“A Karen called my work this morning for help. SHe was very nice & reasonable. When the woman she spoke with explained that she needs another document to confirm some information, she asked, “Isn’t that already included on what I sent?” She said, “No.” Karens don’t like “No”.”
I don’t have a problem when misogyny is pointed out and it shure may make that extra spicy, but I have a problem of the kind “look who’s talking here”. Because the way “Customer Service” is set up (and I don’t even need to know which company or product) is set up to minimize the interaction with customers as much as possible by making it as unpleasent as possible and the service people basically powerless. They have a process to follow, the customers have a problem to fix, often those two don’t go together, and it becomes a bureaucratic nightmare. It is obvious the guy in that little story had previous contact with the customer support in question and is living in this nightmare when he is told that there is basically another document missing. If you cannot understand how that gets one to explode and how that is why he wants to someone who actually can do something outside of the process, someone with more influence - say a supervisor and not someone that in their obliviousness and missing empathy (all by process design). The shame is that the supervisor doesn’t have any of those power, they only see their job as conflict resolution and the customers that are driven to nervous breakdowns as just basically evil.
That story telling is just a little bit one sided, and I can empathize a little too well with the “customer” in question and get the feeling this “Mysogynist” or in my retelling “a Karen” story is just one more step in dehumanizing “consumers” because they are not customers anymore.
And what does that have to do with angry men commenting “not all men”?
Also, I am an anarcho-communist. I am very aware of power dynamics and imbalances, it is literally the basis of my political beliefs. I could write you an essay on power dynamics, capitalism, workers rights and intersectionalism, but I have better things to do today.
I have been on both sides of this argument which is why I believe what I believe. At no point did I blame the call centre staff when I had to go through the welfare system, even though it was obvious that they were under orders to try and find a way to deny assistance to anyone. It was far better to be polite to them, as you point out they have no power, then send a letter or email to upper management threatening them with legal action if they don’t comply with the law. Call centre staffing is a shitty job and has such a high turnover that it is likely that anyone involved will have found a job somewhere else before anyone else can work out their connection with my case. They don’t need me blowing up at them.
In hindsight I should have blamed the transphobes who kept fucking with my housing benefit claim, but I was too exhausted by that point, I just wanted it fixed and out of the way. But that’s the exception.
No, sadly it is not only the norm, it is the whole idea why that system is set up in that way.
That is the reason why I hate the misdirection at play here. The outburst may be colored misogynistic, but misogyny was not the reason for the outburst, and making it all about that is dishonest.
I am being totally honest when I tell you I believe the person writing that series of tweets was being totally honest. Sharing the thoughts that you actually had in response to an experience you actually had is honesty.
As for the misogyny not being the reason for the outburst, that seems like a pretty bold statement. It assumes that you are in a better position to understand the incident by reading the tweets about it than the person who was actually there and made those tweets. You have literally no information they don’t have any clearly don’t have a lot of information they do have.
And “misdirection”? Misdirection from what? What is this malign stage-magician on twitter trying to keep our attention away from?
You tend to blow up and verbally abuse people when they tell you that you are missing a necessary document to enact a transaction? Must be tough to get things done that way. My sympathies, as that kind of emotional lability is a legitimate obstacle for all but the most privileged of individuals.
Why are you so invested in pretending men don’t tend to blow up at women when they’re told no though?
Because the dishonest part here is that the reaction is because the victim of abuse here is male. It is that it is implied that there was no other reason than a male being told no.
No, I don’t yell at the puppets of the abusers either, and I know the algorithm well enough to know that it is useless to ask for someone higher up. No one in this escalation can actually change anything and thus it would only be interpreted in the way it was done here, as “they’ll complain about their contact.” I know all this because I was in this situations multiple times.
This is not about male abuse of women this is about making it so in the same abusive structures that made it so with a little bit of “manufacturing consent” and “divide and conquer” thrown in.
If I said a forest fire was caused by someone not properly dealing with their camp fire, would you say I was being dishonest because I wasn’t acknowledging the dry conditions?
Literally every single thing that happens has multiple causes, and talking about one cause does not negate the fact that there are other causes.
From the tweet describing the incident:
He immediately began talking over her, raising his voice, & swearing.
So that might have been:
Oh my fucking god! Another fucking hurdle you’re throwing at me. This is stupid. I can’t believe you’re doing this to me.
Or it might have been:
You fucking [gendered slur]! You’re just like my fucking ex-wife! I hope you get raped!
The thing is. The person who took the whole thing as a misogynist episode knows which of those (or where in between the two) the comments were, and you don’t.
This whole discussion is about “Is the original poster a victim who is to trust because the reason seams all too familiar” or “Is the original poster an abuser who uses every trick in the bullies book not to be confronted about it.” You default to the first, I default to the second because of what else she said beside “males can’t take a no”.
I’m talking about what I’m talking about, not about the topic you approved.
I am responding to your insistence that you know this was not an episode motivated by misogyny and that it was instead motivated by a person who was driven over the edge by an inhuman “customer service” system that is designed to drive people over the edge. And, further, that apparently this is so obvious that it is fair to say someone is “dishonest” if they deny it.
Every single thing you say about the way customer service is organized to dehumanize people can be true and this can still be an incident specifically motivated by misogyny and part of a pattern of many incidents specifically motivated by misogyny.
If you purpose is to try to convince people to try to change their view of the relationship between customers and customer service departments, I feel telling everyone that men yelling at women has nothing to do with misogyny is a pretty weird way of doing that.
So saying no to a person and then requiring that they not abuse your staff is the “real” abuse and we should just assume that’s what happened because you say so and have had bad customer service experiences before???
I’m not following.
Oh… wait… Maybe we should assume the woman is lying because we are misogynists who sympathize more with literally any man in a situation where there are unknowns. Gotcha!!!
Please tell me more! I’m enjoying learning about how this woman is a monster abuser for tweeting about a customer outburst and how the man is the real victim here.
Maybe let’s get some other kind of inciting incidents going though. Maybe this poor man is stressed by something. Let’s give him a mean wife who yells at him and spends all of his money! That’s good, maybe a teenaged son who is using drugs too. Now I really feel sorry for this guy. He just can’t catch a break.
Obviously. And I can only asume that you and Humbabella are in the enviable postionion to have never experienced this kind of abuse. That … wait, you just added an accusing line without marking it as an edit. Urmpf.
No. We should assume she is lying because she does so from a position of power that is rooted in abuse (by system or job, if you will) and belittles her victim as “no more than a male that cannot hear a no for an answer”.
I opened this whole discussion with switching around a few words changing the gender of the perpetrator, and it wasn’t less plausibel. If that doesn’t get you thinking about what this is really about, and that is perceived status. And resulting bullying by the more powerful party. And given the situation that whole power dynamic here is just the opposite and abused by the twitter author and I have no reason what so ever to trust her on anything. She is no victim here (at least not from the least powerful party in question, the caller), even if the story is true to its word.
Then don’t trust the writer on anything. Maybe they don’t work at a place that takes calls at all. Maybe they don’t have any employees. Maybe this abusive call never happened. Maybe it’s actually a vaccine disinformation bot and this entire series of posts is just there to gain credibility with a certain demographic who the bots handlers want to spread disinformation to.
But why claim that any such incident described as one was described in that tweet was definitely not misogyny?
Call
Response
Customers are treated like crap by customer service
They sure are
When a customer is a problem, customer service gaslights and deflects
They sure do
By creating a sufficiently kafkaesque system customer service can make customers very angry, and then use that anger to label them as problems so they don’t have to address their real concerns
It’s like authoritarian regimes driving people crazy so they can institutionalize them
We are falling under the control of an imperialist corporate junta
Preach on!
Because of all of that, there’s no way that a misogynist man yelled at a woman
The fuck you say?
If you want to complain about customer service and abusive relationships between corporations/government and the people they supposedly “serve” I think you’ll find nearly everyone disagreeing with you here would support you from “this is a problem” to “let’s break out the guillotines”.
I just can’t believe the hill to die on in this discussion is “Men never react with disproportionate rage when hearing ‘no’ from women.” or at the vest least, “Any dispassionate observer can tell for sure that’s not what happened here.”
I didn’t do that. I repeatedly said that I have no trouble that the text of the response might very well have been misogynistic in nature.
And now I have a whole thread because your interpretion is the only way my response was understood.
Let my present what I was saying with an analogy to show you how I see this situation.
You go to a BLM demonstration. You experience a lot of provocation from the police, including first violent acts. And they get what they want, some protestors start a brawl. The next day the local police chief twitters how aggressive those antifa guys are. Always out for violence.
This is how I see the author of that tweet. I don’t suddenly favour violence because of that stance or argue that it never happens. It is wrong to provoke it in the first place, though and even worse than act as it is the other sides fault.
No one is paid enough to deal with other people’s abuse. You seem to literally be making the claim that the employee “got this man angry on purpose” so that he would abuse her and then played the victim to her boss who then played the victim to twitter all because they really just wanted to make this man’s life miserable.
That’s literally gaslighting. It’s abusive. It’s misogynistic. And it’s creepy.
Now you’ve compared a freaking lowly customer service rep who got yelled at by an entitled customer to the actual police. This is beyond far fetched. It’s gross.
I get it. You feel like the people you’ve abused deserved it and asked for it. You feel like you’re the real victim for abusing them. That’s on YOU. Don’t cry to me for support in it any further. You won’t find any sympathy from me here.
Thank you. That is at least an answer. The gaslighting is abusive, it is misogynistic where it is directed at women and creepy. It is however not done by me and pointing out the system that does it and how it makes her superior who posted it a willing collaborator is exactly what made me angry enough to write my response.
So a cop followed me down the street in his car on a Saturday morning in the gayborhood- riding right up next to me.
A trans woman- middle aged then - wearing mom jeans - just came out of the Zipcar office. Right into the parking lot, got into my car - pulled up next to me. Four blocks riding my ass.
I should really consider that this wasn’t transphobia and harassment.
