What is your Anger Threshold?

Recently a member of our team received an incredibly rude, demeaning ticket from a person who was angry about 'spam' coming from our company.  Upon investigation, the account was created legitimately only 1 day prior by that person's coworker who, presumably accidentally, put in a distribution list instead of their personal email. The number of 'spam' emails sent to this list: 1.

This incident made me think about thresholds and tolerance. Is 1 email legitimately considered 'spam'? I receive random emails all the time and even if I am 100% certain it is not something I signed up for or wanted, I would never insult or demean the company, or a representative of that company, instantly as a way of removing myself from that list.

It's often talked about how we live in an instant gratification world, where we demand everything we want now: TV, information, travel, food.  Every day on my 15-minute commute to the office I see people swerving around traffic, running reds, turning right on a red when it clearly isn't safe etc. all to get somewhere a minute or 2 earlier. Today I literally saw a man yell out his window at a teenager who was crossing the road perfectly legally because it held up his left turn for a few extra seconds.

I feel what we don't talk about enough is the dark side of instant gratification, which is that we instantly become enraged when we are not gratified. The threshold for anger has decreased. This is seen in the decline of political discourse, decline of critical thinking and rise in customer service incidents like the one above.  And not only that, but this anger is irrational in that when given steps to solve the problem or a counter argument, the response is often more anger. When presented with the solution, the person in my example above replied "I've already wasted too much time on this problem!" Really? Forwarding an email and typing a bunch of unnecessarily nasty words is a waste of your time? It's an action you took purposefully!  And of course, when it was revealed that this was a simple error by one of their colleagues, there was no apology; that would take too much time.

Chastising someone whose entire role is there specifically to help you solve problems or achieve your desired outcomes does not benefit anyone. So next time you feel that anger burning, take a moment to assess the situation. What is the rational way to resolve this issue?  I am willing to bet almost always the answer is not to berate the person trying to solve the problem for you.