Clue-By-Four

Lately my teammates' attitudes have been bothering me.

Dealing with customers is always a challenge: they tend to be panicky, irrational, poor at communicating, poor at following directions, and prone to sudden moments of irrational behavior. In other words, they're people. But people under stress, dealing with things they don't understand, and who've been put on hold three times and hung up on twice.

Some of my teammates like venting about how stupid their customers are. This bothers me.

I've been noticing in my calls lately, that the stupid tends to recede, exactly when the angry does: as the customer finds that I can and will actually help them, they suddenly start communicating clearly and saying sensible things, no matter how ridiculous and strange they were a moment before.

So when a coworker says something like "there's a cure for stupidity, but bullets are expensive" or "this customer needs a whack with a clue-by-four"... it bothers me.