All's well...

... that starts well.

And my first 7 weeks at work have been pretty good! I've been meeting and interviewing customers and so far it's all been very interesting.

The one thing customers have in common is that they have at least one medical condition. This could range from arthritis to depression to ME to schizophrenia to not better identified back pains to panic disorders to dodgy bones following injuries or accidents to cancer, and everything in between.
Other than that, they are as different from each other as any two individuals can be.

I've had young mothers who've never worked in their lives and think they're good for nothing; empty nesters who've always been in work until the illness struck or they were injured and who now think they're on the scrap heap; drug or alcohol abusers in their late teens, twenties, thirties and above who want to but can't break the habit, or who have never even thought about breaking it, or who have broken it and are now at a loss for what to do with the rest of their lives.
People who can't speak English, people who can speak several languages, people who don't want to talk and people who won't shut up for you to edge in a word.
Shy people, arrogant people, people with no self confidence (whether because of their illness or for whatever reason), people overly self-confident with no apparent good reason, dreamers, sleepers, hypers, no-cluers and over-cluers.
Ex-offenders and people who've never even got a parking ticket in their life; coming from care homes or posh homes; homeless, in temporary accommodation or snug as a bug in a family home.
In other words, a motley crew of humanity.

And I hope they've enjoyed meeting me as I've enjoyed meeting them, because I couldn't single any one of them out for lacking at least one redeeming feature, usually quite a few more. They all had potential, some of them more than others. They just need to be triggered on the level that works for them.

Unfortunately I only meet them once, before referring them to someone else, so I can't be that trigger. This is something that has had me thinking since I fund out what my role would be, shortly after starting the job. I like triggering people, I like being part of what sparks them into getting where they want to be. I like to think I am able, in some way, to inspire them to better things than they realised they might be capable of before they meet me. However, to do that I have to get them to trust me first, and that's not realistic, in most cases, with just one fairly short meeting, which more often than not starts with the customer being extremely defensive, some times to the extent that all they keep saying for several minutes is they don't need anything and this is a waste of their time.

I'm trying to get round this by thinking that the people I refer them to can pick up from where I left, if I manage to break down their barriers enough that they won't arrive at their next meeting thinking they need to protect themselves. This line of thought got a few knocks in the last couple of days, after I interviewed a couple of fairly challenging people. I approached them as I think I approach everyone: I listened to what they had to say, tried to spot what they thought was so bad about them they were trying to hide it, and went from there, not giving undue importance to what I thought was either due to their illness or a defense mechanism.

The first person was a young man with schizophrenia who was hearing voices. He told me straight away he hadn't taken his medication that day, because it doesn't agree with him and he tends to skip it on occasion. Talking to him was tricky because he kept sharing his attention between me and the voices only he could hear. All considered, I think he coped pretty well as I only heard him reply to the voices, very quietly, just once during the meeting, and that was when I was writing something down and therefore not giving him my full attention. All through the meeting he tried very hard to focus on me and what I was saying, and to give me coherent replies. He kept fidgeting on his chair and a few times just jumped up and stretched his legs, moving around a bit before trying to sit down again. I'd wait for him to re-compose himself, repeat the last thing I'd said, and just continue. I ignored his tics, fidgeting and all that (other than asking him at the beginning if he was ok or preferred to move elsewhere where he could be more comfortable, to which he replied he was ok and explained about medication etc...). He had a friend with him who seemed to also have some sort of mental illness. When I went to greet my customer in the waiting area they asked me if it was ok for the friend to also sit on the interview and I agreed. Although the friend was a bit fidgety and displayed some odd behaviour too, he also talked to my customer when he started getting too jumpy and his voice seemed to soothe him, so on balance I'd say he didn't hinder the interview, on the contrary! Oh, and the customer was wearing a hat, a bit like this one.
Anyway, as soon as he was out of the door, my colleagues burst into laughter, gathered around me and started asking me a few questions which I'm half inclined to regard as slightly odder than the customer's behaviour.
These were, in random order:

- Why did you play along with them?
- Why did you not tell the friend to wait in the waiting area?
- Did you look out of the window? I bet he stopped fidgeting the moment he was out of here!
- Why did you not tell him off for being so rude?!?
- Did you see his nicotine-stained fingers?
- Why did you not tell him to remove his hat???

I was somewhat stunned for a few seconds, not having a clue what they were on about, then it dawned on me that everybody in the office thought the guy was taking the piss, aided and abetted by his friend, and they were going through his oddities with a fine-toothed comb to make a case against him.

Take his hat off? He kept his coat on too all through, should I have told him to take that off as well? I mean, I could keep eye contact with him, I could hear him, he could hear me. Do I really give a shite what he has on his head? Let's assume they *were* taking the piss, let's say his hat was a fashion accessory that he removes only when he goes to sleep because it makes him look cool (and excuse me, but I wouldn't wear a Peruvian knitted hat if I wanted to look cool); provided it doesn't compromise communication, what difference does it make? Or worse, let's consider the possibility that his behaviour was intentionally and carefully designed to wind me up, including the (according to my colleagues) disrespectful failure to remove his hat. Do I really want to antagonise a potentially unstable person right from the start, by asking him to remove his hat (that makes no difference whatsoever to my ability to talk to him, and his ability to hear, understand and reply)?
On the other hand, he could have been cold. Or the hat could be his safety blanket, a form of protection against a world full of unknown voices and known people who laugh at you. Or he could simply just not have thought about taking it off.
And the problem is...?

Stop fidgeting the moment he was out of there? Of course it's a possibility. Obviously you can never be 100% sure that someone isn't giving you a trainload of bulls. Personally, I think that if you go to the trouble of faking the symptoms of an illness to such an extent, there is probably some form of mental problem you should get checked anyway. And in any case, my job isn't to verify if someone is ill or not, or what illness they suffer from. There are doctors for that. My role is to help them identify their potential and move on.

The second person was a middle-aged man angry with the system, the world and the universe. And I wouldn't be surprised if he was angry with himself too. This was apparent by his extreme defensiveness as soon as he arrived. The colleague who greeted him came back to the desks asking whose customer he was, and when I said "mine" he replied "good luck" followed by a rolling of eyes. When I went to pick him up from the waiting area his first words were: "I don't know why I'm here, this is all a waste of time and there's nothing you can do for me. And I don't need your help anyway".
He then went on to tell me he'd just been released after a 12 year spell in prison (not the first one either) for armed robbery, which he kept repeating for the first 15 minutes. He was obviously trying to sell himself short, so it wouldn't hurt too much when I'd say that yes, he was hopeless and the scum of society. Or maybe he was just trying to scare me, who knows.
He was also in pain due to an injury.
Anyhow, I let him rant for a while, then I said that I still had to go through this and asked him to please humour me. That's when he laughed the first time - result!
By the end of the interview we'd shared a few giggles and he'd agreed to consider a few suggestions I'd made. I always stand up and shake hands with customers at the end of an interview. In this instance, I was chuffed that he'd extended his hand to shake mine before I'd done the same to shake his.

As soon as he'd left, two colleagues came to congratulate me for how I'd handled it. That was sweet of them, and I'm not saying I didn't handle it well. However, what pleased me the most was the handshake he'd initiated on leaving, after being so obstructive at the beginning.
Other colleagues remarked on how rude the man was. Hey, maybe I'm mistaken, but I don't equate "abrupt" with "rude", nor do I equate "annoyed", "angry" and "pissed off with the world" with "rude". In fact, all through his rant, the guy kept saying "I know it's not you", so it's not even as if he was being personal.

After both episodes, when I was arguing with colleagues that I wasn't being soft, I was just doing what I'm paid for (i.e.: help customers find their potential, build their confidence, etc.), all they kept saying was: oh well, it's because you've only just started, after you've been here a while you'll learn to spot the no-hopers, piss-takers, and wastes of time. I pointed out that although I might be new in this particular job, I've worked with very similar sets of people in my previous jobs, for about 15 years, so it's not as if I haven't a clue. I just think people deserve a chance.
At this point one of them took me aside and said: well, you know, it's not that we don't care, it's just that we have targets to meet and not enough time to do it if we spent time with everyone as they needed it...

That really made me think... this is the main reason why I had become so unhappy in my previous job and why I was pretty happy to be made redundant... Do I want to go back there? Can I find a way to get targets to meet what's right?