Your humble scribe has made a career of searching and hoping to find one day the ideal job. But, alas, he has always been disappointed. He has worked at 27 different jobs in his life. He started hawking copies of the Boston Herald Traveler to commuters in Watertown Square as a lad. He went on to work numerous part-time/summer jobs after school. He fixed duplicating machines, worked as a painter, wrangled horses on a dude ranch, academic administrator, systems analyst, program manager for new product introduction, wrote resumes for people, and worked as a direct marketing database manager. He has unloaded trucks and stocked shelves, he has been paid for published essays, unpaid for poetry and has killed and eaten a moose single-handedly (Just wanted to see if you were still reading), and, most recently has been one of those unfortunate persons on whom god has played another of His cruel jokes - condemned to be a person who waits on the public.
If you have never had such a job - dealing with the public - you have no idea how loathsome and rude the public can be. If you worked in an office in some bureaucracy all your life, you probably thought your boss was a dick wad and most of your coworkers were evil backbiting shits - oh, and you are totally correct on that point - but now, throw-in an unfiltered rabble of customers to this mix, whose only qualification for your attention is that they are suspected of having money. Management insists that these walk-in, random people should be treated as if they were royalty, instead of ravenous doltish vultures with credit cards, which most of them are.
Don't misunderstand, I am not whining. I am merely pointing out that human beings tend to be nasty, brutish and short-tempered. The world consists of two basic types of people: people who provide service and people who consume service. If you are exclusively in the latter group, you probably have little respect for people in the former group, but I need to tell you, it is probably you who is the moron.
That poor menche that is wrestling with a badly-designed computer system to handle the vagaries of your desires is probably doing the best he or she can. And, even if they respond to you in an unpleasant manner (which you probably deserve) perhaps it is understandable if you consider that they have spent the whole morning dealing with inconsiderate assholes, and maybe they have exceeded the reasonable tolerance point for interfacing with people who think the world revolves around them.
Thank god, tomorrow is my last day. Suck on that, public!
5 comments:
Like buying and then selling a boat, DEN seems happiest when he first gets a job ... and then when he shucks it. (He left out selling discount appliances.)
A true masterpiece of communist diatribe lowered on the effete, elite (or so they think) public, as well as management of an amateurishly operated capitalistic failing business niche.
. . . It is, perhaps, your fate to have tumbled in to a totally disagreeable, if not underwhelmingly boorish position with a public that falsely believes that for {a few} dollars it is entitled to attempt to snuff your dignity, humanity, intelligence and humor as if you are a duck at a carnival shooting gallery.
I beg to differ, insect. During an almost 40-year career in customer service, I had relatively few unpleasant experiences. Especially in the later years, when my I was at maximum competence, most encounters were pleasant and even gratifying to me. You see, insect, every service transaction involves more than just the server and the servee. There is also the impedimenta: the attitudes both parties bring to the situation.
Hey Pollyanna, I had a robust LOL at your lame defense of your noble "service transactions."
You were never stationed at a counter, at the mercy of the dreaded next person in line.
Your "customers" were people in offices who were happy to see you arrive because they saw you as The One who was going to fix their problem. Stop blaming the victim.
"insect" is a very rude thing to call someone. Lefty sounds like an asshole to me.
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