December 18, 2002

changing things

She looked at me with such disappointment when I told her it wasn’t working out. I was surprised by this because I knew it was the only possible outcome. When I asked if she had read Chapter Three where it clearly states that it could never work out, she got even more upset, though she admitted reading it.

I don’t remember my dreams very often and even this one is a little sketchy. I’m not too sure who the “she” was or what wasn’t going to work out. Who knows what book we read. Seemed like some sort of instruction book on life (Lam Rim, maybe?). Anyway, it struck a cord with me. I think because it’s so true. People know that they will die, that all of their friends will die, that every good thing they have will go away. Yet we still run around getting upset at things when they don’t work out.

My job requires me to take supervisor calls. Some of the people are extremely irate. They threaten legal action, they talk about never buying one of our products again, they tell me how horrible of a manager I am because I can’t bring their machine back to life. I used to sell new things to people and they seemed really happy as they left the store, put their new CD in their car and drove off singing their favorite song. It was nice to give them that. I think I like working on the other side of retail though. It’s not that I take pleasure in all of the suffering these printers, scanners and computers cause people. It’s that I really like to talk to them and try to help them see that the only possible outcome was this. You have to walk this tightrope of acceptable behavior. The client could be listening at any time, so you can’t just say, “well, your unit was starting to break down the second it was created — in fact, each and every unit we have made thus far is on it’s way to a break down,” (the truth). But the customer usually knows the truth and also knows you have to be politically correct so they give a little and allow you to say things like, “well, unfortunately things do break down. I wish their was a way to stop that, but we haven’t yet devised a way,” without getting too upset about it.

Most of the time. Sometimes you get someone who truly believes that things last forever — that things are not changing on a constant basis, being destroyed the minute they are created. These are the angry ones. These are the frustrated ones.

posted @ 8:44 AM

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