Interpersonal conflict is something that every one of us has to deal with. In my opinion, as long as there is human interaction, interpersonal conflict is inevitable. Perhaps one may not be directly involved in the conflict, but since our emotion is very much affected by people around us, we may just be part of this interpersonal conflict, whether we like it or not.

There was once I encountered a situation which happened during my vocation job in the semestral break not long ago. I was working in a government department, Company A. My main job scope was as to man a helpdesk to guide callers to use the E-Services provided by my company to apply for their business licenses. Basically, my company acts like a “middle-man” (service provider) between customers and other government agencies ie MOM, MOE and etc. Very often, I had to liaise with these agencies on behalf of the callers.

I received a call from a caller regarding her Employment Agency License. As I had mentioned earlier, my company is a service provider on behalf of other agencies and we do not process license applications. She called in to complain that she had paid for her license, yet she still had not received any approval from Agency B. Even though this was out of my job scope and she had to liaise with Agency B directly herself, I decided to help her.

I called up Agency B and the officer-in-charge told me that they did not have any record pertaining to the customer. I requested the officer to check again and he said this “I say don’t have mean don’t have. What is there to check again?” After hearing this, I admitted I was a little irritated with him. So I returned the call to the customer and explained the situation to her (of course I did not mention the part on the officer’s attitude).

By then, the customer was really on hot-pot. She started to yell at me, using unkind words like “useless”, “waste of tax-payer money” and so on. I tried explaining to her that at our end, we do not process application and she had to call Agency B to check. However, customer demanded that since she used our service, we were obliged to do everything for her.

At that point of time, I was feeling so trapped and loss in the situation. I was just merely a “middle-man”. The parties involved understand the situation better than I did but none was willing to communicate or help each other. In the end, I had to get my boss to handle the case. I do not know the outcome of the dispute but I presumed that it was resolved as the customer did not call in anymore.

Sometimes I just wonder, “Is it really very difficult for people to work together?” In the situation as mentioned earlier, the dispute can be easily resolved as long as the officer in Agency B was willing to help. I’m just hoping one day, everyone will learn to work well with one another, and create a better world.