Some jobs are tougher than others by nature. I can't imagine it's easy to run a funeral home, or run customer service for a crappy product, or be the airport worker whose job is generally to tell people either that their flight is delayed. Customers come to these people pre-agitated... making their job a thousand times harder.
My car needed some work recently. A lot of work. Expensive work. After it had had more expensive work a week earlier. I wasn't happy. It's easy to blame the service guys My attendant did a good job of listening...but he didn't make me relate to him. He didn't give me his story.
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My father had something similar happen to him a few years back, and he was equally agitated after needing multiple trips to the dealer in the same week. His attendant stopped him and explained that he was driving a high-end car and that their job was to give him high-end service. They weren't paid commission and they don't see any money by recommending more service; they simply love working on cars, and they don't want to put their name behind a car that doesn't work. If something's wrong, they want to fix it.
That's a story. That makes sense. Yeah, the thousand dollar service bill still stings, but it's harder to be mad at the service guys when you look at it through their eyes. Great form of anger dispersion.
Seth Godin called it 'pretending you care,' where the meter maid apologizes that, despite a great story, once the 'yellow button is pushed' she's required by law to finish writing the ticket.' She then recommended that he contest it in court, where she said he'd probably win, and thanked him for coming to New York and apologized for the hassle.' (Too bad he made up the story).
So, if your primary job is dealing with people, and it probably is, next time you have to disperse some anger, don't be afraid to make it personal. Humbling yourself and explaining the full situation, even though you just want to keep yelling or through out the 'sorry, it's not my job,' just might smooth everything out.
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