yesterday i was taking to a man who was crying over the phone because he will lose his job if the tech issue of their website was not fixed within the day.

it is unnerving when the customers cry out of frustration. i'd rather that they shout, really; i could tolerate shouting. at the very least, i could assert authority or put down the phone if they've become really rude. but crying forces me to stay on the phone even if there was nothing more i could say and nothing else i could do. the only thing left is to wait for them to say good bye and wait for the sound of a phone line gone quiet where i start feeling bad for not being able to do something more when i know there is just nothing more that i could do.

i knew that their issue was not likely to be fixed within the day, and that that person was not going to be giving any happy news to his boss. (nor was he getting any happy news, most likely.) i was dreading calling him back with my non-update; the voicemail was a like a godsend because i didn't have to talk to him personally. but after i left my message i felt like i had cheated on and had failed a man who has had a long string of failure being dumped on him, even thought it was not his fault.

and the fault was ours, and that's what made me so angry. the thing their site is going through should not be happening. i don't think i could describe the details of the issue without disclosing private client information, so i won't describe it. but it should not have happened.

and that's just one website out of a number of websites with similar problems.these things should not be happening. there are many ways to prevent these tech problems from happening but they were ignored and (from how we in the customer support team see it) are still being ignored by the company bosses. and the only person whom we could contact about tech issues like these refuses to directly answer inquiries and would only react to minor side-issues that do not have any direct bearing to the problem at hand.

i was telling a colleague yesterday: i wanted to strangle someone. and i still do.

i am trying not to imagine a man who might have carefully packed his office things last night to start cleaning up his desk. he might have had a box of tissues next to him. of course the more i try to, the more i will think about it. he was not the first man to lose his job because of our fault, not that that makes things any better at all.