So I finally gave up and created another personal Facebook account, thinking that it had to be better than Reddit, at least if I stuck to the more “professional” sounding groups and yeah, it really isn’t.

What the hell is wrong with people to day? Here’s yet another story.

So someone asked “if you had to tell someone that they smelled bad, what would you do?” Now, as I responded, that depends entirely on the situation. If you were in a work setting, where you had to tell an employee that you were getting complaints from customers about their smell, that’s something entirely different than  telling your best friend that they have some hygiene problems. This much ought to be completely common sense, anyone ought to be able to figure this out and since the original poster didn’t actually give any context for their question, I had to cover all bases.

Yeah, that didn’t turn out well.

Immediately, people started screaming that you can’t be “mean” to anyone, ever, for any reason. Of course, I was never mean to begin with, I never said anything that could remotely cause that kind of reaction, but these people are idiots.

So I went back and tried to explain. If I, as a business owner or someone in a management capacity, have to tell an employee that we are receiving complaints from customers, this is a situation that needs to be solved sooner rather than later. It would be something that I’d have to be very direct and address the problem and expect changes to be made, lest it cost the company money.

It’s really apparent that none of these people have ever been in a position where they’ve got management responsibilities. They haven’t had to protect the company, the company’s assets or the company’s future from potential issues. I was also assuming that this was an ongoing problem, not something that you can say “dude, go home and take a shower and we can try this again tomorrow”.

See, I’ve run into this a number of times over the years, where employees just didn’t know that they… well, stank. The first couple of complaints, either from customers or other employees, I will let slide. After that, after it becomes obvious that we have an ongoing issue, I have to step in. Now it isn’t like I’m attacking the person, I’m just letting them know that there have been comments and those complaints need to be addressed. Is it embarrassing to the employee? Yes and it probably should be. Might they have some kind of physical problem where they simply can’t help it? Maybe. It would be very rare but it could happen and in that case, we’d have to discuss readjusting where they fit in the corporate structure because I can’t have them losing me customers but I also wouldn’t want to lose a valuable employee. That’s where you have to be flexible.

One case that I remember was an employee who had birds. His birds crapped on him a lot. That’s what birds do. I understand that, I have birds  too, but that’s not an excuse to go to work with bird crap spread down your back every day. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded but it was almost always there. So I had to call him in and talk to him. I have no idea if he didn’t realize it was there, or if it had just gotten so normal to him that he didn’t understand the problem, but we got it cleared up and he went right back to work and I never had an issue again. There was nothing disrespectful in the exchange but it wasn’t something where I was dancing around the issue. “Dude, you’re covered in bird shit, we have to do something about this now.” And we did, that was the end of it and it never came up again.

Bringing this around to writing again, this is all too common. People ask questions, expecting specific answers and when the answers require a lot more nuance than they were thinking, they freak the hell out. It’s just asinine. If you don’t want to know the reality, don’t ask. Yet these people have problems working outside of their little preconceived box. The reality is that most questions require more complex answers than you’d think and that means you have to go back to the drawing board and consider the actual situation, not just the simplistic expectation that you went into it with.

It was yet another conversation that I just walked away from because there’s no talking reason to people who aren’t reasonable to begin with. If you only want the help that you go into it wanting, don’t bother asking. “You didn’t  give me the answer that I wanted so I’m going to be mad at  you!” Well maybe the answer that you wanted was wrong? Did you ever think of that? Of course not because that’s not emotionally comforting and I am ever so sick of people who are only out after emotional comfort. You have to live in the real world and far too many people don’t want to.

So the search for smart people continues. I’m not expecting much of a change.