Wednesday, March 12, 2008

You Sir, Are A Kumquat

Sometimes at work, I talk to really interesting people on the phone. Sometimes they're really nice and are so grateful when I help them out. Sometimes though, they try to melt my brain with their Jedi mind tricks when they want something I just can't help them with. For instance: Today I was speaking with a man who applied to be a proctor for our tests but was rejected. To administer Independent Study tests there are certain guidlines that proctors and testing centers need to follow. Proctors need to be full time educators, and the man who applied was not an educator. He was an educational psychologist. So when he called in to ask why he was rejected, I was unprepared for how good he was at arguing and making me feel like an idiot. He kept twisting my words, and every time I tried to explain to him that his office was neither a school nor a testing center, he kept challenging the definitions of "school" and "testing center". He kept twisting my words and overused the comparison of "apples to oranges" so many times I wanted to poke my eyes out with my pencil. I just felt like screaming at him but I'm paid to keep my composure. After hanging up the phone I decided I needed to take a break and regroup. In my mind, apples would be representative of a proctor at a school. Oranges would be considered a testing center. This man just could not except that he was a Kumquat, and I swear I almost lost my mind.

1 comment:

  1. When I worked at NuSkin in Provo we would have chinese people call in all the time, and usually they were just learning english so they asked to talk to an english speaking rep INSTEAD of the chinese speaking reps we had for this specific reason. But you couldn't understand a word they said, and if you asked they to repeat anything they took it as in insult that you were mocking their english when really I couldn't tell the difference between either languages...it was ruff, lets just say I didn't know how I felt about chinese people for a while.

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