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Via reddit.com, I read and completely agree with this blogger's rant about how so many people feel perfectly entitled to treat customer service workers badly and how it has boiled over into the general level of rudeness in just about every avenue of public discourse. (I am trying to use language a bit less rough than hers, but her basic point is "stop being such an asshole")
The blogger credits this sad state of affairs to two popular American aphorisms: "the customer is always right" and "you have to earn respect". I agree with her sentiment, although I think it goes much deeper than that. It's not just a sense of entitlement, it's our willingness to reduce everyone outside of our very small personal spheres into non-entities. Once you stop seeing other people as human beings, it becomes possible to do almost anything to them -- witness the sudden popularity of torture among the general public.
Her method of confronting this when she encounters it in others is to try to publicly humiliate the person delivering the beatdown to the hapless waiter or counter clerk. I am less sure about whether this is a good approach. On one hand, it seems to just extend the cycle of uncivil behavior, but on the other hand sometimes the only way to get people to stop behaving badly is to give them a taste of their own medicine. Just imagine how effective it would be to tie Dick Cheney down to a wooden plank and dunk his head in a bucket of water over and over again (okay, I'll stop drooling over that scenario now, but you see my point).
I always try to remember that telemarketers, retail clerks at the mall, and so on are just people doing a job. One that they probably don't like or want but have no choice about. If a customer service person of whatever stripe is doing their job badly, I think it's fine to call them on it, but not to berate them, blow an air horn into the phone, or have a temper tantrum in the middle of the mall. If the person is taking their bad day out on you, then I think there's some justification in giving it back, because respect is a two-way street. And everybody deserves a margin of respect without having to earn it. Even if you're being an asshole.
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