IIRC you have been doing THAT anyway. Poor essexjan.

But, hey, job security. It's not like there's any shortage of nutters.

"You can keep your job; we're just going to make it so torturous that you'll quit. Everybody's happy."

Hmmm, that's a seriously mixed blessing, isn't it?

Yes, definitely a double-edged sword, BP. At the moment, my caseload is about 25% nutters, who take up 75% of my time.

We are thinking of having 'Nutter Squad' T-shirts made up.

We are thinking of having 'Nutter Squad' T-shirts made up.

With a big squirrel as your mascot!

Well, if the situation becomes intolerable, it IS easier to find another job when you already have a job, it seems. Hopefully it won't come to that, though.

Pull a sickie in November, miss the training so they can't give you any additional nutters ;) Let's face it, you seem to have more than enough of them already (and not all of them through work!)

Er, no, Wilder. Taking sickies when you're in the frame for redundancy is not a good plan.

See, if you did get laid off, you could come back as a patient and know how to work the system.

Extreme Behaviour Complaints.

*mullacc bursts through door on his dirt-bike, shotguns his Mt. Dew AMP Energy Drink, spikes the crumpled can and hollers at no one in particular, "YO! I am here to make an X-TREEM COMPLAINT about essexjan's behavior! YEeeaahahhhhh!!1!11! DO THE DEW!"

Now that's an extreme behavior complaint!! NO FEAR!!!!

The *u* in behaviour makes it all more civilized, from this side of the pond. Sort of like a Monty Python sketch or one of those recycled Brit comedies they show on PBS over here.

The reality can't be as saccharine. I hope that you can roll through it. . .

*hug*

(how's the exercise regimen coming along?)

recycled Brit comedies they show on PBS over here

You're thinking of Fawlty Towers, I expect.

(ps I know all about Extreme Behaviour Complainants - not fun)

Yrrr, EJ!....Would you go back to practicing law if worse came to worst?

Extreme Behaviour Complainant... another euphemism I can use for my "crazy Ex" (although, if you worked in L.A., you probably would have met her by now).

Seriously, essexjan, since the majority of your time is spent with the minority of clients who are EBCs, things really wouldn't be changing that much. You just have to determine how much dealing with the 'non-nutters' contributes to your happiness with the job. There are mathematical calculations involved, but somebody else can give you the specific equations better than I.

Going back into private practice would be fairly low down the list of my desired options, brujita. At least they're now putting an actual procedure in place to deal with Extreme Behaviour Complainants, whereas in the past people have been left to deal with them as best they can. Under this new team, they'll be 'contained' within our system and thus will hopefully be more manageable.

Man, I can feel for you on this. My current position has me managing a complaints unit. We do nothing all day every day but deal with complaints, at least 50% of which are organisations complaining about each other as a marketing tactic. Not much positive energy around here.

I work in an Alternative Dispute Resolution scheme, dg, the biggest in the world and whilst some (many) of the complainants are perfectly pleasant, a minority are twisted and want to make things as difficult as possible, deliberately.

Others are just mad that their complaints aren't upheld, like the guy on the phone today who went from 'Hello' to ballistic in a nanosecond.

But he was followed by someone whose complaint I had also rejected, who thanked me for considering it and explaining why it couldn't be upheld in such a detailed way that he fully accepted it. So that was nice.

Thankfully we don't have to see the complainants in person, it's all done by phone and letter. I would not want to be on the 'nutter squad' if I had to see them face-to-face.

Yeah, most of ours is done by phone and e-mail too, although we have to "invite" people to "meetings" to discuss the issues sometimes. We do sometimes get people who are fine with us saying we can't do anything about their complaint or about us hand-balling it to another department because it's outside our jurisdiction, but most are already totally pissed off before they contact us and don't want to hear that we have no way to deal with their problem or that they are possibly the cause of the problem in the first place.

Even when we are able to resolve complaints positively, it usually ends up with someone being pissed off because they "lost".

There is an interesting superstition here that made me laugh at first, until I ignored it and suffered the consequences - there are a number of "serial complainers" who regularly contact our unit to complain about actions by their competitors and the deal is that we are never ever allowed to speak their name for fear of waking the sleeping dragon that is them. I made the mistake of mentioning one of them and, almost as if by magic, we got a complaint from them the very next day. Sometimes it's better just to go along with these things even if you don't understand them.

I agree that it's a good sign if your employer is training you up, except that it could be in order to increase your workload due to the lower staffing levels, I guess.

That's already happened, dg. 1 Oct was the start of our next half-year. In the past, we've had to close 90% of the cases in our cabinet on 1 October by the end of the half year.

We were told today that the target period is going to be three months, to 31 December, and we have to close 80% of those cases by that date.

I think you're looking at this too negatively. Perhaps their behaviour will be extreme in a positive way. Perhaps they'll make you deal with people who are perpetually and inexplicably nice to everyone all the time. Or someone who brings cute bunnies along with him. There's so many nice extremes out there, they're bound to give you a few of those as well.