Awhile back I designated my nifty Do Not Feed the Vultures sign the warning that a post is not entertaining in any way. If you see this, it means I'm having an especially hard time with anxiety. You're welcome to keep reading, of course, just keep your expectations low.
I had an . . . incident . . . with a customer service agent last night / today. I won't give you the play-by-play because a) it's dull reading, and b) I'm still very shaky and don't want to relive it quite yet. Basically, the chirpy happy agent left me a voicemail late yesterday afternoon and said to call her back. I was at the front desk and didn't get the message until long after her office had closed.
Which shouldn't be an issue and wouldn't on many days. Yesterday, however, it was a problem. Because she didn't give any indication what it was about.
And I, well, spiraling doesn't even describe it. My brain cannonballed, depth-charged down through increasingly murky possibilities (and I will note that many were possible only in the sense that Brendan Fraser might be waiting to take me out to dinner when I get home from work tonight).
Of course none of those things did happen. It was all pretty simple, just a follow-up to an online survey I'd done. Which I found out when I finally talked to the agent. At 11:15 this morning.
Over sixteen hours after I heard the message.
Sixteen plus hours of panic and worry and tears. Sixteen truly horrible hours which could have been total normal base-level anxiety hours if the message had included "survey follow-up" or "not urgent" or "no problem with you account" or similar phrase.
And I thought customer service people need training for working with those of us with a mental illness. But I really hate the idea that I need "special treatment", and extra delicate touch because my brain chemistry can be a bit all over the place.
How would they know who needed it?
And is it really "special" treatment to say why you're calling? And maybe offer a text or email reply option? That's not really too out there when discussing a survey which was originally emailed to the customer. It's not just us delicate snowflake fragile fems who might prefer a typed option; that would be just as appreciated by my hard-of-hearing mother.
Somehow this lead me to looking into how many people in the United States have a diagnosed mental illness, broad guestimate. Well, the Center for Disease Control says 1 in 5 people will experience mental illness in a given year, but over 50% of people will be diagnosed with a mental illness or disorder at some point in their lifetime. https://www.cdc.gov/mentalhealth/learn/index.htm
I'm going to trust the CDC's math because they've got to be better at than I am. Even I know that over 50% equals the majority. I've long wondered if we, the utterly messed up, really are the weirdos. The CDC mental health page pretty much confirms that sanity is the aberration. Crazy is the norm.
So customer service representatives and everyone else who ever work with people need special training to effectively work with . . . people. Just normal, everyday, average Joe, slightly out of their minds people. People who are probably going through some sh*t, if not right now then last week or next month or Thursday.
During that research I also decided to look into why it seems like I have to pee more often when I'm cold. It turns out that I'm not imagining that either. It's called cold diuresis. Not that's cold out. It's 58F, 71F in the office. But I've been shivering the last two days because of meds. And peeing like mad because of meds and possibly because of cold diuresis. And my stomach is threatening to devour other organs because of meds.
Meds. Ugh.
Thank you for sticking with me. It's cool if you gave up reading early on and just scrolled down here to the bottom. That's why I use the vulture sign. (If you're interested in reading the post which spawned the original sign, click here. And if you'd like to start at the beginning or this blog but don't want to scroll through 200+ posts to Day 1, you can start here.) I think I feel a little better, a little less like a violin string just before it takes out someone's eye. And please remember what I said if you have any input into customer service, & etc training.
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