Back when I worked for Ranger, my co-worker Chris told me that he was going to buy me a t-shirt that said “I YELL BECAUSE I CARE”. He never did, but he talked about the t-shirt often. It shouldn’t be surprising that I yelled at him a lot at that job. I didn’t handle stress very well and Chris was very good at helping me feel stress. He was a friend before we started working together so he had 10 years of history that allowed us to have very free and spirited interactions.
Every now and then he would take me aside and tell me that he didn’t appreciate my behavior. Any time he did this, I would apologize for it and we’d work on figuring out what the real issue was. Chris was funny like that, he seemed to know when he had it coming and he was sure to see that my reaction was only going to impact the catalyst. Often reactions impact people who have nothing to do with the situation and he wasn’t going to be the victim in one of these situations.
It has been a long time since Ranger and I have matured past yelling at people simply because I have passion for the job. I still have the fire, I just direct it towards people in a more appropriate problem solving way. It’s a lesson that has stuck with me and one that I find myself using on telemarketers a fair bit. As much as I would like to yell at them for calling, I stay polite and get off the phone as calmly and quickly as possible because while they are choosing to work in that field, I doubt any of them are choosing to call me in particular.