“What do you do if someone calls and pretends they are taking their life, and you spend hours with them only to find out you’ve been tricked?”
Yes. All support phone lines experience hoax calls, scams, and misuse of service at some point in time.
Our support line at #Samaritans is no different… especially as it’s free.
So in life situations, what do you do if you
– get told to ‘go home where you belong’?
– get passed over for promotion because Phil-the-brown-noser brown nosed his way up?
– didn’t win that medal because you had the wrong skin colour, even if you were the best?
– didn’t get that job because <fill in the blank>
There are 3 choices in life.
1. Do nothing.
Keep on pootling on.
Keep down and stay down.
Keep the status quo.
2. Do something to change situation.
Protest.
Sign a petition.
Write a strongly worded letter.
Escalate to the Big Cheese.
3. Leave the situation.
Resign.
Quit.
Stop what you’re doing and do something else.
For us at Samaritans, number 3 isn’t an option.
There are so many people who need our services that this really isn’t an option at all.
So what if we get Misuse of Service calls?
Those horrible sex calls, the hoaxes, and abusive ones?
We do “a bit of column 1” and “a bit of column 2”.
(1) We
– stay calm and remind our callers of thr boundaries of our service
– tell them that we will continue to be there for them if they want to talk about their feelings and what’s causing them distress
– politely tell them “goodbye”.
(2) We also
– tag the call as ‘Misuse of Service’ on our system
Phone numbers with multiple MoS tags are banned from calling us.
Obviously it doesn’t stop anyone from getting another SIM card and continuing the bad behaviour.
When we get a particularly rubbish call, we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and then pick up the phone again when it rings.
Because quitting just isn’t an option at all.
As is true of so many things in life, we cannot quit – we must be resourceful enough to find a way to carry on.
Even so…
Sometimes it still isn’t easy.
When we have put so much of ourselves into the call…
When we have been so emotionally vested in being there, being present for our caller…
… Only to find out that we’ve been had.
It can be so deeply frustrating and very disappointing.
Tonight was one of those nights.
I guess I’m writing more for myself than anyone else.
To all our callers who misuse the service:
Please remember that we are people too.
Playing mean games not only gets us down, but you tie up the line from those who really need us.
Time to pick up myself and move on.
That’s all the energy I’m expending on this topic tonight.
Time for a hot beverage and some virtual 🍩..
At least its calorie free 😊