Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Annals of Compassion and Genius
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2004 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
I was unduly cold and harsh to a customer today. I thought something like "why can't these people follow directions? why do they do any old thing and then whine that they didn't get the thing they wanted?" and snapped and wrote a snappish, condescending reply to someone who, as it turns out, was right, right, right, and I was wrong, wrong, wrong.
My boss found out and wrote me a gentle rebuke.
I thought I was going to have a performance evaluation today. I couldn't really concentrate on my work this afternoon, as the meeting got postponed, from 1 to 1:10 to 2:30 or "whenever the room goes free" to Monday morning. So now it will happen while my uncharacteristic and wholly without-basis outburst is fresh in everyone's mind.
Aren't I clever.
