Customer service, reviews, and smiling through the pain.
Caution: prostitute references ahead.
This is a story about prostitutes. Or sex workers, if you prefer.
But it starts at Red Robin. Or whatever burgers-and-shakes type restaurant with bottomless steak fries you have in your area.
You know how it is. You go into Red Robin. If you’re anything like me, you commit your usual pre-meal blood sacrifices to Baal, like your grandmother taught you, before dipping into that basket of bottomless steak fries. And, before you know it, the new server delivers your food late, and cold, and with a rude-a-tude of thoroughly Gallic proportions.
Then you go home, and you give the place a two-star review on Yelp, and discourage your friends from ever going there again.
It’s even worse now because of the invention of systems of mutual accountability as implemented by companies like Uber. All of us unwitting customers used to be able to bask in the delight of, in at least this one area, always being right.
Now we live in the constant danger of discovering that we are being reviewed badly by the companies where we get what we want. And those companies, which used to be the whipping boy in the power fantasy of being a customer, can now Yelp us right back, and we can be blacklisted before we even have a chance to think of an off-color joke to make about it.
Honestly, though, who has time to think of off-color humor these days? There are so many factions to offend, that most truly off-color humor offends such a niche audience that you may as well just make general slurs about nobody in particular and save everyone a lot of effort. If you need a dictionary of recent cultural trends to decide whether you ought to be offended by something or not, then you’ve probably ruined the instance of rage anyway. At that point, you’ve replaced it with a moment of calm contemplation about the hazards of global culture.
At the end of the day, our time is much better spent making fun of Canadians, since the only real thing to make fun of about Canadians is how well they take a little joshing, which creates a loop of warm fuzzy for all parties concerned.
So, yes, this cycle of boycotting is really just a recursive loop of ever-increasing concentric circles of anti-social behavior. The system of customer and user reviews is supposed to reward people and groups that do good work and to intimidate the anti-social trolls into beating themselves in line with everybody else. That way we can all live in regimented straight lines, and exchange sycophantic smiles specially designed to hide the tears and the suppressed screams.
Sorry, I’m getting off track a bit.
The thing is, though, you know that human nature isn’t suited to a culture of positive reviews. Of course it’s not. When you have a good experience, then your first instinct is to keep it to yourself, and only advertise it by grinning about it like a hyena till somebody slaps you in the face with a whole salmon and tells you to get a grip. Which real life always obliges to do, in order to remind us that all joy is fleeting.
A good experience makes us feel like real human beings for a while. The last thing we want to do is share it. Or, if we do share it, we want to share it with the people we know and love, so that we can be part of the larger growth of warmth. We want to be there to watch it.
What we don’t want to do is interrupt our euphoric high in order to express all the mucky, vanilla-cream happiness to the uncaring maw of the infinite mire that is the internet. The internet doesn’t care that we’re happy. When it does express anything about our happiness, the internet actively derides our happiness. It laughs at us, with that stupid troll face and all its thousand variations. Because it is only by burning our happy thoughts in the furnace of the memeverse that the internet can smelt out the tonnage of fairy dust it needs to continue growing at the bacterial rate it grows.
That’s the only thing I can figure.
And we all know that the internet will laugh if we’re happy near it, so we almost never leave positive reviews. And even when we do, it’s in the tersest, obligatory tone, any purity wrung out of what we say by the cynical psychic tendrils that are left when our joyful song turns to the hopeless fart that all happy thoughts on the internet become.
So we don’t write good reviews. And when we do they come out of us like the resigned and uncomfortable gasses of shrimpy indigestion.
We all know what kinds of reviews we like.
Flamers. Rants. Angry screed about bad experiences laid out with anything from the unironic simplicity of the definitely wronged to the punctuation-shy drivel of the habitual surrealist. In a culture where face-to-face encounters of anything less than civil polity is not allowed, we are a people constantly frustrated by bad customer experiences. And sometimes the only outlet we feel like we have is the heated, online review.
Because writing a bad review is so therapeutic — because it’s so easy to argue that we’re doing a public service by warning the general public away from a potentially damaging experience by writing an angry review — I feel like we’re developing a self-perpetuating culture of unforgiving trust in the anonymous democracy which is everyone who chooses to vent their opinions into review sites on the internet.
You know, it’s like…all these people on the internet gave this sushi joint a bad review, so I won’t go to it, even though my uncle likes it, because there are more of the anonymous people on the internet, right? Even though, it turns out, a lot of the reviews are old, and they consistently complain only about the fact that all the servers speak in Japanese accents, and my uncle went there last week and tells me that, so long as you’re polite and gesture at what you want, you won’t have any issues. I still know that the popular vote is the only way of determining the truth.
Right? No reason to go check it out myself, and maybe have an interesting new experience. All these other people already did. So I can confidently, and with great self-assurance, go to Chili’s around the corner. Because I always get heartburn at Chili’s, and they always forget the extra ranch dressing I order, and I suspect that they’ve never brought me a fresh chocolate lava cake for as long as I’ve been alive. But those are forgivable foibles, right?
I haven’t made any prostitute references yet. I haven’t forgotten. I’ve rambled on longer than I meant to. I’ll get to them. Pinky swear.
Dispatches from the Adventure (Exclusive “news-lite” letter).
Follow the Adventure (Patreon profile. Project announcements will be here).
The Adventurer takes tips (PayPal tip jar).
