The World Revolves around the Sun. Not You.

Let me break it down really quick: I am one of two lead agents for the Exchange Program for a timeshare management company. Let me give you a for-instance. Say Joe-Bob has a week at the Cabo Wabo Resort in Mexico. But, after ten years of going to the same resort for the same week, he decides he doesn't want to go there this year. He can call me, "deposit" his week at Cabo Wabo for a week of credit to trade for a week anywhere that we have open. Say that he finds a week at Sunshine & Butterflies Resort in southern California. I would help him "deposit" his week from Cabo Wabo and book the exchange reservation for S&B Resort in SoCal. The info I need to deposit a week is: The name the resort you own, the start date of the week you're giving up and the size unit you're giving up.

It never ceases to amaze me how inconsiderate people can be. I truly believe that they think I have nothing better to do than sit on the phone and wait for them while they dig up the information they knew they needed to give me before they even picked up the phone to call in.

It's like when I worked at Jamba Juice (ahhh the good old days): It would always happen when we were in the middle of a rush. Some moron would stand in line for a good ten minutes. Then get up to the cash register to place their order, pull out a cell phone and go, "Hold on a second, let me call her and see what she wants." Really?? You had that entire time in line to get the orders straight, but instead of doing that, you're going to place the call now and hold up my line? Well, of course you are! Because the the world revolves around you, your time is the only time that matters.

It's even more interesting to see how full of themselves people really can be when you're simply a voice on the phone instead of a flesh-and-blood person in front of them. For instance, I had an owner call in a few moments ago. I won't give his real name, but he had an extremely common name like...let's go with John Smith. Shockingly, he wasn't the only John Smith in my system. There were no Junior's or Senior's--nor were there any middle initials--on his account that I could use to narrow down my seemingly infinite list of John Smiths in my system, so I had to resort to going into every single account and find the John Smith located out of Conscientious, California (I wish that really were a city...). When it took me longer than a half-second to locate his account, I was fortunate enough to listen to a litany of complaints about how slow and incompetent I am and how he's been an owner for a whopping 8 years.

Well that's fantastic, sir, but amazingly enough, there is more than one John Smith that owns a timeshare with us and instead of just picking one at random, I thought I'd find your specific account to make sure you get credit for the week you're depositing. So I locate his account after a totally unacceptable two minutes and getting the name of his resort, I ask him the standard question, "Do you have the start date of your week?"

Fifteen minutes later, after he scrolled through apparently a hundred e-mails, placed me on hold to call his wife, placed me on another hold to call his actual resort, he was able to give me the start date of his week and I could move on with the deposit and the trade reservation. His time clearly was more important than mine and the time of the five owners sitting on hold while I waited for him to get his shit together.

I wish there was an Aggravation Fee I could tack on to reservations: "Alright, sir, well since you were a total pain in the ass, I am going to have to collect an additional $25 fee." That whole thing wasn't even worth the $119 that went towards my total revenue for the month.