Tag: Listening

A Week of Tweets on 2011-05-01

Stuff on the Net
  • Insanity, day 12: I beat you! Suck it! /collapse #
  • Listening to the soundtrack for Cirque Du Soleil's Ovo. It's pretty great. Almost as good as the show. http://amzn.to/gizDUx #
  • 25th Anniversary rerelease of Top Gun? But I saw it in the theater the first time. I can't be that old! http://bit.ly/eGd3qC #
  • I dropped my bag of animal crackers and all of their legs broke off. #
  • @Oakstout Sometimes I feel like I'm in grade school with my sack lunch and little baggies of snacks. in reply to Oakstout #
  • Insanity, day 13: Abs, abs, abs… and cardio! #
  • People who are determined to not believe you will also not believe any evidence you bring forth. #birthcertificateblues #
  • There's nothing like trying to go to sleep under a tornado warning. #
  • Now you too can smell like an RPG! http://www.blackphoenixalchemylab.com/rpg.html #
  • Insanity, day 14,15,16: 14 was a day off, 15 was the fit test (improvement!) and 16 was a pain in the ass. 🙂 #
  • Why can't I have plain Hulu on my Xbox? I don't want to pay $8 a month to get a subset of TV and movies that Netflix has. #
  • @XboxSupport Sure, it's free for a week, but it only carries about a third of the shows I want. Maybe in the future it will be better. in reply to XboxSupport #
  • Insanity, day 17: The ab workout that doesn't include situps and crunches is much harder than situps and crunches. #
  • @calmangeal I bailed out during the third season because I thought it got a bit silly. I may try again someday though. in reply to calmangeal #

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Hey You!

Random Thoughts

Yeah you!  I know being Customer Service is tough.  I used to do it.  Listening to people bitch about their problems and blaming you for them when there isn’t anything you can do.  But you know what you can do?  Your job!  When someone calls you and gives you details about a problem, how about adding them to the ticket, huh? When the technician reads it and it has no details, I’m pretty sure he won’t be a fucking mind reader and know all the things you didn’t write down!

And hey, while we’re here… you!  Yeah you, Mr. Technician.  When you get a ticket that is light on the details, how about you call the customer and ask, “Dude… WTF?” or, you know, something more business-ish like “Excuse me, sir, but what seems to be the problem?”  You know what you shouldn’t do?  Wander around on your own trying to decipher the cryptic garbage in the ticket and figure out what the problem is all by yourself.  You really don’t want to waste six hours working on the wrong thing when three minutes on the phone would have told you it was a five minute fix.

And the whole lot of you… yeah, ALL of you! Stop lying to people.  Don’t tell the customer they’ll be getting a call in a few minutes unless it’s true.  An hour is not a few minutes, not even close.  Two hours is way off, four hours is even further away, and six hours is a giant waste of everyone’s time.  The real kicker?  You all work at a communications company and the one thing you suck at more than anything else?  Communication!

Listening versus Waiting To Talk

Random Thoughts

Have you ever been talking with someone, regaling a story, and when you finish they immediately respond with a story of their own?  One that somehow makes your story insignificant?  Have you ever told someone something to which they respond that they disagree, but the reasons they give are completely out of line with everything you just said?

I have.  When it happens, I try to notice, because most people who do this become obvious in their patterns.  They are not really listening to you, they are waiting for their turn to talk.

The Internet is full of people with this problem, especially when it comes to game design.  Take this thread for example.  Where I linked to should be a post of someone saying that the upcoming Star Trek Online game should avoid being a DIKU clone like so many other games.  He goes into a pretty elaborate tale of how things might work.  The second reply following him is a post saying his idea would fail as a DIKU.

Ummm… duh?  And the guy even quoted the entire original post, including the parts where the original poster said explicitly that it wasn’t a DIKU idea.

This is the sort of thing that makes conversation hard on the Internet.  Some people know what they want to say, they are just waiting for an opportunity to say it.  They don’t join a conversation so much as they look for an opening (no matter how ill fitting) and step in to criticize and spew their opinion.  I mean, if a few people are talking about how to make great soups, what is the point of walking in and stating that, while their soups might be okay for people who like soup, a steak would be a better meal.  It was a thread by people who like soup about soup… what the hell does steak have to do with it?

Sometimes people need to realize that if you can’t contribute to the topic at hand, then perhaps the best course of action is just to listen instead of trying to turn the conversation to something you’d rather talk about.  It really makes message boards less enjoyable, especially when the same person keeps trying to hammer his point of view into thread where they don’t belong.  If no one is talking about what you want to talk about… start a new thread, or at least propose that the thread steer another direction, don’t go hijacking.