Had a check-in with my team lead today. They like to have one-on-one talks every couple of weeks. They ask how I’m feeling, what, if anything, I need, figure out plans for the future. We almost never focus on specific tickets or clients; our talks are more about how I feel overall about the job, about life, about goals and stuff.
It’s great. Have I said how much I really like this job? I can’t stop the anxiety brain; that anxiety is baked in after all these years, it’s not going away. I will always have that insinuating voice in the back of my head, the one that tells me I’m no good, that I’m messing up, that no one likes me. But on good days, I can tell that voice to shut the fuck up. And I am pleased to report I have been having more and more good days lately.
Despite what I said, today my team lead (let’s call them T.) started out talking about a specific call, mostly because we had just finished dealing with it. The client was upset because they thought we had been ignoring their issue today, and that their issue had been caused by a network outage that they also thought we had ignored. It was sort of a mess, and I was on the front lines, since I was the one who had to communicate with the client.
To be clear, the network outage was not something we could control, and we did, in fact, notify the client over the weekend when we got notified about the outage. The client ignored those notifications. And the other issue was… how can I talk about this without giving away company secrets? The other issue was unrelated to the network outage, as near as we can tell, was entirely the domain of a third-party service provider, and was the result of a settings change that the third-party told us was a) impossible to make and b) undocumented – there was no log or ticket for the settings change.
Someone is lying and I am reasonably sure it isn’t us. Either the client made the change, or the third-party service provider did. We will not be able to tell, but it got fixed and that’s as far as me and the company I work for should care about.
My team lead, T., however, started my one-on-one by talking about how it irked that the client was upset with us when we did all we could to fix their issue. And T. could not stop thinking about it. I absolutely saw T’s point of view. Here’s what I offered them:
I also feel a responsibility, a duty, to do my best. If I don’t feel that, for whatever reason, then I do not do things. I let things slide or ignore them. I push when I have that sense of duty.
But my sense of duty is based in rules. It’s got an algorithm. Duty means I have a process, or I can create one. Caring, on the other hand, is emotional. It’s about empathy, it’s about a connection to the issue or the people involved. Maybe we need to separate the rational duty from the emotional care. Save the emotional care for better things.
T. appreciated that, and having talked it out, we were able to move on to other, better topics. It was a good meeting.
This is very interesting. 🤔