Too many lessons learned makes for a dull boy….

 They say it is ok to make mistakes if you learn from them and see them as a life lesson. Oh, I have made plenty of mistakes and I have learned from most of these lessons. I  know these lessons all too well having suffered the consequences from my mistakes. When I was just starting out on my own in my youth I had my strong opinions and ideas about how life should be and was going to be for me. Now that I am on the mature end of middle age and have children that are making opinions for themselves and one that is just starting to leave the nest, I find myself giving them advice that goes in one ear and out the other. I continue to give this advice hoping at some point it will be welcomed. The thing is I learned the hard way so much that I can’t bear to see my children make these mistakes and try my best to steer them in a direction that they can avoid this pain. It is actually painful for me to watch. I guess this is itself a lesson on letting go. I really do try hard at doing this. This morning my 19 year old daughter left for her new job as a barista at a drive through at 8 minutes till the hour she was supposed to be there. This is her two week learning period (like a probation period) before her barista test, a test to prove her skills and the employers time period to evaluate her performance. I have warned her every day and night to arrive 15 minutes early. This has fallen on deaf ears. I can’t stop myself though as I know this is a small town and there are not many jobs here and on top of that, she LOVES this job. I know how she will suffer if she loses it and I will also suffer the consequences directly and indirectly as I watch her fail 

In the past I have watched my own mother (and even a friend) try really hard to get jobs and then only keep them for a little while for some petty reason or another. I am pretty sure that if she had taken a true self evaluation she would have seen that the job was more than she could handle mentally or physically. I have also seen her try diet after diet. She will be so good at the diet in the beginning, lose a bunch of weight, gain a lot of compliments and then return to her previous weight before you know it. I found myself not wanting to compliment her on her weight loss until further into a diet because it seemed that the compliments preceded the failure of the diet. She has done this circus with jobs, diets and other ventures in her life. Don’t get me wrong, I have a wonderful relationship with my mom and I love the stuffing out of her, but observing her behavior has made me keenly aware of my own limitations.

Learning life lessons and being honest with myself and my limitations had made me into the person I am, stagnant and dull. I do not challenge myself very much anymore. I am not very adventurous or spontaneous because of maturity. I haven’t found much reward or success either way, young and dumb or old and knowledgeable.

So I proceed in life and continue to learn. It is my mission to figure a way to find a balance between learning the hard way and doing nothing because of it.

Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes

I am a firm believer that we should work on changing our behavior as we mature. When we are young it seems to be our nature to do things that might be silly but might be taken as unkind by others. I bet we can all look back and think of a time in our youth when we had said something or done something that we didn’t give a second thought to, but that the recipient of this behavior might have been affected significantly. Even in my youth, I had always tried to be kind, but looking back,, it seems I myself may have been somewhat guilty of this immature and rude behavior, well… never again. I now realize that what seems small to me at the time, may not me so small to someone else.

 Something that comes to my mind lately comes from seeing first hand how a recipient of someone’s thoughtless behavior can affect someone significantly. You see, my  19 year old daughter came home this last summer so excited to share the news that she had landed her very first job. She was hired on to work for a telemarketing company. She was trained to answer calls and process catalog orders. After extensive training, she was on her own to answer calls. I tried to prepare her ahead of time by letting her know how some customers might treat her. I told her not to take the words or actions of negative customers personally. During her training she was taught to stick to the script they were given and to answer all questions with the scripts. These scripts were posted on the computer screen. Occasionally, I would ask her how it was going and she would answer ” ok”, just like most teenagers do when they talk to their parents, they don’t want to get into the details so they limit their answers. Eventually, my daughter was showing signs of anxiety and I would notice her crying now and then. I grilled her with questions and she finally confessed that her job was getting to her. She explained that it wasn’t the hours or most of the job tasks that were getting to her but that some of the callers were so rude and that her employer had unrealistic expectations. One day she came home early and I asked her what happened. She told me that she was sent home. I asked her why and she explained that she was taking a catalog order and the customer was becoming difficult. Her call was being monitored (as occasionally the employer does for quality assurance) and she had gone off of the script for a second. The employer gave her a week suspension without pay. That is a lot of money to a teenager. Upon talking to my daughter she stated that the customers statements and questions did not fit the upcoming script. The script included asking the customer if they were interested in a special sale and according to my daughter the customer had previously told her she only wanted the one item and to “save the speech”. Yes, due to my daughter treating the customer like a human being and respecting their wishes, she was sent home with out pay for a week.

My daughter states that the scripts they MUST stick to do not always fit each situation. If she went off of the script by even a few words she was sent home. During her employment here she was sent home twice and upon her return each time, her calls were monitored during a probation period. 

The employer was not the only problem. As you can imagine, the customers were another big issue. She encountered very, very, rude people. Not just one rude customer now and then, but a big percentage of them were rude.. She would take orders for customers that were catalog orders for thousands of dollars and then get to the end of the transaction and they would cancel it because the customer decided they didn’t want it anymore or they didn’t want to process the transaction the way it needed to be done (none of this my daughter’s fault). She encountered people that insisted on speaking to her manager because she had to “stay on script” and then when they were handed over to the manager and were not handled any differently. My daughter lost a lot of revenue because of customers that went out of their way to be rude and also wasted her time (time that could have been spent helping other grateful customers). She was only 19 and had to answer questions that were not age appropriate for her such as information about male enhancement supplements, and how well do they work? She had customers ask her if she was new ( when she had to stick to her script) because her script made her sound like a robot with no human emotions.  My daughter worked at a call center for 8 months and my reaction to those that take orders from catalogs or the such will never be the same. I have seen first hand the emotional damage it can do to the person employed by one of these places.  I will forever let these people say their scripts and I will be kind to them. I will tell them to have a nice day. I will forever put myself in their shoes as I have been educated; that is a good thing to do in every situation. I felt sorry for my daughter.. She now has a job that she reported to me yesterday ” I love my new job mom” and I couldn’t be happier for her.