Customer Service, NOT Servitude!

What's happened to the very concept of customer service? Doesn't anyone take pride in providing excellent service while selling their products anymore? It's an old weary complaint those of us in customer service here on a tediously regular basis, and on occasion, make ourselves of those who have the nerve to either pretend to be of our calling or to ignore that component of their own trade. We are an under-appreciated horde of professionals, often overrun with the uncaring, unskilled, and under-intelligent, treated like human offal be the even less caring, far more unskilled, and those of sub-mammalian intelligence. Yet, the high and mighty would be crippled and fallow were they to locate products and secure services for themselves in the many of our venues into which they strut, paper tigers that they are.

It is, perhaps, ironic, or tempting fate, to be writing online while a make the following assessment, yet I firmly believe it was the dubious advent of this technological age which rendered my profession so disrespected and moot. To paraphrase "Devil's Advocate," once the entire world was fiber-optically connected, every minuscule neuron coddled, coaxed, and teased to climax, every minute synapse treated as some magnum opus, the proverbial fifteen minutes of fame were insufficient, and every being barely capable of uttering cohesive syllables aspired to titanic fame and power. Add to that the more recent phenomenon of the rebirth of the rebel popularity of the criminal, specifically the 'gangsta,' which glorifies great wealth had by little labor and in defiance of anything legal and acceptable by traditional social standards, and the result is a disdain for those who serve others without avarice and in legal capacities.

Of late, we are expected by our cerebrally-challenged clientele to be able to read their minds based on semi-Neanderthal grunts or less. God knows how difficult it is to look up at the gasoline pump at which one has parked and decipher that peculiar symbol known in professional circles as an Arabic numeral, much less relay it to the person behind the counter in less than a simian utterance. I'm certain it is now commonplace and perfectly acceptable among the physically mobile, hearing, and sighted, to step no more than two paces into any store regardless of size, clarity of aisle labelling and clearance of passage, turn to the nearest associate, and bark out the name of a product or substance in thick colloquialism, expecting us to clearly interpret that as a call for help, not because the customer cannot find the product, but because it has come beneath them to do their own shopping. One of my recent customers who was absolutely incapable of communicating at which pump he had parked was my oldest son's middle school guidance counselor; what hope have we for the future when the supposedly stable past, propped up before our children as role models, behave as ignorami.

I need to escape this profession. As dire as the effect on my colleagues would be, we need to become a completely self-service society. I observe my oldest son, recognize the insurmountable sloth I see in him, that I despise in him, and realize that it isn't only current popular culture that promotes his indulgent laziness, it's my very profession. So long as there are individuals whose function it is to provide and retrieve, there isn't any motivation for the lazy and self-important to get off their asses and do a thing for themselves. It's time to return to the Darwinian ideal, to let those that cannot provide for themselves dwindle and die, absorbing themselves for sustenance until they're no more than empty husks. Without the proletarian, there is no bourgeois or patrician. Without the patrician and bourgeois, the proletarian survives.