it is well known i think that people being mean and hostile to you at work all the time generally makes you want to quit your job and makes your mental health very bad. and bad mental health leads to bad physical health and worse executive functioning and general misery. when you have a really shitty boss or coworker who is constantly making your life miserable it doesn't exactly make you more productive. really intense angry customers don't generally make you actually more focused and faster to work. If you've worked customer service, and you've had a customer snap their fingers and yell to get your attention, has that ever actually made you move quicker to help them? It just makes your day worse and makes you want to quit your job.
You aren't Judy Heumann crawling up the steps of the capitol. The disabled trans people making this website are well aware of the importance of accessibility needs and of how intensely you feel about them. Just as well as the cashier knows you're waiting in line on a busy day and your waitress knows that you're hungry. The bus driver knows you're late for your appointment and the librarian knows you need your computer time for something really important that has to be done today. Workers in understaffed institutions, whether they be worker co-ops like cohost or the public sector or for-profit or wherever, are well aware of the importance of getting to what everyone needs. They're understaffed and can only get to everything that needs to be done as quickly as they can get to it, and taking the time to personally address everyone who is waiting for them makes everything else take longer to do to get to them.
When you're a worker in this situation, you really have two choices
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Rush to get to everyone as quickly as possible, resulting in stressful chaotic work days that will result in worse work that will likely need more fixing later and will result burnout very very quickly. You can yell "IN A MOMENT! I'M ASSISTING ANOTHER CUSTOMER!" all you want but it won't make a difference.
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Tune out the people yelling at you that the line is too long and just focus on getting to each thing down the line at a sustainable pace. Let people wait. Maintain firm boundaries. and let the people yelling tire themselves out instead until they lower their expectations for you.
If anything does kill cohost it will be burnout before it will be money. I guarantee you that burnout is a much bigger threat than money when you're managing a project like this. People being hostile and impossible to please makes people want to quit. It's why your local library closed due to short staffing, why your bus is late all the time, why your favorite non-corporate websites and online communities keep dying, why activist organizations die, why your food is taking so long, and so forth.
Short staffing leads to burnout leads to quitting leads to short staffing, repeat ad nauseam.
"Escalating tactics" that people refer to on here don't even work for politicians or corporations why would they work for overworked understaffed underpaid workers who already know about the thing you asked for and labeled it as "planned?"
I'm sorry you have eye strain. That's suck and it's frustrating. I have visual and cognitive disorders too. For me, color contrast is really important and I use the accessibility settings on my devices to increase the color contrast when I need to, even though it makes things ugly sometimes. I report that the contrast is too low but then I just have to resort to the accessibility settings that come on my phone, tablet, computer, etc. because I know it's not gonna get fixed in a timely manner.
All devices have an "invert colors" setting in their accessibility menu which is designed to solve the black text on white background issue for any app or website you use. It's not pretty but it will work on any device for any website and any app. I've used it myself before and it works. It's not an ideal solution but yelling at the bus driver doesn't make the bus go faster.
To be honest, some days the patrons who are yelling the loudest are the ones I get to last just because I don't want to set the precedent or expectation that yelling in the library is how you get what you want. If a patron yells "EXCUSE ME!" from the PCs I ignore them until they actually approach someone and speak at a normal volume asking for assistance. If a patron arrives 5 minutes before closing, I do not let them borrow a book. Maintaining boundaries is necessary for staving off burnout.
disabled people yelling at disabled people to care about disabled people more just leaves the whole world bereft of spoons. be nice to your bus driver, be nice to your library staff, be nice to your waitress, be nice to your cashier, be nice to Nire and be nice to staff because all we have sometimes is the choice to hold our frustrations to our chest and be the one nice person to someone who is exhausted and burning out trying to help everyone simultaneously while keeping a burning ship from sinking.



