Toolbox
As some of you might know I’ve worked in customer care / technical helpdesk for over 5 years. I’ve always enjoyed this very much, which usually surprises people because they think a call center is a hell on earth, but I feel that talking to people and helping them to solve problems is a great job, the reward I get from helping people is a very good one. I seem to be blessed with good social skills, a pleasant voice and a certain knack of being able to calm (angry) people and getting them to explain what bothers them, which obviously made me good at the job and made it so rewarding for me. If your constantly confronted with angry people you can’t calm or help, that’s very frustrating to any person and doesn’t make the job enjoyable.
However when you’re working in a problem – solution environment only social skills don’t get you there, you need to have a certain toolbox. A bunch of tools that can help you identify the problems and solving them. It can be an interface to find customer data, an error interface that tells you what is wrong with an order or a system that supplies you with information about the customer’s location, which in turn can help you resolve the error. Without this toolbox you’re nowhere, there is nothing you can do for the customer besides listening to him. Usually when you start a new job someone gets you acquainted with the toolbox, because if you use the tools incorrectly or not in the proper order, then chances are big you won’t solve the problem, it’s nice if you know how to look up customer location information but if you then don’t put in the correct information in the error interface, the problem will continue to exist. So, key to solving problems is your toolbox, knowing what a tool does and knowing what happens if you use tools in a specific order or way.
Last night I though about all the above after a discussion with Deck, to which I will come back later.
Only I thought about the above not in relation to work but in relation to life. One might say life is made up out of problems, we don’t necessarily need to perceive life as a problem, but I think one might say that the choices we make, the opinions we have, might essentially start out as a problem we need to solve. When we’re born we get a huge toolbox, we get tools, we might even make tools and most importantly we’re learned how to use the tools, our parents are essential in this process but so are the people you meet, the friends you have, the studies you might do. Learning how to use the tools is a process that I feel continues throughout your whole life. Essential to how well you do in life is how much of your toolbox you know and use, If you only know a quarter of your tools you might never be able to solve a problem you encounter because you need a tool that’s in the other three quarters of your toolbox.
This is the point where I come back to the discussion I had with Deck yesterday. He had just read an article about a journalist that was hired to write game reviews, the man was fired because the review he wrote wasn’t very optimistic about a certain game and one of the advertisers didn’t agree with it, thus the site that employed the journalist decided to fire the journalist in favor of the advertiser.
My reply was a bit short and simplistic: “That sucks but that’s how the world works nowadays.”
This in turn upsetted Deck because he feels very strongly about the right to have your own opinion and maybe even more so the right to journalistic freedom.
Let me start by saying that I completely agree with him when it comes to these rights and to the fact that what happened to this man is very upsetting, his right of journalistic freedom should at all times be more important than what any advertiser thinks. And this is also what I told Deck, but I concluded with: what can we do? the guy could go to court and be proven right, this won’t fix the relationship with his employer but it might give a signal to the world that this is not how it works or should work.
The essential tool I missed here is that I’m not familiar with American court or law, I spoke out of the knowledge I have of the Dutch system. And this is what got me thinking about the toolbox I described. Last night I learned that I haven’t yet reached the bottom of my toolbox, I am not yet familiar with all the tools I have and how to use them, so occasionally, more than I’d like, I run into problems I can’t yet solve. Deck is older than me and more educated so this occasionally leads to discussions, not because we disagree on a basic level, but because he can use his toolbox better than me.
So I realized there’s still a lot for me to learn :)