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[Akura]

No, no. That's a cup-holder.

[BlackFlyme]

The Hell would a coffee tray be then?

Google shows me various cup holders.

[nenjin]

I do general and specialized tech support now RK, and that's still pretty much the case. The level of user knowledge (about the things they care about) has come up surely.

And to be fair, today, most people on the phone sound embarrassed when they can't keep up. Versus the 90s where I'm sure people were more likely to be belligerently ignorant about their devices. I'm still surprised how I can hear so many people hesitate when I tell them to click the windows start button. It's only been there for 20+ goddamn years.

And now my company wants to move all our software to being primarily phone-based. (Which is a smart move, given the way tech and our customers use it.) But OMG I am not looking forward to supporting people's phones. At least with computers I can usually remote in and brute-force my way passed the ignorance.

[acetech09]

The amount of rude, classist actions people have performed toward me the last week has been fairly startling.

[Truean]

Please do not quote. Thank you:

It's far worse in legal. I'm not even talking about the criminals who literally spit on the police and wonder why they get arrested. That's just too obvious.

I've had people ask for demand with a bewildered look on their face when I don't give "it" to them, "just the standard form...." They mean of a contract ... for buying a house....

Go ahead. Google "standard real estate purchase agreement"

See all those different forms? Please tell me which one is "standard," because I have no bloody clue. There absolutely is no "standard contract" for purchase of real estate and I worked for a lawyer who made hundreds of those contracts for years. They all have different clauses about who pays for what (escrow, title insurance, title search, closing fees, realtor commission, proration of taxes, prior utility bills, prior tax bills, lead based paint, radon, environmental effects, easements, restrictive covenants, etc, etc, etc), and who pays for risk of loss (property insurance due to visitor injury, property damage by fire, flood, Act of God, or other), and the list goes on and on.

I've seen more than one person who just got a contract off the interwebs just about have a heart attack when they figured out how much money it would cost, because they were liable for environmental damage (as determined by the gov) from a "standard" contract they got. O, and they were going to absolutely have to hire a lawyer, and not to "get out of it" because there was no way out of it, but rather to avoid going in even deeper. That's right, there was no fixing it, and all they could do way pay an expensive professional to keep them from sliding down deeper into the hole. Not me, cause I'm not touching that with a 40 ft pole. They were not happy.

"Well there's a standard one right?"

[screams internally]

Please do not quote. Thank you:

[Tack]

When in doubt; Be a lawyer.
Give them the most simple, unsafe contract around.
Then, when it inevitably cocks up, they can hire you to fix the crap you threw them in.
-facetious-

[Truean]

I knew I was doing something wrong: namely not following that quote and doing the exact opposite.

God damn it, why did I decide not to screw people?

[Rolan7]

@larger post
Huh.  I won't say I had *no* idea, but that does seem worse than I thought.

Related?
My family said "WTF" when I rented a tiny, comfortable apartment instead of taking out a mortgage on a house
And I'm like
I spent my college years and then some fixing toilets and stripping paint for tenants
I don't have to rent
I just desperately *want* to be on that side of things
... And I've taken care of everything myself, because I don't want to be that person (who requested a service they totally did pay a premium for)

Though rationally I should take a loan and buy a condo.  But I moved a lot in my childhood, and can't quite believe that I don't have to anymore.  Second lease renewal is coming up, and I'm kinda locking up.  Three years is longer than I've stayed anywhere since... yeah, middle school.

AHaha, okay, a WTF from my time managing rental property...
This lady lived in my gma's rental house for, I want to say, 5 years?  10 MAX.
Papa (step-gpa) dies
Lady argues that gma ought to just give her the house since she's paid so much rent, and gma couldn't manage it.
Well, for one thing, my dad and I stepped in and maintained the shit out of that house.
Secondly, FUCK YOU LADY
NICE FUCKING TRY
WHEN EXPLOITING AN OLD PERSON, FIND ONE WHO DOESN'T HAVE A LOVING FAMILY
SHIT

[Eric Blank]

Clearly you're just too nice, truean. You need to be more cruel and heartless for poorly defined reasons.

In actual wtf news, we now have a sheep halter to take little sheepy for walks n' stuff. Guess that might seem kinda cute, but I sure as hell am not looking forward to having to wrestle it onto her.

[Tack]

Sheep are uncharacteristically dumb.
Put halter on- feed sheepy.
Put halter on- feed sheepy.

Soon enough that cute little idiot will jump at the bloody halter.
Or- Alternatively - not. Because really their co-operation depends entirely on how warm their brain is at the time.


Not that I have anything against sheep.

[IcyTea31]

@Truean:

I'm not sure if it works like that, but I'd consider creating that standard for myself. Make a template of a contract with the most common clauses and customize a copy of that as required. By reducing the time it takes to write the contract from scratch, there's more time to explain to the client what everything on it means and what changes can be made to it. Of course, if every single contract is too unique, creating a template won't work.

[Orange Wizard]

To me it sounds like people who haven't studied law are merely unfamiliar with, y'know, legal stuff.

[Putnam]

i think the problem is when they get indignant when corrected by someone who knows more than them

which is hilariously unreasonable in things such as law

[Frumple]

Not so much indignation as incomprehension and frustration* mixed with a side of just world fallacy,** in my experience. S'been fairly common for folks to become more tractable when you can address those bits to some degree. Been dealing with older folks whose brains are starting to slip away for a bit now, and it's a behavior pattern expressed with unfortunately increasing frequency.

Really, you could compare it to threat displays by a lot of animals, especially prey animals. It's not so much anger or self-righteousness, exactly, as it is poorly processing fears translating into anger displays.

*Both with their own incomprehension and the situation they're in.
**Things are supposed to work a certain way, and when it doesn't, cognitive BSOD followed by anger reactions because a lot of people have trouble figuring out what to do besides start lashing out until something fixes the situation.

[Putnam]

Yeah, just world fallacy's a pretty big problem, I've seen plenty of people fall under that myself...

i honestly have no idea how i manage to reconcile my idealism with the definite knowledge that pessimism is reality and life's unfair