Phone Rage

Yet another night in work. Yet another night of people confirming my suspicions that Neanderthals have not in fact died out. I wrote about this in one of my very first posts on this blog, and I'm doing it again because I'm still so irate with this happening. A bit of background information first. I work in a Market Research job for Tesco, and we do telephone surveys, some of which we essentially cold call. The responses, as you can probably imagine, are not exactly friendly. They range from having the phone slammed down in my ear, to be told to f*** off/kill myself, etc, and imperatives to that effect. We just smile and put up with it because we get that shtick all the time. It's all very well that we are disturbing you, and we appreciate that, but that is absolutely no excuse for abusing us. They seem to forget that there is, in fact, a real live human being on the other end of the phone. How do they think I feel when they slam down the phone or swear at me? I can tell you that I feel pretty damned angry, often I want to reach down the phone and punch the person on the other end of the phone. There is, of course, a very simple solution to this situation, and the solution is something that seems to dying out these days: Etiquette. A simple, but firm No would suffice. And please and thank you wouldn't go amiss either and don't get angry either, it's our job to do this. Is that too much to ask?