Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Should I Call Him Gordon Or RLP?
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2006 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 So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it!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 had a conversation with some coworkers yesterday about customer service, and about whether to try to get abusive customers to realize their rudeness and stop. If one is more concerned with one's sanity than with justice, then one just manipulates and detaches, and stops seeing the person on the other end of the line as anything but a real-life NPC.
Gordon Atkinson writes, then, on a topic close to my heart.
And where am I in this whole process? Where am I? The real me? I don't know. Sometimes I think the better the essay, the farther away from you I am. Every minute I spend polishing adds another layer of separation between us.
