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I get the impression that post office staff quickly become jaded from being nagged about packages, especially by elderly people. After all, the elderly don’t ha

I get the impression that post office staff quickly become jaded from being nagged about packages, especially by elderly people. After all, the elderly don’t have to work, so they can come to the post office every day and ask insistently for packages they know are on the way, but haven’t yet arrived. So, by the time you went there with your problem, any last bit of good customer service had been burnt out of the clerk.

warent 3y ago
Hopefully you're not saying this as an excuse or justification for runaway hubris and just awful customer support.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  I’m saying it as a force of nature that one just has to deal with. I’ve observed it in many post offices across many countries.
- nullc 3y ago
  All we can hope to do is to understand. When someone deals day in and day out with abusive customers who are sure of things that are just flat wrong it has a predictable effect on the persons handling of legitimate cases. It's not good, it's not just, but it's understandable. Armed with that understanding we can at least try to self-help by making ourselves look as little like the bad customers as we can. Should we have to? Not according to how things should be. But how things should be isn't what counts in the world, how things are is what matters. And at the end of the day-- do you want your package or not?
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    Grinning and bearing abusive customers is not the default state of the world, there are societies where abusive customers are not tolerated at all and thus very rare.
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      An elderly person coming to the post office every day to check for a package may be annoying to the people working there, but they should tolerate it. What's the alternative, chewing out the old person? That's cruel. Banning them from the post office? Unconscionable.
      - MichaelZuo 3y ago
        How does this relate to the practices of other societies?
        jareklupinski 3y ago
        i'm curious now, can you tell me specifically which societies are immune to basically the human equivalent of a DDoS?
        MichaelZuo 3y ago
        'Immune' and 'human equivalent of a DDoS' are pretty extreme conditions, far from what I had in mind, but even in that case there's at least one well known example, North Korea.
        mcpackieh 3y ago
        > I get the impression that post office staff quickly become jaded from being nagged about packages, especially by elderly people. After all, the elderly don’t have to work, so they can come to the post office every day and ask insistently for packages they know are on the way, but haven’t yet arrived. So, by the time you went there with your problem, any last bit of good customer service had been burnt out of the clerk.
        MichaelZuo 3y ago
        Yes I read the parent comment when I replied. How exactly do your comments relate to my prior comment?
sixothree 3y ago
When I go to the post office it is filled with people shipping simple packages that could easily be handled by the machine directly next to the line, which I use then go drop off my package at the same counter. So yeah. People are leeches and sheep and feel some odd need to interact on simple transactions.
- buffet_overflow 3y ago
  I go back and forth on this, and feel similarly about self checkout. Is it better to streamline the process and lean on the technology, where staff can watch their jobs slip away, or is it better to chose the human where possible? I like a later analysis of the Butlerian Jihad from Leto II of Dune (https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad) that says > "I point out to you […] a lesson learned from past over-machined societies which you appear not to have learned. The devices themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines." The more we use machines for these “easily handled” use cases, the more we tend to expect machine interfaces for more interactions, and at some levels, I think that’s dangerous.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    The way I see it, using those machines is labor that people usually get paid for. I don't want to do that labor for free. Furthermore, the professional cashiers are faster at it than the general public. They make fewer errors and are empowered to correct more errors themselves instead of waiting for somebody else to walk over and clear the error. Furthermore, checkout and bagging can be done in parallel which is faster than doing both yourself. The only upside to self-checkout is lower labor expenses for the store. That turns into profit for the shareholders, not savings for the customers, so I don't care about that. And I guess maybe some people don't like the social interaction implied by human cashiers, but if you're not in the mood for that you can just keep your eyes down and grunt or something. Cashiers are used to people who don't want small-talk, they can generally take a hint.
    - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
gonehome 3y ago
When I worked a low paying support job there were the coworkers that complained about the people coming in and there were the good coworkers and they rarely overlapped. Same is true in retail or in this example imo - the worst employees are the ones that behave this way and rationalize their bad behavior.
gunapologist99 3y ago
This seems a bit ageist.

warent 3y ago

Hopefully you're not saying this as an excuse or justification for runaway hubris and just awful customer support.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
I’m saying it as a force of nature that one just has to deal with. I’ve observed it in many post offices across many countries.
nullc 3y ago
All we can hope to do is to understand. When someone deals day in and day out with abusive customers who are sure of things that are just flat wrong it has a predictable effect on the persons handling of legitimate cases. It's not good, it's not just, but it's understandable. Armed with that understanding we can at least try to self-help by making ourselves look as little like the bad customers as we can. Should we have to? Not according to how things should be. But how things should be isn't what counts in the world, how things are is what matters. And at the end of the day-- do you want your package or not?
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  Grinning and bearing abusive customers is not the default state of the world, there are societies where abusive customers are not tolerated at all and thus very rare.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    An elderly person coming to the post office every day to check for a package may be annoying to the people working there, but they should tolerate it. What's the alternative, chewing out the old person? That's cruel. Banning them from the post office? Unconscionable.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      How does this relate to the practices of other societies?
      - jareklupinski 3y ago
        i'm curious now, can you tell me specifically which societies are immune to basically the human equivalent of a DDoS?
        MichaelZuo 3y ago
        'Immune' and 'human equivalent of a DDoS' are pretty extreme conditions, far from what I had in mind, but even in that case there's at least one well known example, North Korea.
      - mcpackieh 3y ago
        > I get the impression that post office staff quickly become jaded from being nagged about packages, especially by elderly people. After all, the elderly don’t have to work, so they can come to the post office every day and ask insistently for packages they know are on the way, but haven’t yet arrived. So, by the time you went there with your problem, any last bit of good customer service had been burnt out of the clerk.
        MichaelZuo 3y ago
        Yes I read the parent comment when I replied. How exactly do your comments relate to my prior comment?

sixothree 3y ago

When I go to the post office it is filled with people shipping simple packages that could easily be handled by the machine directly next to the line, which I use then go drop off my package at the same counter. So yeah. People are leeches and sheep and feel some odd need to interact on simple transactions.

buffet_overflow 3y ago
I go back and forth on this, and feel similarly about self checkout. Is it better to streamline the process and lean on the technology, where staff can watch their jobs slip away, or is it better to chose the human where possible? I like a later analysis of the Butlerian Jihad from Leto II of Dune (https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad) that says > "I point out to you […] a lesson learned from past over-machined societies which you appear not to have learned. The devices themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines." The more we use machines for these “easily handled” use cases, the more we tend to expect machine interfaces for more interactions, and at some levels, I think that’s dangerous.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  The way I see it, using those machines is labor that people usually get paid for. I don't want to do that labor for free. Furthermore, the professional cashiers are faster at it than the general public. They make fewer errors and are empowered to correct more errors themselves instead of waiting for somebody else to walk over and clear the error. Furthermore, checkout and bagging can be done in parallel which is faster than doing both yourself. The only upside to self-checkout is lower labor expenses for the store. That turns into profit for the shareholders, not savings for the customers, so I don't care about that. And I guess maybe some people don't like the social interaction implied by human cashiers, but if you're not in the mood for that you can just keep your eyes down and grunt or something. Cashiers are used to people who don't want small-talk, they can generally take a hint.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago

gonehome 3y ago

When I worked a low paying support job there were the coworkers that complained about the people coming in and there were the good coworkers and they rarely overlapped. Same is true in retail or in this example imo - the worst employees are the ones that behave this way and rationalize their bad behavior.

gunapologist99 3y ago

This seems a bit ageist.