your fake emotions

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To get this started:

When I sold suits 8 years ago I had a really interesting manager. His strategy when a customer came in angry about something was to get just a bit madder than the customer. That is, if a customer was miffed that the cuffs were not the right length, then he would be visibly pissed off for the same reason. If a customer was extremely angry, then my boss was Ghengis Khan on the warpath, yelling sternly at employees in front of the agitated customer. He made it a point to ALWAYS be more angry than the customer if they had a real grievance.

But this was totally an act. His anger had absolutely no connection to the degree of the screw-up about which the customer was upset. It was entirely based on the degree of emotion within the customer (which comes as much from the personality characteristics of the customer as on whatever screw-up had occured). After the customer left he would go back to being normal and non-upset immediately, and he told us point blank not to take him seriously, and that he was simply stealing the emotional energy away from the customer with his charade.

My manager's strategy always worked. You simply cannot yell at someone about how angry you are because x happened when that person is in your face yelling twice as loud about how angry HE is that x happened.

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The previous comment was great about your boss. (edited for clarification)

I own a bunch of rental properties and one place where I sometimes fake emotion is when I am trying to deal with our renters. I usually try to empathize with them and most times the emotion is real. I have lived in some really bad rental situations and do not like them to be in a bad situation. I also am very quick to fix things when I think that they are serious. However, sometimes things that are important to them seem totally unimportant to me. I usually just fake as much empathy as I can and take care of the problem even though in my head I am thinking about how stupid it is.

A good example of this was when I went down to a rental property we own and found while I was they had a ceiling fan that would not start up easily. I sprayed it with silicone spray to lube it and away it went. This seems like common sense to me but they were amazed. I drove an hour each way to get there. But at the end of the day they are paying us $250 a month more than market rent and I figure that for now this is part of the job.

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