Okay, so here's the deal: I used to be a very polite person. Being "nice" was extremely important to me in high school and, to a lesser extent, college. Not to say that I'm all nasty and rude now, but my compunction to kiss ass has waned quite a bit over the years.
I think the main reason for that is that I never had a job in high school. Well, I did get a job at that Japanese restaurant when I was sixteen. My family went on vacation the week it opened, though, so I wasn't scheduled. Apparently, the schedule they did use worked so well that they just decided to repeat it. Forever. Thusly, I was never actually on the schedule, and I never worked. I called every single day for two months, at my mother's insistence, and pestered the day manager about my lack of work. Every day he promised to do something about it, and then the new schedule would come out and, lo, I would not be on it. When they finally fired the day manager, I called up and quit in a pointless huff. I mean, he was the only one who even knew I existed, literally, so when I called and quit, the guy was like, "Wait, who are you? What are you talking about?"
But I'm getting off-topic. The point is that the reason I valued courtesy and decorum so highly is because I'd never had a customer service job before. The minute you've had one of those, you lose every shred of faith in mankind. Unless you're one of those creepy-ass Stepford Wife types who blithely chirp everything in that so-fake-and-smooth-that-it-might-as-well-be-Crisco voice and laugh at everything in such a stagey way that everyone else begins to feel like they've stumbled into a Summer Stock production of The Importance of Being Ernest.
But if you're not one of those people, then you start to hate everyone. I worked in a clothing store, a cafeteria, a cookie store, a restaurant, and numerous offices, and I've seen it all. I've had people blame me for unfair prices, I've had people accuse me of lying about our inventory, I've had people get impatient with me for not dropping everything and falling to my knees and fellating them to make up for not telling the customer whom I was already helping to fuck off, because someone obviously more important just came along. I've had people get furious with me for complying with company policies, like they're special and I should owe them something. I've had people snipe at me over the phone because the person they want to speak with is unavailable, and that's somehow my problem. I've seen coworkers get fired because they wouldn't tolerate being called foul names by paying customers, like shilling out a couple bucks for a cookie gives you license to degrade another human being.
The upshot of all this is that I no longer feel such an allegiance to niceties, nor do I feel obligated to give anonymous customers the benefit of the doubt. I'll be polite if you're polite, I'll be enthusiastic if you're enthusiastic, and I'll even go out of my way to make you comfortable if you prove you deserve it, but I'm not wasting a single ounce of energy by being congenial with the jackasses of this world who think I've got nothing else to attend to but their overweening sense of entitlement. Everyone gets my Neutral face until I know their true nature.
Sadly, it is mostly the Entitled Jackasses of this world who like to do business. Like the man who called yesterday, twice, and bitched me out because I was busy answering questions for a nice, if somewhat befuddled, old woman on the other line who called before he did. The second time he called, he snapped, "You stuck me in hold for a long time and nothing happened!" Yeah, well, that's why it's called 'Hold', you dumb fuck. If that's where everything "happened", it would be called 'Action!', wouldn't it?
Like the woman who called and bitched me out because she'd called thirty minutes earlier, and Dolly still hadn't called her back. And granted that Dolly is the Bride of Satan, but she is a very good businesswoman, and if she didn't call someone back, it's because she was too busy calling back her other 37,000 clients, so suck it up, ho-bag.
And another reason I've given up being nice: I'm the last line of defense around here. Hell, I'm the only line of defense! I'm all that stands between the salespeople and a teeming mass of increasingly irrational customers. Take yesterday, for example, when this crazy chick called up no fewer than four times, insisting that she wanted to come down to the office and have Dolly show her the boats. I explained, four times, that Dolly was inordinately busy, that she was with another client at the present time, and that if she -- Crazy Chick -- wanted to make an appointment, it would be much, much more convenient. Crazy hemmed and hawed just long enough to drive this information willfully out of her short-term memory and asked that, if she "just stopped by", would someone show her around. Very cautiously, I explained that if someone was available, they would take her down to the docks, but I made it very clear that no one was available, and she should make an appointment. She thanked me and hung up.
Twenty minutes later, when she arrived at the office with her entire extended family in tow, she acted all surprised when I told her that Dolly wasn't in the office, and that I had no idea when she'd be back, because SHE WAS WITH A CLIENT! Of course, maybe she wasn't acting surprised. It's possible that the Look of Surprise pasted on her face was just a visual trick caused by her freakish glam-rock eye makeup. Seriously, you guys, she looked like Pizzazz from Jem and the Holograms.
Er, not that I'd know what Pizzazz looks like, having never watched Jem and the Holograms myself. I may like boys, but I'm not that gay. Oh, shut up.
Anyway, that's manifesto on why I'm sick of being polite. I would much rather be...outrageous. Truly, truly, truly outrageous.
