[Courses] [Spineful Living, lesson 2: When Nice = Rude]

[Charlotte Oliver]

-----Original Message-----

I've tried very hard not to attribute the attitude to the fact that I'm 
a woman, but I wonder.  I've also stopped feeling guilty about it, but I 
still get angry enough I shake when I think about it.

Anyone else run into something similar?

LP
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Absolutely. 

Part of my job is to maintain a Cisco VOIP network.  All of my experience in doing this has been learned on the job without any sort of mentorship or training.  One day, I had to set up something special on the voice gateway that I didn't know how to do.  I read what Cisco documentation I could find about it but couldn't make heads or tails of it.  (Those of you who have read Cisco documentation about a subject you're not intimately familiar with before reading the documentation will no doubt sympathize with this.)

Given that it had to be done and I was making no headway fast, I opened up a support case with Cisco.  We pay for the support contract to be able to do this sort of thing.  

I said, "I don't have a ton of experience with VOIP.  Here's what I'm trying to do, here's what I've gleaned needs to be done from the documentation.  Here's what I've tried and here's where I'm failing to understand something.  Can you please help with the configuration?"

I then got a lecture about how I really didn't belong in the position I was in, I really couldn't just maintain a system like this, I was completely out of my league, incompetent, needed training, etc., etc.

I actually nearly burst into tears on the phone.  It was so completely out of line with what I had been expecting.  It was like walking into an ambush when all I did was ask for the support that we pay for.  As we talked, the fellow I was talking to eventually figured out that I did understand what an IP address was and understood networking.  He apologized, as he had presumed that I was coming from a pure PBX background.  He thought he was doing me a favor by trying to make me understand how impossible it was that I could possibly maintain this network.  (And yet, it has been working quite reliably for three years now under my eye!)

Regardless, I refused to call Cisco for any kind of support for months after that, because the last thing I needed in addition to having a problem was to be lectured to about how incompetent I am.  The worst part is that I let him shake me, actually let myself believe him.

That's not very spineful, is it?