As I told Jacob this evening, I feel like a little kid playing at being a grownup. Let's face it-- I haven't had to be customer-service polite since my brief stint working in retail four years ago, and it's spoiled me. My brain is rebelling against being told now to say "good night" to the boss instead of "see ya", or, "yes, M. is in the office, let me transfer you to her line" instead of "Uh... yeah, I think she's here, hang on a second". It also doesn't help that the three people with whom I'll be having the most contact in the office are all 8-12 inches shorter than me, making me feel like the oversized puppy with the big gangly paws, and we all know that feeling big/gangly and acting clumsy/awkward are so closely related that it would be illegal for them to marry in 48 states.
I think what I need is a dose of whatever I'd been having here. It clearly made me dazzlingly competent, confident and generally in control of the situation. The only problems I can see are that a) what I'd been having was Indian food and fruit juice and b) the languorous and sultry poses are part of the package deal and they're unlikely to go over well in this context.
Complain complain flounder floundery flounder.
Posted by dianna at April 8, 2004 11:29 PMLucky me, 15 years of answering my father's business line (since he works out of our house) prepared me to go into automatic-professionalism-mode upon answering a phone. The problem that I have is that I tend to go braindead from sitting in front of a computer for eight hours (doing productive things like leaving comments in online journals), so I'll tell someone "good morning!" at 4 PM, or mix up my name and that of the organization I work for: "Thank you for calling Chris, this is EarthWorks speaking."
Posted by: Chris at April 9, 2004 07:25 AM"...it would be illegal for them to marry in 48 states." you are fucking brilliant.
i also feel like an elephant around short people. sometimes, just for the fun of it, i shriek "ooh! a mouse! a mouse!" and point at them. they like it.
Posted by: didofoot at April 9, 2004 08:03 AMIndeed, languorous and sultry poses have never gone over well with the older engineers at work. Makes 'em uncomfortable.
Posted by: Erik at April 9, 2004 08:55 AMErik: Do you suppose it is possible that they simply don't prefer seeing you in languorous and sultry poses?
Posted by: Chris at April 9, 2004 09:26 AMThis new job has significantly reduced the amount of time that you spend blogging and commenting. I can't say I'm thrilled at the change.
Posted by: Chris at April 13, 2004 11:53 AM