kill 'em with kindness

Is annoying people with kindness mean? My job is not to answer phones. When I took my job, I didn’t anticipate having to answer phones…but I guess someone has to do it and in order to keep my job, I find myself having to answer phones. I work at a newspaper and I take A LOT of calls from people—just for kicks, let’s call them “crazy people who think they are really cool”—who think several things.
1) THEIR opinion is the only thing controlling the decisions made at the paper. Yes, your subscription is valuable, but truthfully, we don’t value your subscription enough to spend thousands of dollars on a new ad entry system.
2) Yes, they hung up and therefore got out of line to place a classified ad in order to yell at me. That makes it my fault that they got out of line and therefore, I should transfer them to an imaginary line where they don’t have to hold...(FYI—yelling at me won’t get you what you want.)
3) Everyone should be in the office sitting at their desk at all times waiting for phone calls. I’m no journalist, but I think it would be pretty hard to do investigative reporting while sitting at my desk taking phone calls. The kicker is when they tell me that they don’t have time to sit at their phone and wait for a call back…huh…that makes sense.
4) Some people “don’t believe” in voicemail. I have no idea what that means.
5) Some people think that if they don’t get their credit issue resolved immediately, the world will end. I don’t know why they couldn’t call at any point over the last 90 days when our credit rep wasn’t using the restroom. It is remarkable.
6) I spoke with a woman today who was on hold in our classified line for “600 years”. I kicked myself after I hung up with her for not asking whether took time to watch any part of the Revolutionary War while she was on hold.
This is just a sampling of the things that people will do/say/think (or are they thinking at all?) when upset.
So, the question remains—is insincere kindness a method of insulting the customer, or is it the best way to keep people calm? I’m not sure—today a gentleman offered to buy me a drink and is going to send a letter to my manager—all because of my insincere kindness.