Also about customer service, reviews, and smiling through the pain.
Herein: prostitute references.
Now, really, I’m talking about two issues, here, because customer interaction has two parts. Right?
On the one side, there’s me: the ignorant pleb, who has no idea how the business I’m visiting operates, much less what’s happening in the daily lives of the people who are there. My part in the transaction is to rudely demand what I want, to avoid making eye contact, and to spend my time there talking about how tragic it would be if automation eliminated my job.
Across the semi-membranous and imminently permeable barrier that divides the two groups in this transaction, I’ll consider, completely at random, my friend Olivia.
Actually it wasn’t random. Olivia works at the best coffee shop in the two mile radius where coffee shops matter at 7:00 a.m. on weekdays, i.e., two miles from where I work. Or she used to, before that coffee shop closed and my life lost one of its bright spots.
Getting off track again. Moving on.
From Olivia’s perspective, her participation in the customer/customee relationship is an exercise in making a daily plunge into a dehumanizing environment where she’s treated like a statistic who needs to treat every single one of the several hundred whiners who demand coffee from her as if they are special, rather than a smudge of interchangeable faces getting worked up about the insubstantial variations they’re making on “coffee with cream,” and every third person acting like she’s ruined their life, even though in five minutes they’ll be gone, and she’ll be dealing with an even bigger douche-nozzle than you could ever hope to be.
I didn’t choose Olivia because she’s a woman, by the way. Just because I like her. Maybe you’re the sexist one. Ever think of that? Huh?
See what I’m saying about off color jokes? It’s hard to even know where to start.
We all jump back and forth over the customer/customee barrier. Several times a day, for a lot of us. We’re all providing some kind of service to somebody in one moment, and they’re deciding how to review us to their peer group. It’s an infinite loop, and we’ll all be caught in it for the rest of our lives.
I’ve been trying really hard not to illustrate the entire point with sex workers, because in a real way their lives are effected by the reciprocity of user reviews. Most of us are only getting used to the idea of coping with the reality that we might need to consider how we are reviewed, as a customer, before we can expect good service. I understand that there’s an economy of information among sex workers where customers get reviewed all the time, and if customers don’t meet certain standards — which they don’t necessarily know about ahead of time — then those customers might find their suits for service denied.
Which is not at all funny, because it’s becoming something weirdly systemic. If enough Lyft drivers or Uber drivers rate you poorly, then at the end of your evening of drinking too much then you will find yourself stumbling around downtown with no ride home.
I don’t know how I feel about that. Although, hypothetically, it’s not a bad thing. Not at all. Because of what happens when you’re kind to people, you see.
I’m not going to say I’m one of these people that you always want to shake and say, “Why are you so calm? The world is actively trying to ruin your life! What is wrong with you and how are you maintaining that sublime smile? Shit!”
I’m not so far gone as that, but I have spent enough of my life essentially similar to being a wage grunt to know what it’s like to deal with ignorant customers who are one or two requests for almond milk away from inciting a riot against the bourgeoisie.
Which doesn’t quite qualify me to say that I empathize with sex workers — the ultimate customer satisfaction experts.
Necessarily. Ask my ex girlfriend about my second job. Wink wink — nudge nudge. Ooh, ah, missus.
At the same time, I feel like I can say with authority that I think he spoke sooth when my dad said that everyone ought to work in the service industry for a while, in order to develop a little understanding about how it feels to be ordered around a little.
It’s not just because of that, although I do always remember my days at Duffyroll Cafe when I decide to be as thoughtful toward people that I’m paying to provide me a service.
Because at the corporate level of “Starbucks,” it might be a convenient illusion to say they’re in the people industry. It might be that “Starbucks” is like every other anonymous corporation who treats its “employees” like resources and its “customers” like revenue statistics. That might be true. But on a personal level, when you visit a “Starbucks” for your “non-fat Zebra latte with double whip and mint sprinkles,” you’re dealing with a person. You’re a person. They’re a person. There’s a social interaction that’s occurring. And in scenarios when that’s true, there’s more than one element that effects whether or not you have a good “customer service” experience.
So when you’re “sitting down” to write your angry review about how the people at “Starbucks” ruined your night because there wasn’t enough “froth” on your “coffee,” then maybe you’ll find it valuable to consider, sometimes, how you acted during your “visit.”
Maybe, at the end of the day, I’ll figure out that putting quotation marks around random words does not a “double entendre” make.
But probably not.
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