Head Hung Low

I was not feeling my best this morning. I will spare you the details but I've been having tummy troubles on and off for the past week or two. (it's probably stress and it's not over anything I can discuss in this forum) It doesn't help that I stayed up to watch Headlines on The Tonight Show last night and the tummy troubles kept me up until almost midnight.

I told you all of that to simply set the stage that I was tired, stressed, and feeling somewhat ill.

You all know, I hope, that I work in tech support. Specifically, I work in a call center. I had a customer call in on an existing issue and I was trying to help him. He was using uncommon software, which often throws any of us off our game at least a little. He also had not connected a feature of the device that might have made my troubleshooting a little easier.

The short version is that he didn't understand something I was asking him to do - even though I explained it at least three times - and kept trying to stop me from shutting down his software so we could test the drive without it getting in the way - even though I told him at least three times that we needed to shut it down. As you can probably tell from my narrative, he got on my nerves and I was cranky to start with.

Honestly, he wasn't any worse than some of the other people I've had to deal with. As a matter of fact, he knew his system relatively well which is more than I can say for some of the overpaid... well, let me stop there before I say something slanderous. The point is I got snippy with him. I didn't go off on him or anything but at one point he did say, "but you're yelling at me." I am ashamed that it happened. I usually have a LOT more patience than that. Even if I am frustrated by the call or the caller, they usually don't know it.

So, to my customer, I apologize. My behavior was inexcusable. I hope that if we talk again it is a more pleasant experience for both of us.