As you may know, I work at a call center for my day job, and I've bounced back and forth between different centers and outsourced contracts for about a decade now. Over the years, I've been shunted from tech support to escalations to billing... and as of this writing, I'm on a mixed billing/sales team.

You may have also gathered from my writing that, in spite of what I may have parroted during all my job interviews and supervisor coachings, I do not actually have an enthusiastic passion for outstanding customer service. Most customer service people don't - we are, by and large, a disgruntled and sarcastic lot... at least when the customers can't hear us.

(There are a few coworkers I've met who do sincerely have an enthusiastic passion for outstanding customer service, and, quite frankly, those people are scarier than Stepford wives.)

It's not that we dislike customer service, necessarily. It's certainly not that we hate our customers or hold them in contempt. About 99% of the people I talk to in a given workday are perfectly normal, polite, rational human beings.

But you just can't filter out that 1%. And try as you might to clear your mind once the call's done, there's always that little bit of stress and irritation and trauma that lingers in the back of the brain.

So, like Scott Adams before me, I'm distilling all of that fermented job stress out of my hippocampus and making a little storyline out of it - one that I expect will resonate with any of my readers who have also had to do customer service. Hopefully it'll be nice and cathartic for you guys.

All of this is to say that if your response thus far has been "wow, that misandrist is incredibly hostile and rude and Ted Peterson is entirely justified", you are, quite frankly, factually incorrect..... and I really hope you never call my center.