This morning, on of my coworkers brought in a box of white chocolate macadamia nut cookies. I eagerly devoured two, and then someone else brought in a box of Dunkin’ Donuts. Wow! I ate one. About an hour later, my sugar high wore off and I crashed. It was just 11:30 a.m., and I felt like going to sleep. I haven’t been eating much sugar lately (despite my posts on chocolate), and I guess my body couldn’t take it. The lesson I learned today: never let your body lose its tolerance to sugar! (Kids, make sure your parents learn this as well.)

An annoying customer called again today. One of the advantages to being a techie (instead of a salesman) is that you don’t have to deal with annoying customers. What makes customers annoying? Generally, calling us for tech support to fix problems they caused. Every user is bound to screw up things every once in a while, but when you have somebody that thinks he knows what he’s doing, and goes into the settings and fiddles around with things, he’s going to screw things up sooner or later (probably sooner). When this happens, we shouldn’t have to go up behind him and clean up his mess. This is doubly true when the customer comes in being pushy and aggressive and claiming we sold him faulty equipment so we should give him his money back.

I suppose most jobs involve dealing with annoying people, but when you’re a teacher, you can just kick them out of class and/or send them to the office of whoever deals with troublesome students. When you’re in a store, you have to be real nice to everybody so they want to spend more money. It’s a little better at a private, locally-owned store like My Computer Store, but I can only imagine what it’s like working for a retail chain. Employees have a measure of pride, too, and it’s dehumanizing to make them bow and scrape. As a security guard, I once had a caller threaten me because the air conditioning had gone out in the building and his servers were overheating. I learned after that, that we were allowed to say something to the effect of, “Sir, you sound very upset, and you certainly have good reason to be. However, if you would like to continue this conversation, you are going to have to be polite and respectful, just like I’m being with you.” If they start hurling more abuse, we can hang up.

The tables are turned, though, when our boss gets involved. He’s the only person I know who can scream at an angry customer until they give in and buy something else. And he does this while scratching himself in, uh, “places” – he gets itchy when he gets angry, apparently. I guess that’s why he’s the businessman and I’m just a computer techie. I wouldn’t have his job for anything in the world, though – give me a salary and a bunch of semi-operational computers, and I’m a happy camper.