[bostonsre]

Yea, that sounds about right. I think I recall being a support rep for trading software in college and I've interacted with those front line workers for a long time now so I have a lot of empathy for them.

They are just people trying to do their job and I don't recall a single support rep that wasn't just trying to do their job well. People are complicated and socializing is hard, especially when it's not in person. What we do is almost always not life and death. We shuffle bits around between computers, we shouldn't take ourselves so seriously. There is no reason people can't be nice to each other in these interactions.

[prower]

This industry mostly provides very ephemeral services, so it's almost never a matter of life and death (the entire multi-million email marketing sector could implode overnight and life would go on just fine), but you still charge money for those ephemeral services, and the least you could do would be to take your screw-ups a bit seriously.

I repeat, there's a big, big value in being friendly and basically "a human", but the very first starting interaction must be serious, not a joke.