Friday, January 2, 2015

Ignoring people isn't funny

We know that our coworkers don’t respect us. Speck is essentially invisible. We didn’t realize until today just how deeply that disrespect was ingrained.

A patron asked Zebra about an upcoming event happening in February. At the end of February. We hadn’t even heard about it yet. Zebra informed the patron that there was no such event and that she must have gotten it confused with a class series starting next week. It just so happened that Speck had spent the last hour working with the upcoming calendar and had noticed said event. “No, she’s right,” interjected Speck. “I just saw it. It’s probably something Shoes set up.”
“No, I don’t think that’s something we’re doing,” continued Zebra to the patron.
“I saw it in your newsletter,” said the patron. “I’d like to sign up.”
“I don’t think there’s a sign-up sheet yet,” said Speck to the patron, trying to bypass Zebra entirely. “Probably not until the end of January. You’d have to check with Shoes.”
At this point Mr. Ed, who had been on the phone, got involved. “Can I help in some way?”
So of course Zebra tried to explain the situation, getting all of the details wrong, and the patron tried to explain what she had read. So, they went through it all again. The patron asking for a sign-up sheet, Mr. Ed telling her that the event did not exist, and Speck trying to relay the correct information directly to the patron. At last, Speck managed to get the patron to understand: the sign-up sheet would probably be out in a few weeks. Mr. Ed didn’t get it. He sat down (at Speck’s work station somehow) and started to copy the date and time of the event for the patron, information that, if he’d been listening, he would have realized the patron already had.

This was annoying. What made it rage inducing was what happened a few minutes later, after  the patron had left.

Zebra walked up to Speck, laughing. “Boy,” he said, “nobody was listening to you. That was really funny.”

Because being ignored is freaking hilarious.



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