Misdirected Anger

It seems that in the last week that people have become stupid and not just a little stupid, but to the point of misdirecting their anger at the wrong people.

For example, consider those veterans who took barricades from the war memorial in Washington D.C. and carried them to the gates of the White House and dumped them. Seriously, if these people were actually thinking then they would realize that the President did not cause the government to shutdown but it was the Congress that did so. However, in people’s haste and anger they directed their wrongful frustration to the person who really never caused the problem in the first place.

As a second example, consider that in a Louisiana Walmart, welfare customers went wild clearing the shelves of merchandise after finding out that their EBT Debit card (food stamps) was not working. Some of the customers even left the store with full carts of unpaid merchandise. This problem was not a Walmart problem, but a problem created by a glitch by Xerox, the company that runs the card program. Sadly, Walmart became a victim of somebody else's problem, which they had no control over.

Finally, a third example is the signing up for the Obamacare program. It is the programmers who developed the software that should be blamed and not the Obama administration as many media outlets have reported. Since the healthcare.gov website is a portal to state programs, it is the states that should be at fault for not having enough bandwidth to handle the incoming traffic. Other sites such as Twitter have suffered from similar problems in recent years. My response is “get over it and eventually everyone who wants to sign up will be able to, it is just that the system is clogged by too many users”.

As you can see from the examples above, people miss direct their anger at the wrong people more often than you think. As someone who worked in customer service for 25 years, I realize that customers misdirect their complaints about products to people like me instead of contacting the real source of many of the problems which is the companies themselves.

So what causes all these problems? I feel that people like to blame the easiest person that someone can get ahold of whether they are the source of the problem or not. Sadly, as long as people direct anger to the wrong people, mostly innocent people will get blamed or possibly hurt either in a verbal or sometimes as I have experienced firsthand, a physical one. The latter one which shows total disrespect and unfortunately for someone like me doesn’t get the kind of acknowledgement from management as it should, just like those people who misdirect their anger in the first place. I will have more to say about this type of abuse in a future posting.

In a way, I am glad that I am away from the customer service circle, as I feel that things have gotten progressively worse for many companies as people misdirect their anger even more so than ever. I really wish that management would step up more so to eliminate the problems, but they don’t which just adds more to the issue. I can only hope that people someday learn to direct their anger properly.