Monday, June 22, 2009

Yuck, it's Monday

Back in the day, when I worked in a factory doing manual labor on a production line, I knew that Mondays sucked because it meant a return to the grind. The weekend was over, no more relaxing on the couch. My time belonged to "the man" once again and since my time had just been my own for two days in a row, Monday was always the adjustment period. The day I was grumpy about being stuck indoors making widgets instead of sitting on the front porch at home and sipping some iced tea. But I was never one who hated Monday's and threw a big fit about them. They sucked worse than the rest of the week, for sure, but it wasn't a huge deal.

However, I am now officially declaring that Mondays suck and I hate them. Let me explain - I now work in a customer support environment on a computer helpdesk. In case that statement alone doesn't make you guys realize how bad my head hurts on Mondays, then let me give you a couple of examples of how every Monday around here works:

1. Did you know that every Monday at least 73% (not an actual statistic, but it's gotta be close to accurate) of all employees in my company forget the password they have used every day for the past 2 years? And when they call in, they make sure to let us know how stupid we are for doing whatever update we did over the weekend which would cause this login issue. Every Monday. Seriously.

2. Did you know that even though our pc tech's only work a normal 40 hour / 5 day work week, people are angry to discover that the broken monitor they called in at 6:00 pm Friday evening was not replaced before 7:00 am Monday morning? Seems as though our hardware department needs to hire additional magic fairies to secretly do the work over the weekends when no one is here. Because the magic fairies everyone believes we already have are just not pulling their weight anymore.

But I think the worst part about working in any type of customer service environment on a Monday is the fact that the majority of your customers are suffering from their own Monday crankiness and taking it out on you. Not only do I dread Mondays on this job, I almost always get a tension headache on those days. It sucks having to apologize to people who are pissed off that "you guys did something to my computer over the weekend" when "we" didn't do anything. But I do apologize. Over and over again. And it gets to me. It really does.

Me having a bad Monday no longer has anything to do with me... it's all about taking abuse from everyone else who is having a bad Monday. I know I'm not the only person who has this problem. I feel sorry for all of us who deal directly with customers. Luckily, Monday only comes once a week.

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