Forty years ago, in a public commerce setting (Dairy Queen, local sports bar, tire shop)....you didn't have any real escalation episodes develop.
What I mean by escalation episodes? Well....a situation where a customer has a nervous fit, mental breakdown, frustration falling-out, toxic personal crisis.....and they can't handle 'bad' news.
An example would be that they ordered a club sandwich......expecting it in 12 minutes, and waited almost thirty minutes to get what you'd say is a really crappy marginal sandwich. In today's world.....they go ballistic, and will spend the next thirty minutes trying to talk to the manager.....finding that talking gets them nowhere.
This week, I noticed a Seattle video-blog where the guy talked about an imitative to being in employees for a de-escalation training episode. You would be talking about four hours....on how to handle a person having a personal crisis, and being unable to handle bad news.
How bad is this crisis business? You really don't know.
In some rural communities....like in a ice cream shop or burger-bar? You might have some crisis-lite guy once every two or three months.
In some of these highly urbanized areas? I bet you could have a four-star crisis-guy almost every hour.
The thing you notice.....we seem to be 'breeding' these crisis-freaks in abundance. They seem to be wanting to demonstrate more and more of their limited patience and juvenile behavior.
Common people able to handle 12-year-old kids in adult clothing with no patience? No....it's just not a talent that we felt was important in society.
Could I handle this type of situation? I'm mostly the type to let you talk for three minutes straight....to get the frustrations out, and then hold out my hand to suggest that we need to pray to the Lord for a good final outcome. If that didn't work....I'd pull out the cheapo fire hose and give you about three gallons of water to your face to bring you to reality.
It'd be best that you don't hire me to manage things.
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We operate a small organic teaching farm near the outskirts of Eugene, Oregon... aka 'goofball central'.
The goofballs occupy anyplace they can set camp in a tent or RecreateVehicle.
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Last week, I was chatting with a new neighbor, a recent parolee at the half-way house across the street.
We were discussing the difference in respect he gave and expected during his penitentiary years.
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As an example of disrespect of our community, I pointed to the goofballs in warehouse-pallet hovels covered in blue plastic tarps surrounded by mounds of their trash.
The absentee-owner swamps around us are infested with the vermin (I refuse to call them 'the homeless').
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That was his 'crisis tipping-point'!
He did his best to ream me up one side and down the other.
Fascinated, I let him his head...
... for probably close to twenty minutes!
He gave me every excuse in the book about his feelings about pointing to something.
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I was vastly amused.
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PS:
A couple-three days later, the house manager chucked him out on the street.
Apparently, they expected a level of tolerance he was incapable of giving.
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And a couple-three days later, Code Enforcement and Parking Control along with the feds in-charge of protecting DelicateHabitat© -- aka 'swamp', aka pretty much all of Willamette Valley -- booted everybody off the fields and streets.
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The bumblebrats hauled away five dump-truck loads, plus thirty-seven (37) tires...
...each piece hand-carried in by one of the goofballs.
According to the stencil, each dump-truck holds about sixteen (16) yards of debris.
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Coupled with the haz-mat crews and containers, the bumblebrat-supervisor estimated this one clean-up cost tax-payers in the neighborhood of us$100,000.
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I wonder if that number includes the times we called-in about some goofball staggering the street naked while screaming about mosquitoes.
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Now, it seems to me, if you are concerned about mosquitoes, naked might not be your best decision.
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