Recently I have seen some reruns of Ashton Kutcher’s show, Punk’d. As you may already know, we are one of the dinosaur families without any kind of cable, so our late night TV is somewhat limited! Have you seen it? It’s sort of like Candid Camera, but instead of something silly or funny, the show usually puts the celebrity in an awkward, slightly victim roll. I think Robert kind of enjoyed it, but me, NO THANK YOU! It made me so uncomfortable to see people get nasty when they thought they were getting mistreated or the short end of the stick. Ugh, they don’t even seem to be embarrassed by their behavior when they realized they were on the TV show and Ashton and America were watching their shameful behavior.
Well, wouldn’t you know that this week I felt like I was on the show! I have spent countless hours on with customer service over a couple of issues… let me back track a bit. First, we have had this issue where our trash was not being picked up because the garbage company keyed in the wrong address to have service stopped! I spoke to the customer service 5 separate days before this horrible experience was rectified. Now in the meantime, remember I live in Texas where the temps are on average high 90’s daily!!! Our trash was disgusting! Smelly! Flies all around, embarrassing! I even called my neighbors to apologize.
Scenario two. I have been trying to run a promotion of our Sunday school classes at church and I kept getting an error message. Part of my job as Director of Member Ministries is to keep our church data base updated and accurate. When I was unable to do the promotion update, I called the church data base customer support three times to help me remedy my problem, and yet the same silly error message kept me from completing my task. Then, today, I spent (I am NOT exaggerating here) nearly 5 hours on the phone with these people today and guess what?! Still no promotion. As a matter of fact, we had to call our support guy to come in and help us un-fix what they tried to fix. My boss kept coming in and telling me to hang up on them, that this was ridiculous. She was teasing me that I am too nice and if I couldn’t do it, she would. Although we were laughing about the whole situation, it really wasn’t funny. This error kept everyone else off of the database too. Which means no one was able to do their work. I was truly quite aggravated too, but “Judy” was so nice and I could tell she was REALLY trying to fix my problem.
Now, about being and acting Punk’d…first wth the trash person, I could have been angry, mean, bitchy, rude and more. I knew I wasn’t on any tv show and could be as mean as I wanted to be, no one was in the room but me. I certainly felt like they were wrong and I was right, but you know what, I was polite, kind, concerned. I even told “Daisy” that I am mad, but I am not mad at her. I was respectful.
With “Judy”, she knew I was frustrated and I knew she was frustrated, but we both had the goal of finding a solution. We remained calm and respectful. We ALWAYS have a choice of how we will act. Will we show kindness, grace, compassion? Will we act like a PUNK? I still love my dear old friend Katie’s advice, “Kill ’em with kindness, Carm, Kill ’em with kindness!” I love that advice! As a matter of fact, Sharon Osborne just confirmed it in her own words on America’s Got Talent tonight, she said “What you put out there comes back!”
Don’t be a PUNK and don’t let the world PUNK you!
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