negative thought

My Shit List

1 Comment Posted on by Snoskred

ss5

Sunrise at Sandy Beach in Hawaii – I’ll be using some of my Hawaii images over the next few months, FYI.

Thanks to Boob In A Box – incidentally one of my favourite recent blog finds – for this one. :)

10 – The fact that Breaking Bad is over for good. It was finished with such perfection, it better win some Emmy love next week.

9 – There is a front end loader constantly running just one street away from me during the day at the moment, and I am losing my marbles. What few marbles I had left, anyway.

8 – My recliner needs welding. If one of the cats sits on top of it, I can’t get balanced right! But to get welded, it has to be carried out into the shed.

7 – Taylor Swift leaving gyms in New York in totally not gym appropriate outfits, with obviously empty handbags on her arm. Tom and Lorenzo (my favourite celebrity fashion bloggers btw) have nicknamed it Taylor Swift’s Empty Bags Tour.

6 – Male movie stars who refuse to groom their eyebrows. Hey, dude, I paid good money to watch you on the big screen, the least you can do is make sure your eyebrows are not taking over your face and/or temples. All of you somehow manage to not have a monobrow, what is so wrong with tidying the rest up? I’m not at the point of naming names but you’re driving me in that direction!

cs

Thanks to Darylisms Tumblr for the gif – I searched high and low for one photo that would do proper justice to the well groomed eyebrows of Christian Slater and none of them did, but this gif image does. :)

5 – People on Facebook when someone they do not know passes away in an accident. I want to bang my head so hard. Here is an example of some recent comments when two people died in a head on collision near where I live. This little example will supply us with numbers 4 and 3 as well.

rip

Why do the beautiful peoples lives have to be taken away from them, indeed? What about the not beautiful people, or is that more ok?

4 – My heart goes out to – I sincerely hope your heart remains in your chest pumping blood around your body which is where it belongs. Since when did this become the new meaningless thing everyone says when they cannot come up with something real to say? Peoples, when you hear a politician say this, remove it from your personal list of things to say to those who are grieving. Your thoughts can go out, your prayers can go out, your internal organs should go nowhere, ever. Unless you are donating them to someone else.

3 – Rip? Rip what? It is R.I.P. – there are dots in between the letters for a REASON, people. You can’t take a moment to put in full stops for this person you are writing a tribute to? You couldn’t maybe use the whole words, like Rest In Peace?

2 – The media and their apparent lack of care for anyone who might not want graphic images on the front page of their newspaper. Yes, some of the papers here in Australia and around the world published unedited images of bodies and body parts after the MH17 tragedy. Disgusting.

Media Watch did a good piece on this and I will put a link to the *transcript* here. If you click through you will NOT see any images but there are links on the page to the graphic images and they are all clearly labelled, and the video itself does contain the images. If you are lame like I am, you can cover your eyes but still listen. :) Link to Media Watch MH17 episode.

1- {rant mode on} Paul Mercurio in those manipulative Insuranceline ads. Sorry people but the ads are so terrible they are not to be found anywhere online. I am very lucky this is the case because if I put the ads here and you watched them, you’d want to dead me.

Seriously Paul, what were you thinking? You were in Strictly Ballroom, dude. You are not wearing a gold sparkly jacket in these commercials – they have you in the most ugly and ill fitting shirts I have seen in a long, long time on a man in the world. Was there a mirror where you filmed this? If so, how did you allow this fashion crime to be committed?

If you had the sparkly gold jacket on, maybe I wouldn’t resent it quite as much.

Okay, that is entirely not true. You could be dressed in sequins from head to toe and I would still be mad as a cut snake.

The levels to which you have sunk – to now be the face of ads trying to convince elderly people not to “be a burden” to their families by purchasing “final expenses insurance” so that their families do not have to find money for their funeral..

Even worse, I know this advertising works amazingly well. :( Those people who buy it would more than likely be better off putting aside the money they’d pay for the premiums each week and leaving that to their kids. But they don’t want to be a burden so they’ll pony up the cash and by the time they do eventually go on to greener pastures they’ll have paid 3x what they would have paid up front for a funeral or via a pre-payment plan with their local funeral company.

I hope they are paying you big money for this, Paul. Any respect the majority of Australians might have once had for you has long since evaporated with us having to sit through these terrible ads over and over and over again.

{end rant} – Sorry that was long but those ads have been irritating me for a very, very long time now. Even worse they are on Foxtel which I am PAYING for. Like Pay TV! Why are there ads – very long and obtrusive ads – on my Pay TV?

Well, that feels better.. anyone else want to play?

If yes leave me a link in the comments. ;)

And pop over to Boob In A Box – and leave a comment with a link to your shit list post as well. :)

Annoyed Snoskred, death, negative thought, wrong world

A case study in negativity..

4 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

moonrise
A photo of the moon rising over the lighthouse at Point Perpendicular, Jervis Bay.

What is the worst thing that can possibly happen to a positive thinker? To be partnered with a master of negative thought. The Other Half is not negative all the time, but certain situations are bound to produce pain for all. Today has been quite a painful day.

When we left the car people last night, they told us they would call “by lunchtime today”. Having been in sales myself I know that if you give a customer an expectation like that, you better follow through and deliver. Having the partner I have, a helpful note for the future is – tell them if they don’t call, it’s going to result in a horrible chain reaction of doom and gloom in my household, and I’ll call off the deal just because of the pain I have suffered due to them telling The Other Half they would ring, and then not doing it.

So here’s what happened – it’s been a day of The Other Half making stupid assumptions and me wanting to beat him up because of his negative thoughts.

Just before we left at 11am, The Other Half discovered a funny icon on his phone. When he checked out what it meant, it seems his mobile phone had disconnected itself from the network. For all we know, it had been like that all morning. There was still an hour till lunchtime and no message on the phone, so The Other Half assumed they had not called. We drove off to Jervis Bay to see the real estate people and how is this for ironic? The house we’d pretty much decided on renting was rented yesterday. So had we not gone car shopping.. clearly it was not meant to be.

But another house we’d driven past before but crossed off the list because it was for sale was now off the market and rental only. This house was just seconds from the beach and backed onto a reserve with trees and wildlife. I would be able to put out a bird feeder. We arranged a time to go see it in a couple of hours, and headed off to drive past it one more time, check my PO box and have lunch. When we drove past it looked small from the outside but we figured we’d take a look because the location was so great.

As we were driving back from the PO box, it was now mid-day, and the other half said to me “It’s lunch time and they haven’t called”. I could hear the negative thoughts in his head – things like “the finance has fallen through and they don’t want to call and tell us” “they can’t find us a car” and various other negatives. I said “maybe they have lunch mid-afternoon” and told him to quit doing that negative self-think that he always does, and why doesn’t he just call them himself?

We went back to look at the house. Everything about it was perfect, except for the fact that it was too small. For two people we have a lot of stuff. I could see my dream of living close to the bay slipping away.. for today at least. We went to see the other agent and they have a couple of options, I’m waiting for a phone call to line up times to see them. I can’t explain this urge to live near this bay to anyone but it’s like a silent screaming inside of me.

jervis

That’s where I have to be near. ;)

So by this time it’s almost 3pm, and The Other Half complains of a headache and that he was feeling like he was coming down with something and he just wants to get home. By the time we got home his mood had gone from not feeling well to complete doom and gloom. Still no phone call. In his mind the deal has completely fallen through, and to make matters worse I’m mad at him because I know what he’s doing to himself. He knows it, too. He knows I get pissy when he does this dance of negative self talk. I say “Just make the phone call already!” He prefers to sit and dwell on how things have all turned to shyte. He does this for an hour.

I am sure I have mentioned before that The Other Half suffers from Call Reluctance. That’s when you don’t want to make a phone call for fear of hearing what they’re going to tell you.

At 4pm he finally makes the call. What do you think he was told? Everything is fine. They think they have found a car but they have to wait till tomorrow for confirmation. The finance is all approved and it was yesterday when we left, it’s just something the finance guy had to sort out on his end. No doom, no gloom. Just his negative self talk doing his head in – and mine by proxy. Of course he feels better now and the headache miraculously vanished as soon as he got off the phone. If he’d made that phone call earlier, think of all the suffering he would have missed out on!

This post got in the way – I was going to write about Feng Shui and Aromatherapy. I’ll take a bit of time to put that one together now because I’ll try and put in a few easy Feng Shui basics ;) and tomorrow is Hump Day Hmmm..

negative thought, new car, no doom happened, photos

The power of positive thought.

2 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

In various discussions around the interweb lately, I’ve realized that I’m a pretty lucky person. Fairly early on in my life, I have learnt some life lessons which have been useful in helping me get to the place I am now. Many of these lessons are going to stick with me and I can build on them as time goes by.

One lesson I learnt by working in call centres is the power of positive thought. Outbound telemarketing is not an easy job. You have to be able to get yourself into a mental place where you can handle people saying no to you constantly. Rejection on such a massive scale can really get you down. You need inner resources which most people do not have and find difficult to get.

Most important of all, you need to be able to put the past behind you and move on. Not past from years ago, past from the last call you made. When you were told “no” and you hang up the phone, you need to be able to say “The next one will be a yes”. Otherwise you won’t be able to make that call. And when you get a “Yes” you need to celebrate that and build on it. In an average 5 hour outbound calling shift, we would average 20 calls per hour, and only ONE of those would be a yes. That means 19 people said no. If you took it personally it could mess with your head in a major way.

So one of the tools I used constantly were Dream Cards by Leon Nacson. I didn’t use them in the way intended by the author, though. Each day at the start of a shift, I would shuffle the cards, close my eyes and pick one from the middle of the pack. That card would be stuck to my computer screen. The cards contain positive messages and I found that by having the card there, I would find myself reading the card – which is essentially *thinking* the card. Here’s a picture of the cards, so you can see the kinds of positive messages they contain. You’ll need to click the thumbnail for a larger image. :)

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And I found that each day, whatever card I seemed to pick out was exactly what I needed to think that day. I don’t know whether that is destiny or just pure luck. For example – I would pull out “I am free from agitation and tension. Nothing can provoke me.” on a day when the people I spoke to would be trying their best to wind me up. I had that card on my desk on the day a customer told me that wind power was bad for the environment because “it takes the wind out of the air”.

These cards got me through some really hard times. I am so grateful for that. I recommend you get your own set but if you can’t find them or can’t afford it, you can just write down a positive thought and put it on your desk.

When I left call centre work I got out of the habit of using these cards, but a couple of months ago I put them back on my desk and each day I shuffle them and pick one, which sits at the bottom of my computer screen. Next to a piece of paper that has sat on my desktop for many months now – sometimes taking the high road is no fun at all.

We often do not realize we are sabotaging ourselves. The “tapes” in our head play constant negative thoughts. Until you stop to listen to what tape you are playing, you cannot begin to make changes and play a more positive tape.

For more on the power of positive thinking, you may want to read this article – Mind your thoughts.

I also use I Can Do It cards by Louise Hay.

call centre, life lessons, moving forward, negative thought, power of positive thought, taking the high road

Tomorrow is Friday

1 Comment Posted on by Snoskred

Fridays are great. Why, you ask? Let me take a minute to expand on one of the other staff members I currently have to tolerate on a regular basis. Negative Nelly. No, that’s not her real name, but it might as well be.

Have you ever met someone that can take anything you say and turn it into a negative? Have you ever met someone who never, ever, EVER says a single positive thing? Do you know someone whose body language, facial expressions and even tone of voice manage to scream negative even if they are trying to be nice to a customer? She works in my store too.

To give you an example – you might try to make conversation with her, and you might say “Looks like it’s a beautiful day outside”. Her reaction could be any of the following.

a. Yes but I’m stuck in here, aren’t I?
b. I won’t get to enjoy it.
c. The minute I finish work today it will start raining.
d. All the customers will go to the beach. I might as well go home, no sales today.

Now I come from an industry where you *have* to be positive all the time, or you’ll plain go nuts. Try working in a call centre with an attitude like that, you’ll last less than 5 minutes. You need to find positives to motivate yourself, and you need positive people around you. So it’s all I can do to stop myself from strangling this woman when she talks like that. I can’t even say anything to her – I’ve learned that at work I can’t speak my mind otherwise the shit hits the fan. What would I want to say? The following as well as a few other things.

a. What you put out there comes back to you – if you are negative, your customers will be too.
b. If someone asks you how you are, you say “Excellent!” – it will surprise them in a good way, and it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I know this to be a fact.
c. If you can’t stop being negative, f*ck off because you’re just annoying.
d. When you are negative like that, it affects everyone in the store and not in a good way.

That, among other things. I’ve actually had two days off because I have been sick – my neck swelled up and I was kinda freaking out wondering what was going on. I went to see the Cute Doctor (a story for another time) and in his rather cute accent he told me I have acute tonsilitis which is very contagious. I decided not to be nasty and go to work and cough all over the people I don’t like. However it seems many of them have already caught it from the admin people, who had this last week. :( Back to work tomorrow and thankfully I look almost human again.

call centre, negative thought