Why It’s Good I Don’t Work For IPR Now

I mentioned recently(ish) on Twitter that I’ve stepped down from my position as the customer service guy at Indie Press Revolution.

I figure that warrants a little extra talk, so here it is.

First off and up front: this was a good thing for everyone involved, and done without any kind of contentiousness. The fact of the matter is, I was getting very tired of the job, and had already dialed back my hours several months ago.  This did not lead to me providing the best customer service. Though maybe that’s a little unfair: I think I did a fine job with the customer service, but I wasn’t very timely about it, which amounted to the same end effect. Folks weren’t hearing back from me quickly, and that made IPR come off as less nimble, less alert. Not good for IPR, that, so when Brennan offered me an out I was straight up relieved.

My replacement (via an expansion of his job description) is Ryan Macklin.  Originally I hadn’t had the impression he was interested in taking on the customer service load in addition to his duties as General Manager. (General Manager sounds like a lame military-themed superhero, doesn’t it? But that’s the title.)  Turns out I was working with outdated information.  So I was double-relieved, because (here’s a little ego for you) I wasn’t sure there were many other folks who could step into the job and maintain/reclaim the level of quality I’ve striven for during my tenure with IPR, and I believed they were all otherwise occupied.  Ryan was on that short list.  So: win.

So it was good for IPR and it was good for Ryan.  It was also good for me, when it comes down to it.  The couple years (was it a couple years? seems longer) I worked this position gave me a lot of time to live up close to the relationship that exists, through IPR, between publishers and customers, and that meant I got to own a lot of anger and frustration.

I’m a negative empath in a way: I really soak up negative emotions if I’m around them, and every frustrated or torqued off customer often found me right there in their corner fuming alongside ‘em.  If a shipment went screwy, I got annoyed. If a publisher was doing a crap job of being clear and timely about shipping us new stock and I had to go write a pleasant disappointment to a customer who desperately wanted to make a purchase but couldn’t, I got really mad.  But that sort of thing just wasn’t something I could pass along, so there was a lot of bottling-up and silent grumbling that happened there.

And that’s just not something I want any more of. When you herd cats long enough, you end up with a fair number of scratches, and some of them are bound to fester. I was experiencing the kind of contempt — often as not unwarranted — that familiarity breeds.  At the end of the day I’m not well-served, nor are my relationships with other publishers well-served, by working in a position where I’m something other than a peer.  If I feel responsible for a large number of publishers, that means I’m going to feel like I own every failure, and the volume on that sort of thing is a killer. (I don’t mean for this to come off as some sort of polemic against IPR’s publishers. By and large they’re a good bunch, but the job left me wanting to hold them to the same standards of customer service and responsiveness as I hold myself to. And those are standards which — I can tell ya — are not always reasonable.)

But it’s not just about the aches and pains. Hell, they might just be a symptom rather than anything causative, and anyone who signs up for a customer service job is due for a heapin’ helpin’ of pains in the ass (gods bless ya, Ryan).  At the real core of it is, the IPR job was too big in my brain for something that should have been so small.  Knowing I had that workload ahead of me each week ground me down a bit, and I think it ground me down because it was never central to what I want to be doing with my career.  The extra money, the insider angle, those were certainly nice, but they were also distractions.  I’m better suited for running my own company — IPR isn’t that.  I’m better suited focusing on game production and publication and promotion, whether as a part of Evil Hat, or in the art direction & layout angle I have going right now with Hero Games, Margaret Weis Productions, and others.  And given that, IPR was always going to get relegated to third wheel status.  And worse, if I didn’t deliberately put it there, it would end up detracting from the stuff I really needed to be doing.

All in all it adds up to a good move.  IPR benefits by getting someone more focused on delivering excellent customer service and quality improvements for the company, and I win by unloading a big basket of frustration and distraction.   And IPR remains a big part of my life even after that separation, too: Evil Hat continues to see IPR as a strong component of its sales strategy, whether it’s in convention floor representation or online consumer and retailer sales.  Everyone wins here, and everyone improves for it.

And I for one can go back to getting excited about new small press products again … instead of regarding them as fresh additions to my workload.