ignoramus
A client called me yesterday and made me feel like the biggest idiot ever. And I hate that. I hate feeling inferior, especially in the intelligence area, and double especially when it's a commercial fisherman that is making me feel that way. He didn't actually say thing and I didn't say anything that would lead anyone that I am lacking in the brains department, but just yelling at someone, losing your cool and all-out shouting makes me feel dumb.
I pride myself on being extremely cool, dipolmatic, knowledged and even keel when I talk to my clients. I always feel like another person comes out because normally I'm a ditz, klutz, loud-mouthed goof ball. But to clients you'd think that I get my kicks out of chess and botany, the most emotion drive outburst is a smile showing teeth at a small child. This dude yesterday made me lose my cool and it made feel like I'm not good at what I do, or I should be doing something else that doesn't involve communicating with other human beings. The entire office heard me shouting at this guy, other people were sticking their heads in my office to look at my beet-red face and mouth questions like 'are you okay?' and 'what's wrong?' Sometime during the conversation I composed myself, lowered my voice and tried to present rationale to this guy. The whole time he just yells and yells and yells, won't let me tell him how I can help, what he needs to do, he just basically repeats the same three questions and calls me a liar. Only once did he call me a liar, but boy, that chaps my ass. Hate being called a liar. I courteously told him I was tired of listening to him yell, we weren't getting anywhere and would he call back and talk to the owner when he returned from his hunting trip.
That damn dude called back, was transfered to my attorney and was an entirely different guy. Sweet as pie, said things like "I am your puppy dog, tell me what I have to do." "My balls are between my legs, I am scared." Furious. So friggen furious, I wanted to start the yelling match all over again knowing he was lying. The worst was, the attorney got the info out of him, calmed him down and actually made progress. A day later I feel like a failure. Why couldn't I have done that? I know he needed to vent and it's not as cathartic to yell unless the other person is yellng too. That's where I came in, but a truly successfull person should be able to yell, scream, allow the other person to vent, calm, satiate, and make progress. I got the first part, now I think I need angermanagment.
The attorney and I essentially played the tax debt equivalent of good cop/bad cop, but if I was truly good at relations, I would have done the whole damn things myself. So now I feel less-than-average on the intelligence quotient.
