One of the things I liked most about working on the phones at call centres in the customer service dept, was the feeling I'd get at a certain stage of a call with a caller on the other end going ballistic. A feeling that a happy ending to the call was inevitable.
You build up a thick skin working in call centres, but the solidarity and comradery with fellow workers enables you to endure the daily lughole batterings and keeps you feeling like a human being and not some cog or tool or device being utilised by a system.
Many times my first call of the day would be the customer running on peak anger who needed to inject it directly into the intended target while it was still fresh.
But that kind of pure anger is a rare and special vintage that doesn't last very long if it has to fuel itself. So I'd just listen to the customer and shut the hell up until I was certain they'd said everything that needed saying before responding.
Most calls felt like small counselling sessions which had a distinctive shape with similar themes. Customers would often wish to inflict their anguish and frustrations for the company on me personally. Instead of the company I was working on behalf of being inept and completely incompetent, I was the one personally responsible for their workmen soiling their shagpile rug after mending the boiler. It was my fault the double glazed windows fitted the week before had started leaking this morning.
Then, when they'd finally ran out of ammo, and could see that my initial intention to try and help them with their issue hadn't changed, the apologies would come because they had made things personal.
"Sorry. I know it's not your fault...".
The conservation is reset, and you both start again but with the same shared goal this time. The volume of both voices remaining the same, as neither wishes to speak over the other. A natural rhythm to the exchange develops as you both climb aboard the same train of thought, setting off to see how far you can get to your destination. The journey becoming more valuable than the need to arrive.
But it all started with relinquishing control of the narrative and just listening. Not trying to assert control from the get-go out of fear of things escalating:
"Right, before you tell me anything, this is how things are going to go..."
There's a sense of bad inevitability about what is happening now in America. Trump's pride and pathological necessity to assert cliched depictions of inflexible strength lifted from the bygone eras his idols live in, is a trait I fear is so hardwired in him, that there will be the to-ing and fro-ing of sides constantly upping the ante, until everyone involved goes all in and a new peace comes only because the will to fight on has been totally spent.
