Under My Skin

Why do people act that way?

Publish date: April 9, 2018
By
Alan Rockoff, MD

 

You can try all you want, but you never really figure people out.

Take Brendan. He spent a good few minutes chewing out my front desk staffer Linda. “You’re incompetent!” he shouted at her.

Linda tried to explain. “We can’t administer the Botox for your sweating today,” she said, “because it hasn’t come in yet.”

Picture of an angry man blowing steam out of his ears. ALLVISIONN/Thinkstock
What Linda did not say – there would have been no point – was that the reason his Botox hadn’t come in was that Brendan had ignored several calls from his pharmacy, asking for the information (and copayment) they needed to release the Botox.

No, Brendan certainly didn’t want to hear that. Nor did he want to hear that we had called in advance to ask him to actually wait until we let him know that the Botox was in. But here he was, hyperinflating his lungs.

“You’re just damned useless!” he explained.

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