If you work with the public - are you finding things are getting scarier?

[CurdinHenry]

More aggression, more delusions to a fairly extreme degree?

This isn't the poor staff sat at the desk/phone/mail box's fault though, institutional incompetence doesn't give the customer the right to scream abuse/threaten to kill the customer service employee just trying to do their job, also stuck in that shitty system.

Oh, so you visited Birmingham and you just made up 'facts' about tent cities that never actually existed. Can safely ignore you in future.

Yes, there was (and still it's) slum housing. I never said all the council housing across the whole city was top notch. I said it was available.

Yes this is a lot of it. So many people now fancy themselves as part time solicitors. I’ve lost count of the amount of customers who have tried to AI complaint their way into partial refunds about the most inane and illogical things. It’s just too easy and convenient for them to be able to resist.
That alongside with I believe a lot of people lost social skills and patience during lockdown. The Amazon driver would simple rock up by the next morning with their bits & bobs and now having to wait for anything, no matter how well communicates, is one massive ‘disappointment’.
My mental health has definitely taken a big dive. I can’t remember the last time I didn’t lie awake most of the night worrying about having to deal with rude people. I honestly hate it. I’ve now gone the opposite way and would struggle to moan to anybody about anything!

I’m sure you can cope with a sign. It’s the people it protects that I worry about,

I agree that people are becoming much more entitled and ruder but the thing that is really making my life more difficult is those people now having access to AI. I can't tell you how many hundreds of pages of AI bullshit I have to sift through in a complaint to find a kernel of something legitimate or even to work out what it is about. Where we used to get 2 page letters we now - literally - get 20, 50 or (last week) 84 page emailed screeds of beautifully structured, headed, sub-headed, sub-subheaded, bolded and italicised nonsense.
There are several issues with this.
The first is the obvious - the time it takes to go through this bullshit and work out what it is actually saying - what are they complaining about, and is there any validity to it?
The second is that it takes 5 times as long to craft a response because you need to address each chunk of bullshit separately, no matter how nonsensical it is, which takes forever.
The third is that the mere fact that AI has spewed out a 20+ page complaint letter validates the person's feelings that a wrong has been done to them. Accordingly when you respond saying "we have considered your complaints and we do not accept them for these 22 reasons" it just enrages them and causes more phone calls, emails and complaints, this time fielded mainly by the poor admin/call staff.

It is utterly exhausting and demoralising for everyone. I am so tempted to run the complaint through AI and tell AI to respond ha ha but sadly that is not possible. It needs someone senior paid a fuck of a lot of money each year to waste their time dealing with something which, in the days when people would have to write it on paper, put it in an envelope and apply a stamp, would probably not have attracted a complaint at all.

People think having a bad day is MH crisis nowdays unfortunately

Oh sorry I've just said, less succinctly, what @SP2024 has just said. I will say that we also have people who will not accept letters without first being telephoned and told what the letter is about as a "reasonable adjustment" for their mental health disability, otherwise the surprise of getting an adverse decision in the post (or any decision) will cause them anxiety and may cause them to try to kill themselves. Then when they are phoned and told, they abuse the person who has phoned them. If it slips through the net and the letter goes through without a phone call their partner phones and emails saying that because of our failure to provide the reasonable adjustment the person tried to kill themselves and so will be suing us for damages under the Equality Act.
It is exhausting.

Zero Tolerance sign means ‘This place is shit or, worse, the NHS’.

You only need those signs when the paying public are driven to distraction. Or about to be killed through negligence.

One thing that has become clear in my sector is that there are a lot of people out there who need intervention from mental health or social services, but the provision is not there, so other agencies they deal with (housing, GP, schools etc) end up having to mitigate the issues. It's just crap for everyone involved.

Do you work for an ombudsman service? This all sounds very familiar to me...

I have a dual diagnosis btw, so I know what it's like from the other side and try and be sympathetic, but also if I spoke to others the way some people speak to colleagues my mum would come over and skelp my arse.

This!!!

We're told to protect our children from this tsunami of digital nonsense. In the meantime supposed discerning adults are drowning in it.

If you think it’s bad now wait 30 years and we’ll be dealing with the now-children who have not built up any resilience to someone saying ‘no’.

Im really glad I will be dead.

Ah, I wonder if you do the same role as me then, as the "having to address the points that are clearly irrelevant" is annoying as fuck. I get more information out of someone writing it in their own words, even if that's not well-structured or articulate.

We stopped any drop ins to our department now due to several aggressive incidents, you can only call which impacts some users who struggle to make phone calls. We're actually getting to the point where we might stop accepting calls because of the abuse, people will submit a form at 10pm and then you get a call at 9.05am the next morning calling you a fucking bitch for saying it's been received but not processed yet. I don't know what people do for work that makes them think it's ok to speak to other workers like that.

Full agreement and sympathy to all the PP talking about AI complaints, I manage all the SAR and FOI requests for the team and it's taking ages trying to work out what people actually want because I've been sent 6 pages of AI slop often quoting US Laws.

Same. Don’t even get me started on the ‘human rights act’ quotes..

And everyone is quick to start filming

I don’t work with the public, I have noticed the breakdown of social interactions.
You are not wrong. Society everywhere is full of angry people, people who have severe mental health problems, poverty, entitlement, lack of respect for others, rude, violent, drug use, etc etc. It is a war zone.

Do they though? Other agencies often state this person needs MH support because they can't explain the behaviours they see and think MH will magically make it all disappear with no real understanding of what MH services provide or are commissioned to do.
Go back 30 years, every person on my ward had severe and enduring mental illness, schizophrenia, bipolar etc. Go to a ward today and everyone has a personality disorder (most of which are untreatable and inpatient stays are shown to worsen the behaviours). I would say 80% of those have had shit upbringings and no life skills to manage what would have been seen years ago as normal life events.

I worked in a call centre 25 years ago and it was shit even then. People are nasty fuckers - I’ve been sworn at, threatened with violence, called stupid, had my accent ridiculed…times don’t really change!

Then your organisation needs to be using a well-trained AI system to help deal with it. And check before it's sent.

There's no excuse for customers being rude or abusive, but everything IS a battle these days, customer services are shit, and when you do get through too many call handlers lack basic critical thinking skills.

It's the organisations that are at fault - they need to train and set standards.

Oh heavens, the world of Pharmacy. We get half an hour for lunch in a 9 hour day and have to close. Only one pharmacist and he needs a break too.
Yelled at when closed, called the F word and asked " is my medication not more important than your lunch break". Easy answer No.
Effing as holes we were called through the glass. He barged on when we opened and demanded to be served first. It took me 20 minutes to find his meds...what a shame I was shaking so much I could not work any quicker.

People like this. 10% of the world's population are too stupid to understand simple directions, the rest are too vain, self absorbed and watching YouTube videos of fat Americans throwing food at McDonald's staff.

Yep, same for me. Also, I couldn't give a shit who you copy in.

Without wanting to be outing, I encounter a lot of people who have very severe mental health issues, in some cases unwilling to engage with support work, in some cases appearing well enough on the surface but with any prolonged interaction making clear they are not.

In some cases, yes, this is because of shitty upbringings or life events (which I know because they were disclosed to me) but the help that may have helped them process these and live with resilience is not there, and that has a knock on effect on the agencies they deal with day to day and the others around them (including DC)

Of course not, but it isn't the customer's fault either. And companies etc that make their customer help lines tortuous and hard to use have to shoulder some of the blame for the stress felt by people trying to use them.