You’re really smart,
You should go into customer service.
- The Little Lady
Go ahead and raise your hand if you’ve ever had that told to you before. No? Me either, well, not on purpose. The wife (or for cutesy nickname consistency “the Little Lady”) threw that one at me a while back in jest. You never really hear anyone try to convince someone to go into customer service jobs though do you? It’s not like people are saying “look, he’s got the dexterity of a heathen God, his fingers dance like little legs of Ricky Martin! He must use these digits of his for the greater good of humanity. For dialing phones and typing memos and notes about conversations that weren’t that interesting to begin with but now they’re being documented on a file and kept for 3 years before the document destroying people come to send it away to document hell.” And yeah I used “document” a lot right there. It’s a cool word. You’d do it too if given the chance. If a guy has good hands he should be a doctor, if he has little to no discernible intelligence he should be a lawyer, people just expect this sort of thing. But why not customer service? Maybe it’s just bad marketing. Maybe if we sold people on the idea that treating people well and resolving their issues, minor as they may be, is just as worthwhile as being a doctor then they’d have some sense of accomplishment at their job. Certainly moreso than a lawyer. Not that this is an anti-lawyer rant because there are some good ones and they do, on occasion, serve a purpose, but most of them are just chuckleheads who like the idea of wearing a suit to work.
Interesting side note here regarding suits. Why is it that people who wear suits to work are either important businessmen and women with huge responsibilities and whatnot or else they work at a department store making $9.50 an hour? How did that happen? Not that I’m complaining about not wearing a suit to work but some of those department store guys have an awful lofty opinion of themselves when they’re essentially one notch above the guy at the gap wearing leather jeans and a choker necklace. Of course I work in a bastardized quasi-managerial form of customer service, so what do I know?
People work in the old CS because they can’t or won’t work anywhere else. I don’t know what kind of PR you’d have to put together to change the public’s feeling on the thing but I’m guessing it’s a lot of cash. And we’re going to need that cash for the crazy stripper party that we’re throwing for Carl for winning Customer Service Rep of the month. So this whole thing is probably a wash.
