For a couple of years now, I’ve made a living providing front-line technical assistance for a cable-based ISP. While I’m proud of all the tools I’ve added to my inventory, I seem unable to advance toward my principal goal; a job where, if I can’t get away from the constant minor issues of the public, I can at least approach them in a better-organized manner, hopefully with more logical analysis and less direct 1-on-1 contact. Unfortunately, my age (50’s), combined with a lack of the basic underpinning most people now get in high school, makes this unlikely.
But to make matters worse, the managment of the center where I work is about to attach a top priority to revenue enhancement (read that “mandatory sales pitch”). The higher-ups, who view their end-product primarily in terms of entertainment, won’t acknowledge that many of the more technically-savvy people I deal with have little use for most of what we’re supposed to push.
Many of the people who started out here have moved on; most of the rest, who tend to be a few years older, are often tied to the job by the need for health insurance. Resistance to the forced-sales approach remains strong, but the first moves toward a “sell-or-else” approach appear to be taking shape.
I would love to be able to offer my superiors some hope for defusing this situation, but it seems impossible to get the point across that the predominantly-introverted technically-oriented personality may actually prove counterproductive in the role of a pitch(wo)man.
