can affect that policy.
Companies purposefully set us up to communicate bottom-up, so we can either play the game or break the law.
>People who are responsible for overreaching unreasonable security rules ... are basically us
No, it'd be a policy maker or CEO who thinks we're in the 90's and that secure email documentation isn't a thing. "We" could suggest so many ways to handle it that would save costs while being more secure. We're not much higher on the totem pole than Karen.
Yet suddenly, we get these incidents and our bosses are suddenly rushing to IT to find a solution. As if 6 months of deliberation wasn't enough.
> I'm sorry Karen here needs to bear the brunt, but if this kept up, at some point Karen's boss will take notice, And then it moves up the chain to someone who can affect that policy.
I'm open to options. Not doomerism "the system can't be fixed" mentality. I don't like to think of myself as combative. Ideally we get listened to in council and they properly pull what strings are needed to help.
But this has been my reality. Employees can evangelize for months for better security, but then a (very avoidable) hack happens and suddenly the budget for it appears out of thin air. Being a nuisance (or letting nature take its course, in the perspective of an employee) is much more powerful to these kinds of organizations than words.
> But this has been my reality. Employees can evangelize for months for better security, but then a (very avoidable) hack happens and suddenly the budget for it appears out of thin air.
So your lived experience indicates that harassing front-line low-level employees about it does not work because they won't be listened to. Why, then, are you advocating for harassing front-line low-level employees?
Go for the people who can actually set policy: ministers, representatives, council, agency boards, managers. When you call, rather than take it out on the employee request to be transferred up.
And even if you don't have the energy to keep fighting after your own case has been fixed (a very common remedy when it's usually much easier to grease the squeaky wheel than to actually fix the axle), try to leave information on your process and contact points in accessible locations so that those afterwards can start a step or two ahead.
>your lived experience indicates that harassing front-line low-level employees about it does not work because they won't be listened to.
I'm saying inconvenience from an outside force (not the low level employee) gets actions done, not words from the employee. It can be the custome, it can be a malicious actor. It can be the federal or state government. But it has to come from outside or up top.
I don't know how you construed that as "so customers can't do anything"
>Go for the people who can actually set policy: ministers, representatives, council, agency boards, managers. When you call, rather than take it out on the employee request to be transferred up.
If you've seen local policy these days... Yeah, not really. LA just had a new Metro line approved despite the mayor's attempts to delay the vote. Policy isn't working with us.
I won't say escalation doesnt work, but I haven't seen it pulled off. Wait queues for help is already so long, so asking more time of the customer might not be feasible. It's already inefficient enough that we need go use Synchronous calls to to do all these duties.
> I'm saying inconvenience from an outside force (not the low level employee) gets actions done, not words from the employee.
When you harass an employee it’s still word from an employee. And it’s very optimistic to think said words will go beyond you being an asshole doing asshole things.
> I don't know how you construed that as "so customers can't do anything"
You seem confused. I never said that, you just invented it from
me saying that harassing front line employees is useless.
I sorta feel there's as much fantasy on the other side. The situation as is—the concrete one we're discussing here—exists. You're voting for a version where this person doesn't complain through the methods designed for it and instead writes to the CEO or something and has things fixed that way. Or possibly just doesn't complain about being screwed at all.
The system is largely bad. That's mostly agreed by each side. I feel like what you're asking for—to treat others as humans—is right and yet only going in one direction. There's a disagreement between the company and the customer and instead of showing up the company disingenuously gives you an unrelated powerless person to speak to. The expectation is that you shouldn't count them as the company, you count them as a human—and you're supposed to do that _because_ the company underpays them and gives them no power.
If the author didn't abuse the fax, why would anyone notice the process was broken. It's only by abusing the existing process that change will be triggered.
You see this all the time in cybersecurity. Nobody cares until there's a breach. Nobody would care if he faxed 25 pages and mildly inconvenienced Karen, but by faxing 500 pages and inconveniencing the whole office, it's going to start something. Even if it takes them another 5 years to fix the process, it's a start.
Realistically, the change will probably be "no more than 25 pages of evidence required". But that's also a win for the person being asked for it.
Okay. It's a job. I know choices are slim, but "its hard for my mental state" has never been a satisfactory excuse to further displease customers.
>So either I would have to lie and say "wow, that must be so frustrating", which is not empathy,
Sometimes a little white lie is easier than a cold hard truth. Just ask any salesman.
>And that brings me next to the next thing I don't understand... either that person was also lying or somehow people have the ability to just contemporaneously download the feelings of other people, feel them, but also not act like they're feeling them
Given the author is blind, I imagine he's better than average at reading the tone of voice. He could have interpreted it wrong, but I'm sure this dismissive tone isn't new to him.
>Finally I ask the question of am I evolved to even be able to socially interact with 120 strangers in a given day?
Probably not. But I'm not sure what you want me to say. I don't want to be the same as Karen and say "suck it up, it's a job. But this is such a commin feeling on modern society. If we aren't going to collectively rise against its, we're bearing the flood alone.
Given how we're still actively drowning people, I don't see us coming together soon.
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