If you’ve been paying any heed to my tweets over the past few days, you’d have some idea of how busy life has been in the little IT office where I work. We are overrun with Commerce students, and they are a difficult lot to support. I try, I work to avoid stereotyping groups of people based upon single arbitrary traits, but the effort involved in this endeavour has been taxing my limits ever since the dozenth or so vapid business major sneered at me for not immediately handing over expensive electronics that don’t now and never have belonged to them.
The fact that we at the IT help desk are neither a store nor medieval serfs frustrates the entirety of these beings’ educations, as they are by all accounts trained to either throw money at a problem until it goes away or else to futz with people until they realize they’re beneath you and spontaneously develop obedience.
The sense of entitlement is like smog around here. I am saying it is thick enough to obscure vision, folks: environmentalists will be pissed and asthmatics will die.
It’s the school year that’s to blame for this influx of walking damned commerce students, and I’d have a lot more ire for these folks if I hadn’t already used up all of my ire in the mental preparations I’ve been doing in advance of my own resumption of academia. I’ve got some goals, and they are ambitious, and with this being the last week before the commencement of my last year of undergrad I have ample time to sit back and interpret the whole ugly vista of the coming eight months as a terror and a menace and probably the greatest set of opportunities ever in my lifetime.
I hate that last bit the most.
So I’ve been keeping tabs on every single bloody page I find offering cheaper alternatives to the campus store for textbooks, in the hopes that I can spend less than five hundred fuck-mothering dollars a semester on books I’ll have no time to ever touch again and will in all likeliness only need to read a quarter of to do well. The more interesting possibilities include trading and renting books, and I sincerely hope I can come to some positive arrangement with one or another of these ethereal options.
The outlook does not look good, however. The book store, in spite of its being a hellish maw filled with smaller, uglier maws, is at least reliable. You know that it’s there, and that you can probably count on getting books in it. It’s what it’s for. I’ve trusted the Internet to deliver all manner of goods to my doorstep in the past, but I’m skittish when said goods will not only serve as the tools to leverage my way through the final horrifying battles of my education, but also cost hundreds of dollars even with hefty discounts.
You might sense that this is a sensitive issue with yours truly, but then again you and your wallet likely sympathize.
2 responses so far ↓
willdanceforideas // September 5, 2008 at 6:28 pm |
As much as I sympathize with you about the commerce student being annoying, it really isn’t them. It’s you. Any time you work in a position that someone else looks down on it’s going to cause frustration. As a hockey referee I hated coaches, as a ride operator at Wonderland I hated guests of Wonderland and as a Burger King employee I hated the burger eating community. The only problem is that I became a coach, I often visited Wonderland as a guest and I am a platinum member of the burger eating community.
Most commerce student don’t know about software costs (especially at Queen’s where I rarely heard of a student buying their own computer, let alone software), so I think they get one free explanation of why you can’t give it to them. After that you are free to beat them with sticks.
bitpart // September 5, 2008 at 6:52 pm |
You know I have work experience outside of this job, no patronization is necessary. If I didn’t think the behaviour of my Commerce student customers was at all different or more intense than the usual customer-service relationship, I wouldn’t mention it.
Here’s the thing, in other services that cater to the public at large you don’t get people coming to you every few minutes asking for “food plz” without elaboration and you certainly don’t get customers insisting you should give them products you don’t now and never have sold because they’ll pay you extra for it. You always, always get the occasional crazy doing just these sorts of things, but I wouldn’t hesitate to say that most of the men and women coming in here behave as such: with a palpable sense of entitlement, a distinct lack of knowledge about computers and our services, and a predilection to become indignant when we don’t immediately accommodate these things.
I thought I’d made it clear in my tweets that these students are persistent to extreme lengths well after an explanation has been given to them, hence my frustration. I do find it to be indicative of a distinct culture in this building much as I’ve stated that I try not to subscribe to such reductive thinking. I haven’t been hasty.