I handle 100% of my indie app's email and telephone (yes, telephone!) support. My app is designing/printing labels. Printers in general, and label printers specifically are awful and inconsiderate robots, unable to perform the simplest printing job when you need it most.
Sure, 2-5% of my users are nasty/mean, but let me tell you a little secret: They are immensely frustrated with their life situation and they know how simple the solution should be. If you can show them the light, if you can "flip" these users, they will become your most loyal customers.
I start by telling them, "Hey, every month I get a call like yours where you are so frustrated you want to scream, and let me tell you a secret, if I got a call every day like this... I'd quit this business, but calls like yours are rare and I want to help you through this."
Boom. They're listening, and they're often listening to advice they don't want to hear. What kind of advice? Oh... like, "you will have to work through this and tweak the measurements until it works, because some printer drivers are mysterious and terrible. But once you get it, you'll be rewarded with it working for a long time until you have to buy a new printer."
Still, 50/1000 seems high to me, I like to think I earn the trust of 90% of my nasty/mean customers. Sometimes I'm lucky and I just paste a URL to a FAQ. After 4 years in business I had my first person hang up on me because they kept demanding a simple answer and I would say, "sorry, it's more complicated than that, I don't have a simple answer... I just have two complex answers that contradict each other until you can choose which one is the lesser of two evils."
It could be a book that no one would read: Zen and the Art of Label Printing
A lot of people contact support half-expecting that they'll get fucked around, and you see a complete 180 in their tone as soon as you offer a decent solution to their problem.
Of course, there are still those people who just want an excuse to be a cunt (maybe 1% or less, from my experience). I don't push them too hard to reach a solution, and just graciously accept the money they've paid me as an admission fee for what they actually wanted - an excuse to feel righteous when they smear shit on the walls.
> A lot of people contact support half-expecting that they'll get fucked around, and you see a complete 180 in their tone as soon as you offer a decent solution to their problem.
I occasionally get rude customer service emails at my startup, and in nearly every case the person apologizes after receiving a personal reply (from the founder, in my case) within 24 hours.
In many cases, the customer actually becomes an advocate for us. Once they understand that what they want (to be able to use our text enhancement within Kindle/gdocs/iBooks/Nook) is not something that my startup can do on its own, they will offer to reach out to the relevant BigCo and ask for them to build an integration.
Basically, people who will take the effort to reach out to complain to me are more likely to be willing to reach out to another company as well.
I have had to fire a few aholes from my SaaS. They would ask a question, get an answer, do the wrong thing, then call my support team member profanities. So I just refund their last bill and delete their account, and send them to a specific competitor I don’t like.
Honestly I'm often this customer (the one that flips 180 - not the one who wants to be a cunt!)
It's quite strange. Maybe it's because I have in the past drafted kind and considerate support requests only to be met with an incomprehensible response that's not related to what I said. Getting a genuine response is a pleasant surprise.
I think this is simple selection bias. People who reach out are going to be rather motivated (frustrated).
Consider that calling customer support often takes 30 minutes of being on hold and then talking to someone with no power to help you. People are generally do everything they can to figure it out on their own.
I did tech support for a few years and probably answered 100k calls or so. I would estimate that less than 1% of people were unreasonable. 2-3% were mean people. 80% were kind. It's a hard job and you have to focus on the good.
Yes, tech support can be difficult and it seems like your statistics are similar to ours. We receive around 5,000 support tickets per day and we simply cannot satisfy everyone. Sometimes we have to "fire" a customer who becomes disrespectful towards one of our attendants.
> Sure, 2-5% of my users are nasty/mean, but let me tell you a little secret: They are immensely frustrated with their life situation and they know how simple the solution should be.
Yours is a wonderful comment and you must be a very empathetic person.
Sadly, the vast majority of people tend to have just enough empathy to get by (we definitely are outliers!) and have a really hard time understanding that the very mean person most probably just had a terrible, terrible day or week, and lashed out on you. Yeah, it sucks and it is non excusable, but we all go through the worst days of our lives eventually.
In my experience it is wrong to assume that 5% of people are nasty, like the article says. It's a sad view of the world. 5% of people are currently blinded by life that has just shit upon them, and patience and a little selflessness would calm them down, and maybe, make their shitty day even better. And if they are complaining about something, whatever their attitude, there is probably something wrong that needs your attention.
Sociopaths exists but they are very rare, and often they just want to go about their day, not caring much about you to do anything good or bad.
I am at the point in my life where I have a shitty broken printer that I'm still not getting rid of, because at least I am aware of all the ways it is broken and shitty and how to fix them or work around them.
While I’m sure this is a real problem, I’ve been on the other side of this equation where you’ve tried your level best to get a problem resolved, and not only haven’t had it resolved, but have been repeatedly screwed even more.
For example, many years ago, I signed up for a landline phone (when that’s all there was), and signed up for a particular special service that Ameritech was offering that would allow me to have a computer on a modem running 24/7 without getting unreasonable charges. Eventually, I get the first bill and it’s charging me the regular rate. I sigh and call them. They agree it’s their mistake and they’ll fix it to remove the charge and it will be reflected in the next bill. It isn’t. I go around in circles for 6 months, with my bill increasing to thousands of dollars. Finally I call them up and just start screaming at someone, and that is what finally got it fixed.
I’m not proud to have done that, but sometimes it’s the only option. The person I was yelling at wasn’t the one who caused the problem or lied to me, but I didn’t know of any other options at the time. (I was raised by wolves, it turns out.) And, ultimately, it worked.
None of the examples given in the article make me think it would consider screaming at a representative of a company that’s wrongfully cost you thousands of dollars after you’ve spent months trying to rectify it as part of the “5%”. That’s totally reasonable, even if it want directly the representative’s fault. Screaming at a service worker because of a hair in your food isn’t—that’s psychotic.
No, screaming at a worker whose job is to answer the phones is not reasonable. It shouldn't have cost them anything either - you shouldn't be paying incorrect bills.
Had they filed official complaints? Gone to any regulator? Had the issue escalated?
I will say that I have since grown and become more emotionally intelligent and am far less likely to do that now. My comment about being raised by wolves was intended to convey that I was brought up poorly and not taught how to handle myself in situations like this without yelling.
> Had they filed official complaints? Gone to any regulator? Had the issue escalated?
At the time I wouldn’t have known how to file an official complaint or even that there were regulators who could do anything. What fixed it was that my screaming got it escalated to an appropriate person who could actually do something. I didn’t know the term “escalate” in that context at that time, and customers shouldn’t have to know how customer support works to get things escalated. That should have just happened when I described the problem the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or 5th times.
I think your comment was fine by the way, I got the raised by wolves part and you clearly stated you weren't proud of it. It's entirely understandable as a response, and it's not like it's some mortal sin. I was more responding to someone saying that was the right thing to do.
The OP clearly said they tried for months and stated they did not feel good about being pushed past their limit, so yes, I'm assuming they tried less extreme solutions over those months.
Otherwise, I agree with you. I'm trying to say it's psychotic for your _primary_ reaction to be rage.
Miss Manners reported her newspaper delivery going astray and calling the paper. The nice man told her "We don't do anything about that, unless the caller is really angry."
She asked if he would put her down as being irate, and he agreed. Her newspaper delivery resumed.
I have screamed at support people, but only in the rare cases (maybe three times on the last 30+ years would qualify) where they personally acted unreasonably and reasoning with them did not work, and they refused to pass me to a supervisor. The last part being key to me.
In the vast majority of cases I agree with you - if it's the company's fault it's not fair to scream at people with no power to do what you ask (but if there are no other means it may be fair to be intentionally difficult to force them to escalate - but you don't need to be rude to be difficult).
While I agree, I’d also argue that some companies put out purposefully bad policies and then staff customer service reps to handle the blow back. These situations are often really bad for the consumers and the staff.
Yes, this was my question. Are 3-5% of people horrible all the time, or are we all horrible 3-5% of the time? Or more likely at any given time 3-5% of us are horrible, with some of us entering the group more often than others.
Off the top of my head, I can think of a half dozen people I've known who are just horrible all of the time. Nasty to their family, nasty to coworkers, nasty to strangers. I can think of another half dozen who are just in the habit of mistreating service workers.
Some people you're just catching on a bad day, but there is definitely a portion of the population that are just crappy people.
Disagreeable personalities are definitely a thing, and some have some other stuff stacked on top that can make for persistently unreasonable people.
Off the top of my head I knew someone who had a really hard loss that they couldn't cope with, and you could basically just see them reeling it in all the time, and that was expressed outwardly as anger. Really tragic situation though, and if you didn't know the details you'd just assume they're a raging prick.
I find it hard to mine compassion when I don't know someone's backstory, and I usually default to filling in the details with some kind of dismissive story about them just being self centered and belligerent (probably true some of the time though). I find life goes better when I try to fill in the blanks with some kind of reasoning that would explain that behaviour better (while still not excusing it).
>Disagreeable personalities are definitely a thing, and some have some other stuff stacked on top that can make for persistently unreasonable people.
I score in the bottom 3rd percentile for trait agreeableness. I'm mostly polite unless perhaps I know something is not right and someone is trying to pull a fast one. I can totally see how low agreeableness combined with being towards the lower end of the distribution on intelligence would make a default strategy of loudly saying your piece and being too dense to a) know you shouldn't do that, b) consider your lack of understanding might be the root of the problem and c) comprehend the implications of what you're being told so that you can calm the heck down.
It isn't your fault. Support systems are designed to triage and remediate. This means the loudest voices get served the best, or, that the squeaky wheel gets what they need. Of course, there are limits to this. One thing I've noticed is when I am in an automated call tree with voice recognition, speaking loudly (almost yelling), gruffly, and demanding a human will often get you an level 2 or higher support tech. I tend to shut this off when a human gets on the line, but the call does get dispositioned and often white-gloved.
I think it’s more likely that most of the call centre staff were reasonable people who followed the process they were trained to do, but the process is broken. Some of them may have known it was broken, but either not known how to work around that, or faced barriers to doing so such as having to talk to an a-hole boss about it.
No this should not be correct (that is if you are assuming the 3-5% rules is correct and I'm not saying it is). The people who work for companies are vetted by the company so in theory the percentage of people who are bad would have to in theory be less simply because of that filter. The people a company (or someone is dealing with) is unfiltered hence the probability in theory again should be higher.
Some percentage of managers, including hiring managers, will also suck, and these can make crappy employees out of people who otherwise have potential to be good.
I think it's more than 5% on the service personnel side. Customers are a more reliable random sample than service personnel, who are likely to not like their jobs in the first place.
Personality traits like this are on a Bell curve, so he's just talking about the "left hand corner" of that curve. The percentage just depends on your threshold for tolerance.
I know people who are convinced that 50% of people are horrible people, their tolerance stops at "anything left of the median".
My tolerance is the opposite, and I can work with even quite problematic people successfully, so I would estimate that just 1% of people make that unnecessarily difficult.
I agree, and want to also add: If you're in software / tech (if this is an incorrect assumption on my part please say so and I apologize in advance; I've become used to seeing your posts and my sense is this might be your domain), on average you're working with people who are significantly more intelligent than the average adult human being.
In my experience, the rate of nasty / miserable / mentally unstable / "want the world to burn" chaotic people amongst the general public in the United States is pretty close to 1 in 20 (5%).
At my swe jobs it's been more like what you say~ 1% or less who are serious struggles to try and work with.
> significantly more intelligent than the average adult human being.
?
You'll probably take offence to this, and I'm sure this will contradict your general experience, and will probably even set off some folks' pet pride narratives about themselves working in software...but I think that's bullshit.
I don't think software people are smarter than any other profession on average, and I think almost anyone can learn to program and be employed in a software job. As someone who worked all of hospitality, hard science and software, I can say that all these folks that seem really smart, basically just seem that way because they use highly specialized technical knowledge. You can have pretty dull people who nevertheless are really smart at chemistry, or customer service or software, because they possess the specialized technical knowledge. I don't even think the average case is software people are smarter...but it definitely (again this will probably sound like I'm denigrating software people) seems like they think they are.
Yet that attitude is not unique to software folks, I've known people who worked other things and: lawyers think they're smarter, accountants think they're smarter, business majors think they're smarter, hard science folks think they're smarter, etc...
This probably will sound like I"m trying to denigrate software people, what I'm actually aiming to do is just to discredit the what I assume to be bullshit stereotype that (to seemingly overstate it): software is some sort of rarified intellectual pursuit confined only to some elite intelligentsia. In that sense, I think HN probably gives software a "bad name" in that sense by associating it with intellectualists, but even then truth belies that, as HN is diverse, it's not just software people.
I hope people stop with the belief that people employed in software professions are a hyper-intelligent rare species, and are actually just regular folks possessed of essentially fairly narrow specialized technical knowledge. To finish on what will probably be the harshest statement you read today: I get if people like that mystique, but I think it's unnecessary, often compensatory, and just plain false.
Happy to be wrong; guess it depends on how you define smart; lies, damned lies and statistics, etc; but that's what my gut says.
In latching onto the elitism angle, you might have misunderstood the point I'm trying to make. It's not that software people are so much smarter or better than other professionals. It's that software engineers (and possibly professionals in general, but this goes beyond my realm of significant experience) are more intelligent on average than a random person off the street. For example, look at Instagram comments sometime. They tend towards truly unreadable nonsense. The people pushing out these gems are the kind of randos I'm referring to. To be clear, I'm not saying software people's average mental capacity exceeds that if plumbers, doctors, bankers, etc. Only that on average it's way above the true average intelligence of the general public population.
A long time I worked on a free messaging app. In debugging issues I occasionally had to look at random selections of messages from the DB (conversation history), and it was utterly depressing. The average human is much lower, depressingly so, than I had previously fathomed.
In my experience, the smarter someone is, the more entitled/bratty they tend to be (especially to service workers or people they look down on).
On the other hand, “dumber” people (or just poorer people without a knowledge job tbh) tend to be more screwed over by society and may be more reactionary.
Eg. A swe might talk down to a waiter and be demeaned while they work, but a poor person may resort to yelling at a bank representative on the phone because that mistaken $10 charge affects their ability to buy groceries, and it happens all the time.
This has been my experience as well. I, too, have met and talked to thousands of people from every possible background on seven different continents of this world. From the poorest people on Earth to some of the richest.
I've seen the same thing. About 5% are nasty and about 1% are truly bad people who commit horrible crimes.
Saying this from my personal experience [ workspace related not familial ] : What happens is that some of these bad people have charisma, can make you follow them, for their ulterior motives. So if you get trapped in that circle, because you tolerated for so long, you probably did not get to experience the 5% bad, but maybe 20% bad over your lifetime. So my lesson there is ... walk. You recognize a problem, you walk, rather than try to fix it. Of course you should give a chance, but that is it - just one chance and then none.
Makes me wonder if the distribution is independent of other personality and socioeconomic factors.
Much earlier in life I helped recruit for a cult (much has changed since then). 3% - 5% seems on the high side for people who "just suck" -- perhaps by an order of magnitude. But perhaps the "just sucks" is context dependent. I found early on the FORD bulletpoints makes it pretty simple to start smalltalk (Family, Occupation, Recreation, Dreams/Desires).
IDK about "horrible" but https://www.sentencingproject.org/research/ puts it at 1.5 million peak. Thats not quite 1 percent of the US population but its also not that far off. And we can quibble about US sentencing rules but the BoP has a count[1] of felony categories and drugs make up less than half, and its even less in state prisons.
The reason the estimate feels high is likely that the HN crowd is progressively separated from less stable elements of society. The bullies picking on kids at recess don't generally make it onto the gifted / accelerated track, or your 4 year degree granting university. You're going to encounter fewer of them at upmarket shopping centers and corporate offices, if for no other reason, 1.5 million people are in prison.
The silly thing is to assume that since you had a bad experience with someone they are like this all the time. When you work sales, some people will enter your store on the day they got dumped, their family member died, they got kicked out of school. You never know why people are acting out. Chances are it's nothing about you.
Other cases, it might not be the person's first time in the store. If they tried several times to fix a problem they are frustrated and and angry. I've had this happen to me multiple times and no matter how patient and nice the representative is, it doesn't change the fact I've wasted way too much time on this problem and you can't make me happy. Even if you solve my problem, it will not make up the lost time and energy.
The only thing I'd recommend is to try and be more empathetic. You never know what the person has been through. If you think they suck and you see them at their worst, they could probably use some empathy.
> The silly thing is to assume that since you had a bad experience with someone they are like this all the time. When you work sales, some people will enter your store on the day they got dumped, their family member died, they got kicked out of school. You never know why people are acting out. Chances are it's nothing about you.
As much as I hate to post training material from ChickFilA…one of the videos they required us to watch explained this all so well and really made me stop to think about what others might be dealing with when I’m interacting with them. It’s a bit heavy on the emotional angle, but does it’s job well imo.
It’s been a long time since I’ve worked there, so no clue if it’s still required or not but, here it is in its ~3 minute length.
> The silly thing is to assume that since you had a bad experience with someone they are like this all the time.
The post mentions doctors and seems to indicate that they would put a higher percentage of humans in the ‘terrible’ category.
Add stress and people act poorly. There also seems to be a thing where people can’t always articulate what they are feeling (eg a specific phobia they have) and act out in response to the stress.
Once the stress has gone they are different people.
Don’t get me wrong, I also think that more than 5% of people are terrible.
It depends on how you handle a bad day. If you are self aware and explain "I am having a bad day before I got here." any rep with a modicum of empathy will appreciate your grace/effort to not lose your shit, often being extra nice about it.
But that relies on customer 5% not meeting a rep in that 5% too.
I feel like this guy is my therapist and just told me a fantastic insight that's perfect for me at that moment.
As I was reading it, I came to the same conclusion as the writer -
You really have permission to free your mind of those people and just focus on taking care of the people who don't suck. Just expect it and move about your day.
In 20 years of dealing with customers I've had to deal with maybe 3 people who were real jerks. Maybe my experience is unusual, but my customers come from all over the world. Rich countries, poor countries, non-profits, startups to fortune 500. Practically everybody is friendly and respectful.
Occasionally people are irritable or upset, but I don't take it at all personally. I just assume they're having a bad day or that they're angry for valid reasons I just don't know. When people figure out you actually want to help them the anger dissipates immediately.
Verizon treats their customers with contempt as a business practice, and when you call their support the phone operators are not authorized to actually resolve your issue anyway. So yeah, that makes people angry. They would leave if they could, but where would they go? AT&T? It's a racket.
> Verizon treats their customers with contempt as a business practice
I agree, but with actual support technicians at Verizon I've actually had pretty decent, even above average interactions. The company itself does things I detest, but I try not to take it out on the people answering the phone.
Personality disorders are very real and surprisingly prevalent, with 3.6% of Americans meeting the diagnostic criteria for antisocial personality disorder and 4.4% for paranoid personality disorder (the two disorders that are most likely to make people difficult and unpleasant to deal with). https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/pn.3...
I wonder if people with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) might be high on the "likely to make people difficult and unpleasant" list as well. A quick search suggests that ~5% of the population has NPD, which surprised me.
Many laws, company policies, etc exist to prevent those 5% from causing damage to the rest of the population. So 95% of people have to live with restrictions and bureaucracy that merely exists for those small group.
That might be the wrong way to look at it, or rather, it doesn't take into consideration the natural minimum.
It may be that just 5% of people will continue to break the rules _despite_ the bureaucracy.
So, how many of the 95% are following the rules _because_ of the bureaucracy? I suspect it's much higher than most people would care to admit.. just look what happens when the system or enforcement mechanisms break down.
How many of those 95% will find their own equilibrium outside of official laws? Do the laws only apply strictly-defined caps so everyone is on the same page as to what is or is not acceptable?
"Live with" is a weird framing, isn't it? If we accept the claim for a moment, wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the restrictions exist to give the 95% the best chance at a reasonable, unmolested life?
Yes - at the price of restrictions that apply to all of us, not just to the 5%. The powers that be are trying to tune the restrictions to some kind of global maximum of organizational output. Rules hinder that - they slow you down. But the lack of rules increases the damage that the 5% can cause, which also slows you down.
The hard part is, when something causes damage, it's easy to make a rule, but harder to see that the rule will cost more than the damage.
100 - ɛ percent of the population have to lock their cars and homes so that the ɛ percent of people won't steal or vandalize their property. The ɛ may be small, but while ɛ > 0, they can deal disproportionate damage unless everyone implements restrictions.
Ever get approved for a home loan? Much of that laborious process is to thwart fraud committed by a small percent of people. If everyone was trustable on good faith, computers could do most of the work almost instantaneously.
How about the entire organized crime bureaus of police forces worldwide?
Speed limits, building codes, the list goes on and on an on. And of course the wealth of society is sapped to pay for enforcement of all this stuff. Pretty much all civil regulation and the associated enforcement costs could be scaled way way way back if the single digit percentage of people who really suck didn't or the low double digit percentage of people who really get bent out of shape over these people got somewhat over it.
Encountered the same in dating: 20% of women are flakes, 10% are bad people, 5% really bad. 80% are good.
15-20% of women are flakes (non-maliciously unreliable, can't keep commitments), 5-10% (half of those) are actually maliciously bad people--bad/psychotic/abusive/crazy, 1-5% (half again) really bad (like psychopath/sociopath/criminally deranged bad). 80% are good. Stick with the good! Says nothing of actual compatibility in a pair just basic good or not.
That 20% of flakey (including the 10% of bad and 5% really bad) has nothing to do with you, it's not your fault nor your responsibility that they are like that, and their feelings and behavior are not your responsibility no matter how they might try to blame you for that; and there's nothing you can do to "change" them or "help" them or "better" them. And you probably can't "handle" them. If you get involved they're only going to try to hurt you (or in the case of flakes let you down) again and again.
So learn the signs that work for you and filter out the rest as quickly as possible. You don't have to be mean, but you have to be clear and set boundaries. There's no pride or sense or nobility in "handling" or "tolerating" a crazy or bad person. They're just dangerous and unpleasant.
The other possible sampling (which doesn't contradict the author's lived experience!) is that there are is a tiny fraction of uniformly nasty individuals, and a substantially larger (maybe even majority) of individuals who are nasty at individual points in time.
I think this is true, but the way I would put it is:
While you have influence over 95% of what happens to you, you can only really survive the other 5%. Take solace in the fact that, sometimes, when it seems like there's nothing you can do - you are right! That said, often the path to self-improvement is in situations we've misunderstood as "we can't effect" and are actually caused by us.
My dad phrased it this way, talking about running into this kind of person in the military, "Sometimes you run across an asshole, and there's nothing you can do about it until you or he moves along."
I've taken MDMA on 4 separate occasions, in the crystal form each time, at a dose of 200mg. Each time, I've watched my friends' eyes pop out of their skulls, sweat like crazy and hug everything in sight. I felt slightly better. Drugs most definitely affect people differently.
I've found that a lot of people in our industry (higher than 5%, probably much higher the smarter they are) have BPD or are on the spectrum which causes anger issues when things don't fit the pattern or outcome they're expecting.
I'm not saying that to disparage these people, but I've learned to be careful in how I interact with certain people, especially as that top tier of brilliant engineer are the ones I want to learn from and respect, technically. They literally don't know they're being awful, but in realizing the deficits here -- even they do not -- it helps in not dismissing certain people or just throwing them into the 'crappy' bucket.
Agreed, on a personal level, a little less so on a professional level (within reason) in that I want smart co-workers. I don't need to invite them all over to dinner to meet the family.
That being said, we try to hire for low ego, high humility and good communication skills plus technical. Very hard in Silicon Valley.
Even though I agree that there is probably a fixed porcentage of bastards in the world's population, I think 5% is a too high number. That's one in twenty and I don't think I will find one in twenty people who are the classical bastard in the groups of people I interact with.
I think it's more like 2-3% in my very subjective experience, of course.
I also think that the setting matters a lot. If you are in a very competitive environment, like the author in the article, maybe the circumstances push the number to 5%, but if you are in a relaxed, friendly setting, I think the percentage might lower to 1-2%.
In my experience people who express this kind of view (a slightly-sweeping, slightly-cynical take on the prevalence of shitty people) also tend to be epistemically overconfident of their grasp on social situations. For example, my opinion of the following quote is that it sounds contrived (Not contrived for the blog post, but contrived in the sense that the "brought the hair with her" hypothesis is itself contrived).
> My experience serving/bartending in restaurants was the same... As an example: one time a lady threw a huge fit about a 2-3 inch smooth brown hair being in her meal when her server was a blond girl and the entire kitchen staff were 35+ year-old Mexicans/ African Americans with completely shaved heads. Now I'm not saying this woman brought the hair into the restaurant and planted it in her meal... but I know for a fact it couldn't have been from any of our staff in the restaurant, so you can make your own decision.
My take is that there's less shitty people and more shitty Bayesians :)
So if I found a hair in my meal, I'd let my server know. It's gross, but it happens This woman found a hair in her meal and threw a fit. Whether she planted it or not (which is definitely a thing people do), she was not being reasonable in that situation.
I agree she was being unreasonable. The article claims that 3%-5% of people are "terrible" and "just wanted to be mean, nasty, selfish brutes" and the quote I used was used by the author as evidence for that claim. The author takes a situation where someone was being unreasonable and then throws in a hypothesis based on tenuous reasoning.
I mentioned it in a comment elsewhere in the discussion, but I've got one coworker who is just a terrible person, another that treats others terribly when he isn't getting his way, and used to have a third who would treat his reports like crap if they didn't worship the ground he walked on. I've got a couple family members who are just unabashedly nasty to everyone. There's a couple more who are just awful to service workers because they think they're lesser for the work they do. Those are just the people I have to directly deal with on a regular basis.
The author apparently logged the number of people who were jerks over the course of a given time and and that's how they came up with the numbers they used. Whether those people are awful all of the time, who knows. I know there's a number of people in my life who are just terrible people all of the time. Of course, they think they're the nicest people in the world and are the victims in every situation.
The lesson in the article is to be decent to everyone and if someone's nasty in return, ignore it and focus on the people you can help. The numbers aren't necessarily the point, but from my experience, it's a reasonable estimate.
I think it's possible. I feel like even the most normal people can have an off day when they just want to be assholes to people for whatever reason. (I've personally done this, and later regretted.) So maybe the sales folks or bartenders are seeing those people on their off days.
Ah I should have added wilfully nasty. The article I thought mentioned discarding "bad days". But then again are the malicious truly aware and holding themselves accountable for their maliciousness instead l just pointing to external circumstances.
Yeah. Been there, done that, trying to keep it well under 5%.
But that's different. There are people who are nasty more like 50% of the time, or maybe even 95%. It's good to recognize that yes, that's me some of the time, but "quantity has a quality all its own", as Stalin (allegedly?) said. Too much of that attitude and/or behavior puts you in a different category.
And even for people in that category, it's also important to realize that they have their 5% - or even 50% - where they aren't like that. That doesn't make you want to hang around them - even 50% jerk is too much for me to want to spend time with them - but still recognize that the other part is there, and appreciate it when you see it.
This definitely explains a portion of these "nasty encounters", but I think only a very small portion. The majority of people will at least attempt to be gracious even if they're having a really bad day.
Riffing off of the author's restaurant example: at the restaurant I worked at in college there were "known nasty" regulars. They were just...always horrible to the waitstaff. The hosts knew not to seat them in the veteran servers' sections, so I often dealt with them.
If they did happen to get seated in someone else's section, they'd get pawned off. Even the one waitress on the team who was constantly hustling to work every last table/shift/upsell she could manage would hand them off to me and let me keep the tip (if there was one...), rather than having to interact with them herself.
> As an example: one time a lady threw a huge fit about a 2-3 inch smooth brown hair being in her meal when her server was a blond girl and the entire kitchen staff were 35+ year-old Mexicans/ African Americans with completely shaved heads. Now I'm not saying this woman brought the hair into the restaurant and planted it in her meal... but I know for a fact it couldn't have been from any of our staff in the restaurant, so you can make your own decision.
Whether it's from the kitchen staff or waiter is kind of irrelevant; throwing a "huge fit" is ridiculous regardless. Kitchen staff make mistakes all the time because it's hard work with a lot of pressure. You deal with it by saying "sorry to be a bother, but I'm afraid there's a mistake" and that should solve it. No fits needed. (Of course, we have just one side of the story and it could be that the staff was rude or dismissive after she politely pointed this out, so we'll never be able to judge this specific incident; but people exploding over minor things is something I've experienced as well when I worked in retail).
We don't really know what her tantrum really was. Was she apologized and compensated for her meal or OP told her "we don't have anyone with black straight hair" (and while he has such hair, heh)
Maybe it was a hair stuck to someone's clothes and that fell of (or maybe it was OP's hair indeed if even he don't go near the food!). Or that blond person's hair looking darker after being soaked in meal. Or someone with curly hair had sime straight strands or they were less curly after falling off. I would assume any of those before assuming customer intentionally put that hair
So true. I take this as an aid towards my customer support approach. I guess it’s a good idea to include a slide on the onboarding process where we mention this and give some tips into how to deal with this in the most respectful, yet decisive way.
5% of encounters != 5% of people. In fact, even if the poster tried marketing to the same people at different times, he might well have gotten a different 5%. Some correlation, for sure, but still. Not to mention how encounters are a binary thing - another person might get a different 5%.
Also, the samples he's talking about are not really uniformly distributed over the world's population (i.e. "people"), nor even people in the USA.
The old adage: 'The customer is always right' which means a business should always have the best interests of customers at heart and always assume good faith, has turned on its head. Now customers have weaponized that old adage and presume an air of ugly hubris and are mean spirited because hey, 'The customer is always right'. Eh no, sometimes the customer is an asshole.
> which means a business should always have the best interests of customers at heart and always assume good faith
I thought it meant, at least originally, that a customer's choice to shop, or not, at your store needs to be treated as your failure to attract the customer, not the customer's failure for making the "wrong" choice.
Looking further into it, there's more nuance to it. Of the several people who popularized the phrase in the early 1900s, one of them was Harry Gordon Selfridge. While he is lumped in with the others, the phrase he used was actually "The customer is always right, in matters of taste." With the idea being that a salesperson shouldn't judge the wants of the customer. If they want an ugly sweater, sell them an ugly sweater, don't try to convince them to get a good looking sweater.
Others said slightly different things. Like Cesar Ritz who said "The customer is never wrong", where the idea is that the moment the customer complains, you take action to solve the problem the customer has stated, even if they are incorrect.
per 20 80 rule, 20% people are just 'not decent' no matter what, it has nothing to do with you, it's just statistics.
now for this small group again, 20% of them are really standing out, I mean really nasty, that makes it 4% of all people, right in the middle of the author claims: 3~5%.
it makes math-sense to me.
on the other hand, I would assume 4% people are genuinely kind and warm-hearted no matter what.
the rest 60%(excluding 20% at both ends), or 92% people(excluding the two 4% at each end) are just regular folks, a mix of selfish and generous day in and day out.
Surely it’s more time based too, the ebb and flow of people sucking at different times has to be a factor. Not even 5% suck 100% of the time. There’s no way that 95% of people don’t suck 100% of the time either.
Are we saying that 5 in 100 people will suck. If so think that’s an underestimate.
This roughly matches my estimate of evil drivers on the road, people cutting lines violently and not using turning lights, pushing to insert on the right when they used the emergency lane to pass everybody in a slowdown...
I think it’s way less than that. We just got back from a ~1600 mile round-trip to visit family plus a week’s worth of incidental driving around town to buy groceries and visit other family nearby.
On the highway segments, most cars were just trundling along between 2 and 20 mph over the limit, generally keeping reasonably to themselves. When an obstacle appeared on the roadside (stopped motorist, police, other), people flexed to let other cars get left and then returned to normal driving.
Sure, I noticed a few people driving aggressively, following too closely, changing lanes excessively to squeak out one or two extra spots, but that was perhaps 50 cars at the very most in 1600 miles of driving. 1 or 2 per hour, not 1 per 20.
In theory the vast majority of your long road trip is going to be on wide open areas with low enough traffic volumes that there is no point of contention.
Add in heavy traffic and the number of negative interactions will go up. Then remember you tend to roll with the traffic in these situations that lower the total number of people you're subjected to.
I think there's more variables to it than that. It's absolutely possible to create aggressive drivers out of thin air if you annoy everyone around you enough. I used to drive commercial equipment that simply couldn't keep up with normal traffic. Needless to say when you are a rolling obstruction you see a ton of "aggressive" drivers because "normal" drivers do aggressive stuff rather than get stuck behind you. I can't imagine how bad it would be if I were driving like that in a vehicle that didn't very visibly have an excuse to be acting that way.
If you smell shit all day look under your own shoe.
You've listed a few really bad behaviors and then used a bunch of weasel word language to imply a bunch of casual minor rule breaking is equivalent to its worst case forms. No wonder you see bad drivers everywhere.
The guy who's not using his blinker for a lane change on the freeway in light traffic isn't equivalent to the guy weaving through traffic without blinkers and even then is the blinker really the problem there?
Riding in the breakdown lane to pass someone isn't equivalent to getting tin the breakdown lane for a couple dozen feet coming up to a light just prior to the creation of a dedicated turn lane in the same space.
If you didn't get bent out of shape over technical rule violations that are fairly reasonable in context you'd see a lot less bad drivers.
> If you smell shit all day look under your own shoe.
Ha I'm going to have to remember that one.
I used to get all steamed up about crap other drivers do on the road. Now, I generally just ignore it. I don't know why they might be in a hurry or what kind of day they've had, and it's not like I can actually do anything about it anyway.
My experience confirms the general concept here (the number at 5% is arbitrary I'd place it higher than that). The point is (and I have found this to be true) if you deal with enough people you will hit on people who have let's say issues and do not think clearly or even close to rationally and there is simply no pleasing them. So for business the idea that you need all of your customers to be happy is simply not going to work. That is what I have found in actual practice over many many years.
Separate point when you are starting out in some business the easiest and first customers you get are the ones that nobody else wants or gives bad service to because they are irrational and unreasonable. (Keep that point in mind..)
There is an example with Zappos of someone being able to spend an entire day pleasing one customer. That is entirely unreasonable and except for the story and publicity value of that event makes no sense at all since anyone who wants to spend that much of your time is not going to be a customer that you (probably) want long term. At a certain point you simply have to (in business or life) walk away.
It's perhaps worth noting that in excess of 5% of the populace have one form of mental disability or another.
ADHD alone is estimated to be a disorder present in 5% of the adult population (2% are currently diagnosed; the 5% is based off childhood diagnosis rates and the fact it usually doesn't go away when becoming an adult).
And while those with ADHD are unlikely to populate the OP's 5%, those with pathological narcissistic, sociopathic, schizophrenic (and other) disorders very well could.
Also when you consider other dimensions of personality that are normally distributed, and intelligence which is also normally distributed... it's not hard to imagine the bottom tails of some of those being contributing factors.
I sort of think what you're really seeing within that 5% is a majority fraction of "baseline shitty" people, and a minority people of "momentarily shitty" people.
The baseline shitty people are likely a kaleidoscope/patchwork of pathologies, and the momentarily shitty people fall within normal ranges but circumstances have pushed their stress levels north of what they can handle.
Spot on. It's a shame that we haven't prioritized (and de-stigmatized) mental health, especially at a young age, so horrible children don't grow up to be horrible ego-centric adults.
Arguably these kind of personality disorders aren't really "mental health" issues. Or, certainly not in the same way that something like ADD, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, etc. are. It's basically a nice way of saying "your personality sucks so much that we've decided to label it".
I disagree, I believe they are mental health issues because they're highlighting a process breakdown in how someone is perceiving the world, relationships and challenges.
Is that to say that people don't have personalities which suck? Of course they do. That being said, there are many ways of balancing a person's tendencies towards negative outcomes, but ONLY if they can admit they have a problem and they're willing to put in the effort to re-balancing themselves.
This probably also raises if you incorporate people who were traumatized as children. Someone having a trauma response can definitely look like horrible ego-centric behavior, when actually they're having an internal meltdown where they're emotionally re-experiencing their trauma with no coping mechanisms because we basically never teach adults to recognize when this is happening.
A lot of hyper-toxic fiddly freakouts over small things actually turn out to be deeply rooted in some sort of horrible trauma.
Absolutely agreed, and I hate to sound like a Scientologist here, but I think a lot of people's struggles have roots in some trauma in their past. We're all shaped by bad things which happen to us, and for some people -- the ones especially with low Emotional Intelligence -- they can be re-balanced quite a bit in their thinking and patterns but ONLY if they're willing. That's like 80% the battle.
Except those disorders don't often translate to people acting terribly towards acquaintances. Sociopaths may be the nicest people you've ever met, if and when they want something from you. Schizophrenics may be various levels of detached from reality and perhaps difficult in that way, but only a tiny fraction of a percentage are so unhinged that they would act abusive or destructive.
There just isn't a large enough population of mentally ill with symptoms that would manifest as described to make up 5%, though they surely make up some part of it.
There have been any number of leaders that have been horrible people and yet the average normal people excuse their behaviors, and some even buy into their behaviors.
Being a horrible manipulative jerk seems like a great reproduction strategy to me.
On average women will see through you and won't give you the time of day. Some will fall for your terrible abusive manipulation, though.
They get impregnated and you move on. Your victims will on average have the usual mothering instincts and will do their best to help their kid make it. Eventually, that should result in you generating many offspring.
I hope this strategy isn't conscious on anyone's part, but it sounds like one evolution would reward.
I hope someone can show me a fatal flaw in my reasoning.
The problem with generalizations like this is I think it can cause you to miss real issues in your business. For example, I'm always incredibly nice to customer service folks. It's always served me pretty well, but one time I got so fed up with Comcast that I rage quit and switched to Direct TV. It's the only time in my life I've ever done anything like that. At the point where I got mad and started to quit they finally started offering to actually fix my problem. But by that point I was too fed up for them to save my business. If you just go into an interaction like that assuming I'm one of the 5% of consistently awful people you would miss that there is actually a huge problem with one of your business processes that you need to fix, because it's so bad it's driven an otherwise reasonable person mad.
"between the years of 2009 and 2013, I talked to something like 13,000 to 15,000 people while I was doing retail and SMB sales for Verizon. I learned a lot from that period, but one of the things I learned that I did not expect was what I now call my "5% rule."
No matter how kind, warm, thoughtful, amazing, cheerful, consistent, and perfect I treated people roughly 5% of them would just be terrible (yes, I have the numbers to back this)
... this number has held up in other parts of my life too (dating, restaurant customers, etc).
...
the take here - 3% to 5% of people for whatever reason just plain suck."
Sounds easy enough to believe. Of course, social conventions and so on influence such things, these people are not always terrible - I am not sure I buy the latter part of the thesis. I certainly haven't had this experience dating or in grad school. But, there is a reason "karen" is now a commonly used noun.
I’ve seen people who are very nice and one context be very not nice in another.
As an example, try being a medical doctor on HN. The toxic few are why I stopped posting about medical things here.
I’m not saying those responders are generally mean people. I think they’re normal people who for whatever reason feel wronged and are part of my world’s 5%.
I trust you have the numbers for this. And we can debate them until the world ends, but I think having a mental fallback that “yeah, some people suck” is valuable for your mental well being.
Life’s too short to let the few negative people out there bring you down. 1% or 5% whatever lets you realize that and move on
Is this person describing objectively horrible people, of just people who are incompatible with him?
I reckon about 5% of folks rub me completely the wrong way and I likely do the same for a similar number. I don't know that I agree that makes them inherently bad/the worst.
I wish I had more data on it, but I've seen many different sources saying the same thing, but the number has more closely approximated 2.5% here, and so I'm wondering if there is discrepancy, or this is within the range of statistical accuracy of one or both.
(OP) its hard to have an exact percentage because it's (crude) observation - I could totally go with 2.5%. The number is in the low single digits for sure, but definitely higher than a rounding error (or a null-hypothesis). Whatever the number is, it's high enough to impact the people that have to interact with lots of other people - they feel it, which is really what I was getting at.
Growing up my friend's dad was a prison guard. He mentioned once that 95% of the people in jail shouldn't be there. They did something stupid, or did a bunch of dumb things, but were not evil. He wouldn't talk about the remaining 5%.
I deal with technical issues for users and have for over 20 years all around the world. In my experience 5% is too high. There are certainly problem customer, some from frustration for things not working, some more a language barriers and then the jack asses - I’d say that 80% of the work is on 10% of customers which skews the results further. I can only think of a handful, less than 10 customers I wanted to fire and only one who was such an asshole I did in those 20 years. If you are able to solve the problem of the user they normally turn around.
Just wondering what has happened to this blog writer, no context none specific post…
I mean how can you state a statistics without defining scope and scenarios. By writing this article, he might have been mean to those who has challenge in life that he didn’t even aware of or appreciate. Does this count him/her as those 5% as well? Surely this can’t be a black and white discussion.
> ... and let that moment go - it has NOTHING to do with you.
This applies not only to bad behavior of others, but sometimes even to your own bad behavior. We are 'moist robots' as one cartoonist puts it, and the sane thing is to not beat yourself up for something stupid you did or say, but evaluate the whole stituation later when you are in a better state of mind, learn from your mistake, make amends, and move on.
When I was younger I worked at a local supermarket and later at a sports store - turns out customers at the sports store were almost exclusively nice.
Not a huge sample size as I only worked at the one store but from talking to others seems like the number of degenerates is waaaay lower when people play sports
I used to work in food service. I didn't keep track, but I don't think it was 3-5%. More like a tenth that. Maybe it's just coffee, and so even a great majority of the really terrible people could manage to pay and leave without exposing their terribleness.
My experience from retail: I often went months without a single nasty customer. I don’t know if I’m good with people or not but it was pretty rare to have an issue. Most of the bad customers were blatant shoplifters too, and not nasty at all (even these were uncommon)
From personal experience it's at least 1%. I had a Kickstarter project 10 years ago that had approx 6,000 supporters and 50 were simply awful human beings. Everyone else was ok. Anonymity brings out the worst in some people.
My phrase for this is “unreasonable hostility” and it really is sobering to behold every time. I do wonder if there is some correlation between this 5% and the percentage of sociopaths in society.
The general population contains sociopaths at a rate of 3% of males, and 1% of females. Additionally, roughly 70% of these people grew up in single parent homes without a father, and roughly 30% were from unwed mothers.
While these facts may reflect on a civilization's cultural values, it does not cover the roughly 1% of the general population that are born psychopaths. Psychopaths are generally not treatable, and a subset of these individuals should be considered dangerous.
Part of designing a Marketing/Sales campaign, is accounting for these folks too. One needs to realize some individuals are hostile if they feel you owe them something, and can attempt to do something nasty.
Have a wonderful New Year, and remember some jobs are just not worth the drama... there are hundreds of less traumatic jobs around that also pay well. =)
My brother and his wife are like that. They hate everyone because everyone is always trying to cheat them and take advantage of them. Total victimhood mind-set. Obviously he's a Trump supporter.
I was actually thinking this morning about a rash of surprisingly bad Covid etiquette I'd seen recently, and one thing might fit this "5% rule"...
A minority of the bizarre Covid bad-etiquette incidents I think can't be attributed to accident, grogginess, preoccupation, symptom fatigue, etc. Specifically, I've seen a few incidents in the last week or two, of people who really did seem to go out of their way to intentionally cough on/at someone.
It's sad, but I guess I can believe it: some people will be nasty sometimes, and Covid time gives them a weapon (whether they have it, or the victim merely wonders whether they have it), and they can do it with impunity.
(I saw something related, earlier in Covid, but it was usually presumed anti-maskers who seemed to do an intentional/faux cough as they passed someone wearing a mask, more like they intended it to be a joke. What I've seen recently seems to have nastier intent.)
I have only a handful of anecdotes, but I wonder whether the idea of intentionally spreading Covid (or making people think you did) was introduced in pop-culture recently, and people more inclined to be nasty latched onto it.
If they really wanted to act nasty and annoy germophobes, they could just use the bathroom and conspicuously not wash their hands--no pandemic required. I would assume these are the same people who are amused by intentionally coughing at others, and the coughing probably does less damage, so the net result is an improvement.
Clearly it's performative, and when no applause (from any similar assh#les in the immediate vicinity) is forthcoming, they take it as oppression, and the brainwashing of society in the large. Chip on shoulder, but scaled up by orders of magnitude via mass media assist.
Sure, 2-5% of my users are nasty/mean, but let me tell you a little secret: They are immensely frustrated with their life situation and they know how simple the solution should be. If you can show them the light, if you can "flip" these users, they will become your most loyal customers.
I start by telling them, "Hey, every month I get a call like yours where you are so frustrated you want to scream, and let me tell you a secret, if I got a call every day like this... I'd quit this business, but calls like yours are rare and I want to help you through this."
Boom. They're listening, and they're often listening to advice they don't want to hear. What kind of advice? Oh... like, "you will have to work through this and tweak the measurements until it works, because some printer drivers are mysterious and terrible. But once you get it, you'll be rewarded with it working for a long time until you have to buy a new printer."
Still, 50/1000 seems high to me, I like to think I earn the trust of 90% of my nasty/mean customers. Sometimes I'm lucky and I just paste a URL to a FAQ. After 4 years in business I had my first person hang up on me because they kept demanding a simple answer and I would say, "sorry, it's more complicated than that, I don't have a simple answer... I just have two complex answers that contradict each other until you can choose which one is the lesser of two evils."
It could be a book that no one would read: Zen and the Art of Label Printing
A quick video of my app Label LIVE, narrated by yours truly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnqUP1CZd24