Don’t Let Rude People Ruin Your Day

It never ceases to amaze me when people are rude in the office or anywhere in public.  I wonder what is going through their mind that they can justify their behavior.  But more so, how can we “the recipients” of this behavior not let it affect us?  All to often we let these situations that happen to us to “stick” with us and bother us all day and night.  We try to figure out why it happened and was there something we could have done to prevent it.  Such as the situation that happened today in my office, a patient was accidentally scheduled for yesterday, which was a holiday.  The patient was called yesterday morning and was told of the mistake, we apologized and gave her an appointment for today at 11:00.  She called us this morning and asked for a later appointment due to a service for a friend, so we told her to come in at 4:15 and we would work her in, as our schedule was full.  When the patient arrived we were running about 1/2 hour behind, not the norm for our office, but it does happen.  The patient was roomed around 4:45, and at 5:00 our front door flies open and in walks the patient’s husband yelling at our front desk person “where is my wife who had a 4:15 appointment?”  I looked up and this man had the meanest look on his face, if I didn’t know him, I would have been frightened and I think my front office person was in shock.  I told him that we were running behind and she was next to be seen.  He proceeded to yell and tell me that our office made a mistake and this was our fault, rambling on and shaking in his anger.  I replied “yes you are correct we made a mistake, but were willing to get her in today”.  I did not even mention that they had changed the appointment from this morning to this afternoon as it would not have mattered.  Once I agreed with him and told him that his wife was next, in a very calm manner, he just looked at me and I smiled.  He turned and walked out the door, and we all just looked at each other wondering “what was that all about?”  We will probably never really know what was going on with this man for him to react to us in this manner.  The interesting thing is his wife was okay, not happy, but okay that she had to wait, go figure.   The important thing is that we need to be able to handle these situations knowing that maybe we triggered the behavior, maybe not, but let it go once it is over.  This is easier said than done sometimes.  Tomorrow is a new day and when I think about it, people who behave like this in the office are the 1% and I think we should be able handle that.

http://www.ehow.com/how_2112304_deal-rude-customers.html