Easy On Me

Continuing perhaps the least appealing blog entry ever… my diet, or rather, my new lifelong eating habits, which I changed overnight about two and a half months ago. (To recap: in order to deal with oncoming diabetes and scary cholesterol buildup, I stopped eating all meat, dairy products, nuts, nut butter, and oils.) I cover this information less because you’ll find it inherently interesting than as an explanation as to why I suddenly abandoned this blog so long ago. Getting a loyal blog audience is difficult, and sacrificing mine was not something I did lightly.

I have hurt a couple of friends and broken commitments these last few months because I simply have no energy or desire to get past the basics. By the time I’ve got the three kids off to school, done a load of dishes, done a load of clothes,  and worked out, dealt with accounting and lawyers, I was until last week pretty much done for the day. That was at least an hour before lunch was even a possibility. Suddenly things that normally wouldn’t get me down triggered unseemly amounts of pity: having a retarded child who seems impossible to toilet train, dealing with insurance personnel for another medically challenged child, sleep problems, the deterioration of a middle aged body, being hit by the IRS, my heritage of addiction, keeping the kids up with their homework… things I have handled just fine for years suddenly seemed like burdens.

I don’t smoke or take any illicit drugs. I can’t have caffeine because it keeps me up all night no matter how early I have it. I had also had to reset my sleep patterns and become a morning person, after years of keeping rock star hours. Up until a couple of days ago all I wanted to do was nap by the time the workout was over. That meant a full-on crash with nothing to catch the fall, because the much-desired siesta would shatter my new, fragile truce with the alarm clock. I don’t want to watch DVDs, I don’t want to surf the web, I don’t want to talk to anyone on the phone, nothing. I just want to sleep. Since I can’t, it’s just waiting for one second to saunter into the next, deciding whether I should curl up into a fetal position, fantasize about Olive Garden salad dressing, or just whine.

At this point you’re no doubt completely without sympathy. You are no doubt observing that at least the poor little rich CEO gets to work at home and won’t get fired if his  productivity hits the floor with a whump, as it has the last few weeks. You’re right, it could certainly be worse. But man, I felt like crap for a long time. I still have days where just reading my email is triumph.

I have been experiencing what can only be described as severe withdrawal symptoms from eggs, milk, cheese, and oil, with my body working full time against this effort by throwing every possibly obstruction in the path of my diet. A number of skin conditions suddenly flared up. I had headaches all day for weeks, headaches that didn’t respond to over-the-counter painkillers. When my wife would fry something, it was everything I could do not to fly into a rage.

I became Mr. Hyde most of the day, snapping at nuns, little old ladies crossing the street, puppies, unicorns, and my poor defenseless children for offenses ranging from the trivial to the downright nonexistent. At times I was crushingly tired by late morning yet not allowed to nap. My last remaining comfort used to be taking hot baths and reading, but hauling my great overweight bulk out of the bathtub when it’s all done strains my wrists, causing stress injuries that last for weeks. So that’s out. It’s one thing that I can’t have candy, Mountain Dew, or cheese. I can’t even take a damn bath.

And the food. Fortunately my wife is up to the hour of labor-intensive chopping, dicing, grating, and no-oil stir-frying food preparation needed to get me through the day, so I am lucky in that I seldom have to prepare it. For all the trouble required to make these meager dishes, it is sustenance and not often enjoyable. Because it has no added fat, I am often full, but never satisfied. Two months into the diet, I am finally coming to terms with the fact that I will seldom enjoy a meal for its own sake. I managed to gain weight the first three weeks because I just wouldn’t stop eating in hopes of somehow beating the system and actually feeling good at the end of a  meal. End result: Bloat, but no satisfaction.

The book I read descibing this diet promises that about 12 weeks in, you start to not miss fat. Maybe that’s so, but it glosses over the extreme discomfort one can endure during those agonizing few months. Starting yesterday a green shoot of hope emerged from the wasteland. I stopped jonesing for peanut butter. Maybe tomorrow, I’ll start looking forward to apple and leek wraps.

In Doing the Right Thing, Even Though It’s Wrong, Part 1, I discussed a situation in which I went with my ethical instincts in “helping” customers, against both the interests of my employer and, as it turned, the customers themselves. We Americans get criticized by the rest of the world, wrongly I feel, for being preachy, sanctimonious hypocrites because we try to impose our opinions on others. And while I feel that impression misses the nuanced position of America on a geopolitical level, I can tell you that I was preachy and sanctimonious about an issue when I worked at Microsoft and Microsoft paid the price for me. Uncomplainingly. Even though I was wrong.

Customers forcing companies to do the right thing…

Now let me turn the tables. Let’s talk about customers who try to force companies to do the right thing, even when it’s wrong. This one was right in my own back yard.

It has been over 8 years since I did routine technical support at my day job, but I purposely leave a few back doors open for customers who are determined to reach me. It is quite possible to get hold of me on my personal cell phone within 30 seconds of visiting my site. Although I am no longer able to handle support requests, occasionally customers ring me up, sometimes with odd results.

The most recent case was a customer who found an extra $3 charge on his credit card statement that appeared to be initiated by us. It had a cryptic, footnoted description and came after a routine charge he agreed with. For reasons of privacy he wasn’t willing to send me even a redacted portion of the statement, and had trouble describing how it appeared on the statement. I immediately suspected it was some kind of charge by the issuing bank that had nothing to do with eSnipe, and asked him to call them. He had. He said they couldn’t identify it.

I was still pretty sure this wasn’t an eSnipe-initiated charge. He was equally sure it wasn’t the bank’s. I told him I would issue a check for the amount of the charge, not pointing out that doing so would be immensely cheaper than handling this as an escalated support incident. Here’s where we get back to the titular theme of this post. He refused to accept the refund I offered for a mistake we hadn’t make. He did it on the very American grounds that he wanted to make sure that other customers didn’t have this problem. He would rather forego my non-refund refund in order to get to the bottom of the problem and ensure that eSnipe wasn’t doing this to its other customers.

Since we handle hundreds of support incidents a week, and I am in frequent contact with the support team, I knew this wasn’t the case. It was an anomaly. The customer kept me on the phone for an hour as we tried fruitlessly to diagnose the problem. Finally he hung up, promising to call the bank. I did the same, because my merchant account vendor happens to be his bank too. I thought I’d call our rep and see if the bank could help figure out his problem.

…even when they’re wrong

While on hold somewhere in menu hell, I got a call back from the customer. He had called the bank a second time, got through to a different person, and found out that it was indeed a charge issued by the bank and not my company. The culprit was weird formatting problem in the way the bill was printed. From what I could tell by his description, the bank had imposed a new fee on him, and didn’t start a new line when it was added as a line item. It came right after the eSnipe charge by coincidence, and thus appeared on the same line as the description of our fee.

But here’s what we can all learn from these shenanigans

There’s a deep, meaningful lesson in all this, I’m sure. I just don’t know what it is. The lesson I want very much to get across to you is that sometimes it’s okay not to force someone else to comply with your ethical code. I can’t do that, though, because even as I was in the middle of this frustrating and vaguely comical experience, I knew that I have been that same customer. I too have tried to make companies I patronize make systemic changes when I knew customers were being treated improperly by them.

Yet here I was, The Company this time, not treating the customer at all badly, and not being in the wrong. Yet any possible defense I raised would sound like stonewalling to the gentleman I was serving. After all, it was right there in black and white on his bill! A charge with our name in front of it! How on earth was I supposed to manage the issue if he didn’t believe this incident was unique, yet he wasn’t willing to send me a scan of the relevant portion of the bill to assist him?

In the end I simply had to remind myself that the customer is sometimes wrong. More about that later.