Thanks @arnym21 I do my best, and this solution was one that RogersDarryl and I came up with together at a particular difficult time in my mental health treatment (I openly acknowledge I have PTSD), but with mental health issues that keep you confined and socially isolated, I have found many forums, beta testing and others that allow my to use my intellect, past skills and feel like I have meaning, but like any human being, I can get frustrated, and I know it is not worth it to loose my cool, so I find accommodations for my disability around mental health, and this is one of my solutions.
And yes to everyone, try hard not to lose your cool when you get fed up with your services, or whatever - it achieves little and can send some into a real tailspin - I speak from experience.
Interestingly, the forums, the support for challenges, the frustration of the beta, following up with support staff for customer service issues was actually part of my therapy for a stretch - I learned not to go at a customer service issue until I reviewed it with my therapist. I am learning recently that I also have to be empathetic of the programming teams on the other side, and that I have always had really high standards on programming and implementation because I had no choice (I was in health care), plus that is just who I am and fortunately, the staff I had too, but I too have lived through, with my users/customers, and my staff things that went bad and all we could say was, "we are working on it" - my staff did the work, I did the fire fighting of the frustrations.
But that was before PTSD found me, and I had to learn that life has trauma that comes along and that a lot of the stuff I used to get worked up are the small stuff and that the reality was that the small stuff would frustrate me because I had significant big stuff buried for years that would poke its way out in the small stuff - there are some here who have watched my growth and supported me and to all of you I say thank you.
It also makes me a strong advocate of the need to accommodate disabilities, like closed captioning, font size, etc. and so many other areas.
So, I threw the suggestion out on your request, as you are right, it may be a solution for others, to allow them to stay cool and calm as you said. I meditate, walk in nature, enjoy time with my wife, follow my two adult daughters, bounce frustrations off my son-in-law who used to work in customer service training and he just laughs (great ice breaker) - he educates me on the conflict of caring customer service people and for me to remember that programmers and tech support are caught between our frustration and their own frustration of wanting to fix the issue and often not having the answers when we call.
So, I am still around. and even when I "ban myself", I come back.
Great advice, thanks.
Bruce
