As mentioned in the last post (if you read the updated version), all the career-related venting of the past few weeks/months has been unpublished. It's a whole new day! (One where I have to get up in two hours and 40 minutes.)
However, I can still complain about other stuff. (I'm still me.)
Like, right now there's this post on Dooce called "Outsourced Caring." As usual, it's an enjoyable thing, and at this point it has over 500 comments. What's the issue? How troublesome the self-checkout machines can be in grocery stores, and how these machines seem to be more about removing positive human interaction (and perhaps attracting negative human interaction) than any actual efficiency. Most comments take this view.
I sympathize, although I seldom have a problem with the machines and I usually really like using them. So many people still avoid them that it's fast, and the only real issue that springs to mind for me is that at one store it won't take my school district Visa gift card because it requires a zip code, and I've yet to find a zip that works. (See, this is where I'm good and don't tell about all the posterboard I then had to buy with my own money and how, once the lesson came to pass, it was So Not Worth It.)
I acknowledge that, since I don't have a toddler and since I've had the time to learn the little oddities of the machines (e.g., "Skip Bagging" can be your best friend, but don't use it more than four times in a row or a human will have to come over), my experience is simply different. I don't think those other people are stupid for having different experiences or feelings. It sounds like they have genuine frustrations.
Meanwhile, I agree with them that stores shouldn't put in 12 lanes but never have more than three open. I agree that self-checkout isn't for all types of customers, and so stores shouldn't try to steer everyone into the self-checkout lanes. I agree that self-checkout can bring out the worst in people, especially whoever is prancing from foot to foot behind you, judging your technique. Oh, and PEOPLE. It is not a mortal sin to form a single line that waits for the next available station. Yes, I know how BADLY you want to form a line for each of the four self-checkouts, but that way leads to madness. There isn't even room for four lines. You may have thought, back in high school, that no one ever uses geometry in real life, but now you see you need those skills to understand why four lines that are this big can't fit into the small rectangle that is that big.
Anyway, it's a good post, enjoyable comments, even if I don't really relate. What I do relate to is bad customer service, though, and heaven knows I don't tolerate it well. That said, employees can be slow, inept, pretty much anything, as long as they're trying to keep the customer happy. One apologetic smile from them and I'm saying, "no, no, don't worry about it" and meaning it. To me, bad customer service is when you're not serving the customer, not even at least thinking you are.
Some commenters say the checkouts themselves represent bad customer service, and some say that, for them, it's the humans running the self-checkout area who are
the problem. A few even discuss how going through any kind of checkout line is just an exercise in unhappiness, a discussion of which evil is lesser follows. Many say how they don't shop at XYZ store anymore just because they've had such a bad self-checkout experience.
With the exception of my local Smith's (where it was Asshat City until recently), I'm pretty satisfied with the retailers on my street. Good job, local Albertsons! Keep up the good work, local Sinclair! Peace to you in this holiday season, national haircut chain whose name I forget but Mike seems to like you!
However, one time, back in Texas, my mom had a bad experience in a chain store. Small city Texas, too, where they brag that these things don't happen. Me, I'd already just about given up on the place and wished my parents didn't even patronize it. Every time I went in the people were unhelpful and rude and seemingly unqualified.
This being a blog and my blog and all that, I ranted about it here. Then I contacted the national headquarters of the store. I shared the link with them, prefaced with a more civil discussion of my frustration. (Not even a form letter back.) I said, in my post, in bold letters, perhaps with some CAPS, that I was unhappy and really didn't want to patronize that particular branch of the chain any longer.
Well, the hate mail. The hate comments. Real hate - as in, really nasty stuff about my mom. (Because she had a brief neurological lapse, a problem we were only beginning to explore with a doctor at that time, and she simply asked the cashier a question, she apparently deserved every bit of poor service she got and probably more, and we - her family - deserved hard time in a small cell with gang members for letting her go into the checkout line by herself.) Nasty stuff about me, too. Lots of personal attacks on how I'm ugly, boring, can't write to save my life, whatever. I deleted things that were just way too off-topic, but I let most of it stay because I thought it reflected poorly on the commenters in ways that my protests and clarifications never could.
Alas, the majority of those who felt moved to comment only saw a bonfire and ran for more wood.
And then eventually the abuse just got ridiculous (someone with a dull axe must have linked to the post, but I never saw where), and I eventually unpublished it for the time being. Why should I put up with insults from people who by their own admission weren't reading "all those boring words"? Insults in what is, essentially, my own home?
Worse than the abuse, though, was the refrain of "if you worked retail, you'd understand why those people deserve to be incompetent and unfriendly."
I could blow off so much of what people say, but this point of view that it's okay to be a jerk when you're having a bad day or doing a job that few people would like to do past high school still makes me mad. It's so unacceptable.
The assumptions that I never worked retail, that I didn't spend years in customer service, that I was just "some student with no real life experience" because I happened to be finishing a degree, that I was just "some teacher with no real business world experience" (as if I was born with a dry erase marker in my hand) - none of that helped, either. That, and people answering my "you apparently didn't read" with "who could read all that garbage" - you just don't want to live in a world where people passionately respond to things they've never read, including attacking the author. (Then again, I join some rather august ranks of writers in suffering through this.)
The real issue was that I thought the cashier acted inappropriately, as had many of her co-workers before, and I wasn't going to shop at that one store anymore. Instead, I was flamed for callously dismissing the plight of the common working stiff and for stupidly abandoning the shopping potential of the thousands of other stores in the chain. And this is why Mike gets mad every time that commercial comes on that starts with, "People are smart."
So, coming back to the self-checkouts. There are literally hundreds of people in that post talking with real angst about the customer service issues they've experienced, with several vowing never to return to the technology/store location/entire company again.
What's my point? Er, I don't know. I think I was just going to smile ruefully.
Maybe I'm just letting people know where to go if they want to attack someone for criticizing, say, the minimum wage employee who, instead of helping customers with machine errors in the self-checkout lanes, is gossiping with a friend. (To pick just one example.) Let every person who told me that I just didn't GET IT, that these people have to suffer all kinds of idiots and therefore can't be expected to do their job, let those people RUN to this post and unleash the fury of their wisdom.
Or.
Maybe I'm making a comment on how blogs reflect a savage aspect of society, where cruel people sniff out the weak (one little personal diary versus the popular powerhouse that is Dooce) and pile-on because they can, using any excuse to do so. (Many of the people who criticized my post were pretty much making stuff up, stuff that I'd never said, because they had their own issues and were apparently desperate to twist my words into whatever fit that marginally-related agenda.)
Not that Dooce doesn't get its hate mail, as many charming posts from the author have shown, but it is surely assuaged by the (deserved) lovefest.
Maybe I'm just pondering the ongoing online confirmation of how unpleasant people can be, and maybe I'm inspired to do that because I have two classes reading To Kill a YouKnowWhat, one class reading not-1984-but-the-other-book, and two classes reading Lord of the Not-the-Rings. So, my day is like this: People are small-minded. (Repeat.) People are hypocrites who enjoy overpowering others. People go savage at the first opportunity. (Repeat.)
Obviously, I shouldn't type when tired (I never meant to bring up that post again, and all of this will probably be deleted after this evening's nap), but I wonder if the thrill of nasty anonymous posting is here for the long haul. At first, people were new to the internet and perhaps not used to living lives where such a variety of experience and point of view had to be considered. Howls at the sacred cow slaughterhouse are to be expected.
But now, now that people have had a while to understand that the world is a big place of many ideas, and everyone can have a pulpit (so no need to crash someone else's and demand a new paint job), I wonder if people will ever rise to more civilized discourse. With the cream that rises, so do the dead fish.
Comments