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Here and there, I keep seeing people talking about how their past experiences cause them to react in ways that are unhelpful in !situation, whether it's dealing with people of other races ("I used to be unprejudiced, and then I dealt with lots of horrible black people and now I find them scary") or being able to handle themselves in a disagreement ("I was married to/grew up with/etc an abuser, so I overreact to conflict with over the top nastiness/abject terror"), and there's kind of this implication of: "... So it's not my fault."
Which it isn't, exactly, but my thought keeps being: "So you're getting counselling for that, right?"
I mean, the good Lord knows I have a whole bunch of triggers that make me react irrationally to things, but the thing is? I've always known that's kind of messed up, I've always tried to control it, and when I couldn't, I tried to explain it to the people it affected and apologise.
And I am, in fact, now seeing a clinical psychologist on a regular basis, and we're working on unlocking and expunging my trauma and my issues, giving me real control over these things. I acknowledge that I have a mental illness, and that I have a boatload of trauma and Issues in my personal history, and I'm working on getting better.
And yes, I understand how behaviour patterns can lead to prejudice. Allow me to tell my tale of exactly that (not like you can stop me, this is my journal).
I used to work for Directory Assistance. Basically the white pages by phone - a free service, no less, where people would call, give the name of the person or business whose phone number they wanted, and I would look it up in the database and give it to them. The way it worked was that they would say the name to the computer, which, if it didn't find a match in the 4,000-odd very common requests it pattern-matched, would send them to us, the operators. We'd hear the recording of what they'd said to the computer, and then we'd speak to them directly. Often we'd have looked it up by then, from the recording, confirm it was what they wanted, and release; a computer voice would then read out the number to them.
My average call time was less than 18 seconds, including time spent listening to the recording. My service quality record was outstanding. I was very good at my job.
Still, there were regular problem types; kids making prank calls, adults making prank calls, obscene calls, and people who didn't really know what they wanted; some of these made funny stories, most of them were just annoyances.
More problematic were the rude, hostile, offensive customers. They cause problems and they lie - oh, how they lie. (One of the more satisfying customers-lie moments was when a customer demanded my supervisor and proceeded to tell very false stories about me, only for it to be revealed to her that my supervisor had, in fact, been listening in on the call at the time, because he was checking that I was giving my customers good and appropriate service, and no, really, he knew exactly what I said, and it wasn't that.) Some customers would be rude to women and polite as hell to men - charming.
The thing is, after a few months, I'd noticed a pattern with a certain kind of unpleasant customer, matching a certain accent. The correlation took a while to hit me consciously - I realised one day that when I heard that accent on the recording, I tensed up, was wary, and when a customer with that accent was polite, I felt genuinely surprised and relieved. I heard that accent on a male voice, I just expected the customer to be rude, misogynistic and horrible.
Thing is, though... how much of that had become confirmation bias? Perceiving even brief interactions, the ten second-or-less calls when I just say, "You requested X, is that correct?" and get a yes and send them on their way, as containing a rude 'tone' because I expected it? Calls that weren't so quick and easy, that went sour because I was braced for hostility and was defensive from the start?
At this point I can't say. At that point it would have been hard to, but having become aware of it, I made a point of modulating my reaction, avoiding the contentious approach to answering the calls to begin with, and - as so often happened when I realised a run of bad customers had made me grumpy and I was being defensively cantankerous to all of them, and consciously made an effort to relax and be pleasant - I stopped having so much trouble with them. Some were still rude, sure - that reaction hadn't come from a vacuum - but I made the effort not to let it affect me, and it got easier.
(In a side note: Seriously, if you deal with someone in telephone service and they seem cranky from the start? Try to cut them some slack - for all you know they just spoke to eight people in a row who were viciously nasty and embittering, and it can be hard to let that go all the time. Be the one nice person they deal with after all that who suddenly redeems their faith in humanity - a couple of my callers had the experience of saying something nice to me, even just, "Thank you for your help," only to be greeted by a shocked pause followed by: "Oh, thank you so much, I've just had a terrible run of people being horrible and it's so wonderful to hear someone be nice..." in a tone that sounds like I'm almost crying with relief, because I was. Which, in the ripple effect that people's actions can have, put me in the mood to be warm and kind to my customers for the subsequent hour. So spreads joy in the world.)
After a while, I let go of that reaction, got back to taking each man on his merits. Now, a couple of years after I last worked the phones at DA, I'd say it's gone, because I couldn't identify that particular accent more accurately than "something kind of Middle Eastern"; at the time, I was used to recognising a difference between "something Middle Eastern" and that specific accent.
I don't, for the record, feel guilty about having got to that point. Partly because it was, genuinely, a learned reaction, not a prejudice in me that came from anything other than repeated negative experiences based on a particular stimulus. Partly because I was never actively mean on the basis of it; I did my job, with the same speed and professionalism as always, I was mostly just wary and guarded against hostility. Partly because I lived up to my principles, and, having identified the prejudice, I did my best first not to let it affect my behaviour, and finally to let it go completely.
And mostly because I'm aware that all of us, at DA, made generalisations about our expectations of customers based on their voices in a range of ways. Elderly? Could well be a bit vague, may need help with us reading out the number slowly and carefully (which most people hated, because it raises call times; I didn't mind because I was one of the fastest people working there, so I could afford the odd long call, and I like being helpful). From New South Wales? Will be clueless as to the existence of places that aren't in New South Wales and people who aren't from there, so will say things like "mid north coast" when you ask what town they're after and expect it to be meaningful. From Melbourne? Will be rude.
(Going through prejudices by state/city: Brisbane: Cheerful and generally polite, will often be wanting non-Brisbane Queensland numbers. Rural Queensland: Polite and friendly, but have horribly broad Strine accents that can border on incomprehensible to us poor West Coasters. Sydney: Think Sydney is centre of universe, and rest of universe consists of New South Wales and maybe Melbourne. Rural New South Wales: Have understandable confusion about some towns which are geographically in one state, but in the phone book of another due to border situation. Are likely to know the (nearest) town to what they're looking for. Less friendly than Queenslanders but still nice enough.
(Melbourne: Rude. Have inferiority complex about Sydney. Rural Victoria: Still a bit rude, generally think they know what town they're looking for but the number will be under a different town that's nearby. May be a product of Victorian geography. Special hate for the woman who refused to believe I knew what the area code for Ballarat was. Tasmania: Think in directions, not towns (like "north-west coast"). Usually polite enough, but conform to inbred moron stereotype far too often. Are rarely from Hobart or needing Hobart numbers; suspect state capital should be Launceston.
(South Australia: Polite. Often have trouble with towns, especially when looking for places in the wine district; you learn to know what they really want. Northern Territory: almost universally prank-calling kids, Northern Territory seems way too short on entertaining activities for children, especially children in regional Aboriginal communities; reports that the educational system out there is inadequate reinforced by these children being barely comprehensible and, on the rare occasions when they genuinely want a number, having great difficulty with concepts that should be basic. This needs to be fixed.
(Western Australia: Excellent for knowing what town they want. Far north has similar problems to Northern Territory as far as children are concerned. Perth people, to my disappointment, are ruder than South Australians but better than Melbourne.)
There's prejudice, and then there's pattern-matching, but the thing is? Even if you've had a series of bad experiences with people who have identity tag X, that doesn't have to control you, and should never affect your reaction to a new person with identity tag X. I spoke with very intelligent-seeming people from Tasmania, with polite Victorians (sure, they were probably tourists, but...), and so on. Overall patterns shouldn't define you, especially when you know that you're never dealing with a random sample. Seriously, bright, clueful, literate people? As a rule, they're not calling Directory Assistance from the cities. I think it's relevant that my experiences with country people were generally much better; they were a more random sample of the population, because they don't have as much access to phone books, especially the ones for the cities, and internet access is less widespread. Quite a lot of people will, when they want a phone number, look it up in the White Pages online.
Sample bias can really warp your perceptions of certain groups, as, of course, can confirmation bias. (In terms of state/regional conclusions as detailed above: Yeah, like I didn't already have some prejudices about the Eastern States, after growing up a sandgroper. Sif.) It's back to being one of those areas where it matters less what you think and more what you do, but you'll be happier in and about yourself if you can train your thoughts to be in line with your principles.
But it's never okay, in my view, to form judgements on a single individual. Representing isn't fair. I worked there for several years, handling approximately a thousand customers a day; over hundreds of thousands of calls, I once had a call that went like this:
Me: There is no listing under that name, do you have further information, or another name?
Him: Yes, there is. You're just saying there isn't because I'm black, aren't you?
Me: ... We're on the phone, sir. I have no way to know what race you are.
Does this mean black people are oversensitive about race, playing the race card wherever they can? No. It means that one customer was an ass. (For all I know, he wasn't black, just a white idiot who thought he was clever.)
The only vaguely race-related reaction that persisted was an instant horror when someone asked for the name Nguyen. Because immigrants tend to cluster, it's a really common name, and more often than not, I'd ask for the street and suburb, and they'd have it... and on that street would be fifty or more Nguyen listings, so I'd need the initials, only there'd still be twenty... so I'd have to ask for the precise address, and read carefully through the list to find it, because we couldn't actually search by street number because no-one apparently thought that there'd be large numbers of people with the same surname on the same street.
This is why I object to long residential streets. There was one street - in Sydney, I think - which was both very very long and apparently something of a Vietnamese enclave, because finding Nguyen on that street was horrendous. I think it even had blocks of flats on it, because there'd be eight different listings at the same street number.
*dies a little inside just at the memory*
Worst was when they weren't quiiiite sure of the house number, but they knew roughly, and had the initials... and there'd be more than one set of the same initials at close-but-not-the-same addresses.
I really don't miss that job.
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