I’ve owned some trivially small businesses, and something I think is missing in the discussion is how quickly people’s presumptuous bullshit has me on the phone burning time-money. They think I’m rude, it’s them though, and their sloppy sales ‘lies’.

In those roles it’s not that I’m king whatever of wherever, but I know intimately how much my hours capitalize for, and given that lots of sales/customer communication is happening on the phone, you get a big impedance. Smug low tier sellers trying to talk past me, and flatly disrespecting me when trying to rationalize their pre-packaged pitch.

Architecture is customer facing. I am nice, and soft spoken the first time. But when kindness is misunderstood as ineptitude and people start talking to me like I’m a girl who could just never, like, understand a transmission…? My only regrets are not hanging up hard enough and refraining from swearing at them in the early years.

Other people’s C-tier employees and D-tier operations are not my problem unless and until they pay me.