Haters, trolls oh my! On the internet of late, it has become very easy to believe that almost everyone on there is an absolute Twat Basket.

We have all been living through the first pandemic in over a hundred years and added to that the partisan politics and rhetoric of people manipulating the internet for their own malicious ends.

Give yourself a break.

Now, I used to work in a call centre. (Stay with me, there is a point to this. It isn’t just a prelude to me announcing the world’s dullest autobiography.)

It was for a large British gas company, I won’t name them as they don’t really need free advertising from me and let’s be honest you could probably guess who they are.

I worked in customer service, as I pretty much always have done.

Why am I telling this story? Well anyone who has ever worked with the public will know, you do get some proper arseholes.

It is very easy during a working day to lose perspective and think that all of the customers have been bad, awkward or downright rude. You can then take that home with you if you are not cautious.

So I decided to do a little experiment, now I am not saying that this was scientifically accurate or anything, it wasn’t of course there are way too many variables. It is interesting nonetheless.

What I did was this:

I got a scrap piece of paper and used a five bar gate system of recording how many calls I had dealt with.

Further down I used the same system to record how many calls I had taken that I thought of as bad in one way or another.

Several interesting things came out of doing this, the first and most important one was that in reality the vast majority of the people that you dealt with certainly did not fall into the camp of ‘Full on arsehole.’

Secondly, I learnt that the number of bad calls to good calls ratio was much higher on a weekend shift. This could be because there are fewer calls on a Saturday. Or it could be if you call a utility company on a Saturday you are already quite far over into the arsehole spectrum.

Obviously, I have to make the point that I am not including calls that were about safety issues okay? Just to avoid those sort of comments.

Feel free to try something similar where you work, just be careful what you write on the piece of paper in case one of them can read it. That could make it a VERY bad day for you.*

Next time you are on the internet and the comments and replies are getting you down just mentally do what I have done above. Note how many people are nice, friendly and helpful against how few are actually horrible.

Then block or mute the fuckers cause Twitter isn’t a job for most of us so we DO NOT HAVE TO PUT UP WITH PEOPLE LIKE THAT.

You can even be rude to them if you want, although you are then kind of joining in then.

*I know someone who used to work in a customer service role and called a customer the C word. (And no, it wasn’t clever.)

When dragged into the office to be asked why he had done it, he simply told his boss that the customer was one. He no longer works there, I will not name him as that is unfair, but knowing him he may do that himself.