PR 101: The Customer Always Wins

If I ran a country it would be a mandate that everyone work a shitty ass job that nobody ever “dreams about”. It’d be a required course in high school and you’d have to take it every year. And then after you graduate from college you’d take it again before doing whatever else your life “calls” you to do. You could have the option of being a garbage collector, waiter, plumber or a checkout attendant at a supermarket.* And those would be just the basic courses.

And if after college someone still doesn’t get it drilled into their head that they don’t get to look down on anybody–no matter how low their job is perceived to be–they’d take a remedial course, at something like future SAT research.

This bothers me about our culture: we’re always having people serve us. It doesn’t matter if we’re eating at a restaurant, buying movie tickets, taking the bus or receiving mail. Someone is there making the world spin for us.

Okay, it’s not inherently a bad thing, but when you combine that with the idea that as customers we somehow deserve something, we start treating people less like people and more like invisible slaves who have no life of their own and should be unnoticed anyway. The people behind the desk, waiting on tables, standing behind the counter, the people who pick up our trash…they’re just lowlifes who deserve to be looked down upon aren’t they?

It’s like they exist solely to serve us; they’re all supposed to be there as if somehow we’re better than them because we’re the ones doing their “boss” a favor since we’re the ones paying for something.

You know what? It’s true. We are the ones paying for something and they’re the ones who are supposed to deliver. That’s their job.

But that doesn’t mean we get to be put ourselves on a high rocker and be an ass about it. Nobody gives a wooden nickel how important you think you are, when you’re at a restaurant you don’t get to throw a tirade at the waiter because he somehow got your order wrong.

I can’t think of a good way to end this, suffice to say, give some people some respect. They deserve it more than you do your 44.7% cooked steak.

* “fail” note: I realized I fell into my own trap of labeling these jobs with the amazingly graceful and positive tag of “shitty ass.” My point (I would think, obviously) is not to demean those jobs, but was to be overly biting in how I believe the general perception of these jobs is unfair.