One Tuesday last year, between Christmas and Jan. 1, I called my health insurance company to check on a claim status. Wendy took my call, answered my questions and suggested a solution.
The next day, I received another call from an independent agency monitoring the effectiveness of the first call. The nice lady assured me the survey would take less than five minutes. She launched into a series of questions where I had to rate the service Wendy had provided the day before. The rating system rules were five = good, one = bad.
The minutes ticked by. After each question, I consulted the system rules, considered Tuesday’s call and answered as truthfully as possible. Then came a question that gave me pause.
“Given the opportunity, how likely is it that you would hire your customer service representative in your own company? On a scale of five to one, with five being the highest, and one being the lowest.”
“I don’t think that’s a very fair question,” I blurted.
“Excuse me?” the nice lady asked.
“Well, you’re putting an awful lot of pressure on me to choose if I would hire her or not when I know nothing about her. I don’t know anything about her references. I know nothing about her past experience, her education, her commitment to excellence,” I said.
“Umm …” the nice lady said.
“I mean, I can’t possibly answer this question in a way that is fair to Wendy,” I said.
“Umm …” the nice lady repeated.
“And to be honest, it’s making me a little nervous. I’m not even certain what I would have her do here. I’m a freelance writer. I do my own interviews, my own research, my own writing. I suppose she could work on transcriptions, but, again, I would need to know her work ethic to make sure she is dedicated to accuracy.”
“Ma’am, are you okay?” the nice lady asked.
“Absolutely,” I replied.
“You do understand I’m not asking you to hire Wendy, right?”
Of course I knew this. Who did she think I was? A freak?
Probably.
At this point in the conversation, I imagined that the nice lady was not only recording the call for quality assurance purposes, she was at that very moment flagging the recording for some sort of future viral audio. I also imagined her standing on her desk in the call center, wildly flailing her arms to get the full attention of her coworkers, who had muted their own calls to listen to my stark raving mad musings on speaker phone.
Clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Jennifer Kunst, Ph.D., gives a partial explanation for my reaction. In this 2013 article for Psychology Today, Kunst writes:
“How does a molehill become a mountain? Physically speaking, a molehill becomes a mountain when an animal takes dirt from somewhere, and piles it on somewhere else. Psychologically speaking, if we think metaphorically, making a mountain out of a molehill essentially is a massive displacement of psychological dirt from one place to another. We unconsciously dig up dirty issues from one significant area of our lives and pile them on to something far more innocuous. I think this happens because it seems easier to pile a little bit of dirt somewhere else than deal with the psychological mountain itself, intimidating as that often is.”
I might need a bigger dustpan.
You see, I have been created to be imaginatively visceral, or viscerally imaginative. In writing, this serves me well. In real life, I end up having a lot of conversations like the one with the nice lady.
The key, of course, is knowing when to tell the difference between molehill necessity and mountain necessity. This takes a good shovel. A shovel crafted of wisdom, mercy, grace, perspective and humility.
Back on that Wednesday of last year, I didn’t have to answer any more questions. The nice lady bid me a rapid adieu, and I went about my business—I wrote the story of what had just happened, my reaction, her reaction, what it meant in the large scheme of this thing we call life. A pause. A reflection. A little movement of dirt here and there.
Shovels, after all, are fine tools. In strong hands, they plunge deep, turn over what is hidden, and find fertile soil.
Dig on, Kentucky. Dig on.
And if you ever run across Wendy, please tell her that her application is still under consideration.
YOUR TURN: Tell of a time when you turned a molehill into a mountain—or vice versa—and the lesson you learned.