My Biggest Secret

The (Semi-)Fictional Confessions of a Technical Support Rep

I've been working in customer support for almost a decade now. And I have a secret that none of my customers would ever guess!

I. Hate. Customers.

That is a very broad statement and it doesn't apply to most of the individual customers. But taken as a group, I utterly loathe them. It's not something that happened all at once. Rather, it's the result of many years of built up hostility. And I'm not alone in this.

Above all else, I take my job very seriously when I'm at work. I spent most of a year nearly starving to death and I really didn't like that, so a job became very important to me. And when you're working customer support, your job is to support customers. No matter how stupid or assinine the questions. And no matter how aggressive they get, you absolutely must not under any circumstances let them get to you. It's not personal. It's business.

So I take special pains to control my tone and pick out words that I feel are sufficiently easy for my less mentally equiped customers to understand. And deep inside, I let the hate build. In 9 years, it makes a pretty large ball of spite.

To me, 'customer' is a four letter word.

But the amazing thing is that none of my customers would ever guess that the raging beast lurks inside of me. Some of them (the ones who I detest on a personal level versus a general one) might wonder how someone could remain so polite and soft spoken despite a torrent of profanity and verbal abuse, but the ones who genuinely appreciate what you do for them, who thank you and really mean it...they'll never know the truth. They shouldn't, because it would hurt their feelings due to something that has absolutely nothing to do with them on a personal level.

The worst part of this is that, over the years, I've learned to recognize this same attitude in others. When I call about a credit card issue or even when I'm ordering a pizza, I can feel that same low level disgust. I can't be sure if it's paranoia or if they're just not as good at masking their feelings, but it's got me wondering if maybe I'm as much of the problem as everyone else.