10/30/19

i'm thankful for the slack bot we have at work which, ever half hour or so, finds the most recent "great" rating that someone on our team has received from a customer (they can give ratings of "great", "okay", and "not good") and celebrates it with a fun gif and an announcement for coworkers to reacji with support and praise and i'm thankful that a great rating i received at the end of my weekly support shift yesterday was celebrated by the bot, especially since i had just a few minutes before received a "not good" rating from another customer that hurt my feelings. 

i'm thankful that the "not good" rating will not harm me materially and i will get over it emotionally, and i'm thankful that because of years working customer support, it is very difficult for me to be able to forget that there is a human being on the other side of the screen who has feelings and who is not "lazy" because they weren't able to solve my problem immediately or at all, which is something that i have noticed that people of my age and social class and political affiliation who would, on principle, never tip less than 20% in a restaurant or give an uber driver a bad rating unless they felt unsafe, seem to be able to forget sometimes. 

i'm thankful to understand that doing online customer support isn't as precarious as those other two jobs and i'm thankful to understand that the harm in those other two cases is more acute and material than in the customer support case, which is a distinction that maybe those people draw in their heads and which i can't fault, and i'm thankful to also know that some people and some companies provide genuinely bad customer service and for customers for whom a particular product or service is essential in one way or another (and in a way that's more serious than one bad hamburger or a slow ride to a party), bad customer service can be a serious problem, especially if their lives are already hard in one or more of the myriad ways that modern life is hard for people, which they often are, but i'm also thankful that my experience doing this work has helped me feel solidarity with the person on the other side of the screen and i'm thankful, always, for people who feel that way too and are grateful for the help that we try to provide.

i'm thankful that we facetimed with my parents yesterday evening and had a nice chat with them and got a tour of their new apartment in colorado. i'm thankful that i was in a good mood and so were my parents and d and i'm thankful we all love each other. i'm thankful to have learned that my dad was voted employee of the month at the dispensary where he works as a budtender, and i'm thankful that it's close enough to the apartment that he can walk to work everyday and that he, who has never been a big fan of walking, does that, since it's good for his health. i'm thankful that it's so close that when he works afternoon/evening shifts, he comes home for dinner and eats with my mom and then goes back to work. i'm thankful to remember my last year at my third high school and how, because i was so horrifically socially isolated and anxious and my mom wasn't working at the time, most days she would pick me up at lunch and we would go home and eat pasta or ramen noodles and watch the young and the restless, a service without which it would have been much harder to get through that very hard year. 

i'm thankful i got through that very hard year and there have been many good years since then. i'm thankful i checked in with a friend who reached out to me recently about her anxiety getting worse and i'm thankful that she's hanging in there. i'm thankful that i felt vindicated after a bug that i reported last week and that was kind of dismissed turned out to be a major issue that caused a lot of problems, which, i'm not thankful for the problems it caused but i'm thankful that it was a sign i should trust my instincts more (and also that i can do a better job of identifying and communicating the scope of an issue than i did). i'm thankful i wrote some good code yesterday and that i will have the opportunity to write some more good code today. i'm thankful for a DM conversation i had with a coworker about murakami tropes. i'm thankful to have taken out the trash and recycling and compost. i'm thankful that the fajitas i made (without a recipe) for us to eat for dinner this week are so good and were so easy and something i should make from scratch rather than ordering as delivery. i'm thankful that though there's not enough left for proper fajitas tonight, i can make some rice and make us burrito bowls. i'm thankful tomorrow is halloween and my friends are having a party.