The Angry Dieter

People who message me on IRC and I am not participating much .. the conversation kind goes like this:

PersonX Hi how are you (Hi how are you)
me Fine thanks, you? (i don’t care really, but I am being polite)
PersonX good good (yes, i have nothing else to add)
PersonX hey I am doing [insert activity here]
me sounds great (i think that’s boring, don’t talk to me)
PersonX yeah so.. what did you do today? (let’s try another tact)
me work (work… you know i work)
PersonX so, how is the weekend looking? (i need to find something else to talk about)
me I don’t go out, i work. (moron, what do you think i do?)
PersonX HAHAHAHAH (omg that is so funny you are so smart)
PersonX So I guess it’s busy at work? (c’mon keep talking to me biatch)
me Oh hell yeah! (it’s a call centre, what do you think?)

I guess this is called closed answers. Its a good summary of how some of my conversations go when I am feeling a bit Blah.

I had some coaching by my TL today on some of my calls. Out of 1000 calls he picked five bad ones. Nothing wrong with the content, or the information, just the way I conducted the calls, my tone wasn’t consistent, warm, friendly, preppy and I wasn’t empathic enough with my customers (both call centre consultants and general public), and that chances were more than half my calls would be as bad.

Not sure what hurts more. Being challenged to find a good call, that I balked at the challenge. Understanding then, that by me hesitating, I had then lost confidence in my abilities and perhaps thought maybe he was right and more of my calls sucked and thus, him thinking that he thought I thought “he may be right”. That I couldn’t trust that anything I had done was good. He introduced to me the concept of self doubt, and that is a knock to my confidence.

Last time I had sucky calls to be coached on, the feedback was this is what you did wrong, this is how to fix it, or how do you think you can improve for next time.. and this is what you did good, great call, keep it up. I didn’t walk away from that coaching session feeling like I was a failure.

I felt like defending myself, but they are all excuses. Some possibly legitimate, but I didn’t want to sound like I was begging. I refused to listen to anymore of my calls again with him, as I didn’t want to hear anymore. He asked me why, and I pointed out that he made it clear that they were all bad, and I didn’t need to hear the rest of his criticism. Why? Because I couldn’t take anymore. There’s only so much a person can deal with, and I am only human. No one likes making mistakes or being criticised, but there’s a limit to how much you can listen to before it totally destroys your confidence.

He’d told me I made the same mistake in all the calls, so listening to the rest was pointless. He said he’d taken into account my circumstances, but didn’t say what those had been, I am assuming he’s talking about my hearing issues. Let me just say, that hearing loss in such a quick manner does affect a person’s attitude to work, home life, and general demeanour, but once again, it’s an excuse and not one I am prepared to use in my defence.

I have nothing positive to say really about today, it started off well, I had no nightmares, I had a great training session with someone who was crap two weeks ago, and then this. I’ll be over it tomorrow and back to being cool, emotionless lori. Just add a dash of empathy and I might care enough to make someone’s day, if I don’t have to deal with more shit like tonight.

September 28th, 2005 | Category: Blogging, IRC, Work | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL