When a customer service worker tries to chit chat or make some sort of small talk with you, so long as you have the emotional bandwidth for it, then at least respond to their efforts to chit chat or make small talk instead of ignoring them completely.
Sure, plenty of customer service workers have low emotional bandwidth themselves and are happy to ignore and be ignored in return. However, if someone is trying to chat with you about the weather or whatever, it's nice to at least reply to their attempts. This is because many customer service workers feel dehumanized by being constantly ignored and brushed off by customers all day. Smiling and saying "hi" to someone only to be completely ignored all day every day does tend to get to many people.
So when you board the bus during a wind storm and the bus driver makes a joke about the "beautiful weather we're having today", instead of ignoring her it's nice to just make a simple "haha yeah sure is!" back to her. When the receptionist says something about the never-ending construction going on in the building, it's nice to say something back like "haha yeah they sure are taking their time" instead of brushing him off entirely. These might be small interactions, but it could make a huge difference to them and how humanized they feel at work.
"Fighting? We ain't fighting. We're just showing each other what we can do. Friendly like," said Granny Weatherwax.
She stood up.
"I'd better be goin'," she said. "Us old people need our sleep, you know how it is."
"And what does the winner get?" said Diamanda. There was just a trace of uncertainty in her voice now. It was very faint, on the Richter scale of doubt it was probably no more than a plastic teacup five miles away falling off a low shelf onto the carpet, but it was there.
"Oh, the winner gets to win," said Granny Weatherwax. "That's what it's all about. Don't bother to see us out. You didn't see us in."
Disclaimer: I'm autistic and I over think and over talk about things. This post is so long, but my biggest special interest is other humans and I obsess over relationship dynamics. (Relationships meaning ANY human-to-human interactions.)
I am writing this bc I am genuinely confused, kinda hurt, and curious if I've ID'ed a relativity recent cultural change and if so, what's driving it? And how can I deal.
Here goes, what happened to apologizing? As a basic act of human decency? Full inquiry under the cut.
So where have apologies gone in customer service positions when you've actually fucked up, I mean, specifically?
I promise this is not "kids these days!" or "no one wants to work anymore!" shit. I know that front line customer service jobs are THE WORST. I worked them for 8 years (fast food and retail). I get how awful customers can be. I've observed how treatment of folks in these roles is worse now than ever.
When I'm out in public, I'm really nice...like really really nice. I can be a menace to people I know when I'm in a bad place, but the last thing I wanna be is contributing stressors to folks in customer facing roles. Yet I eat a lot of fast food and thusly, people make my orders wrong a lot. If it's a small error, I just deal and move on. But more often it's a case of not getting all the items we paid for--which I can't afford to do. But also even when I have it all, I can't always DEAL and eat stuff made totally the wrong way, so I often will return and ask that I get what I actually ordered.
That's no big problem. It's annoying, but I have the emotional fortitude and patience to get over it and advocate for myself, kindly and politely. This involves sometimes driving all the way from home, back somewhere I just left to get what I ordered.
And somewhere along the way, I realized that no body was apologizing anymore. Like at all. I travel frequently for work so I've observed it not just where I live in Texas or where I go regularly to see family in Indiana, but also in CA, CO, FL, NM, and NV now too.
The ole brain which collects data I don't want to and patterns that don't matter has told me that BY FAR the most common response in these moments is that the person at the counter/window kinda stares blankly at me, goes to grab the correct item and silently thrusts it at me and waits for me to take it and walk away. And even after I thank them, 0 words are said to me.
I don't know how to say it other than it feels dehumanizing. I don't need anything fancy--but I'd like to be treated like a fellow human being standing there, at the very least.
I'm not talking about being a fawning sycophant to me.
I'm not asking for free shit.
I'm not wanting anyone to get in trouble or be blamed.
I'm not saying that an irate customer should be apologized to.
I'm just looking for what, to me, is a very normal, human kindness response of a quick, "Oh sorry about that! One sec..." type thing when the other person has also given them basic human kindness.
It's happened again today, so I feel like I'm losing my marbles. And it's been making me upset enough that my partner and I did a count of this over the past 2 months ish and it has now occurred 7 times out of 8 situations. (One person said sorry very kindly. I almost cried tears of joy on the spot like a freak when they did.)
I mean this next part so sincerely--what's happening? Is it anticipation that the customer may be a jerk bc that's what's usual? It is generational shifts? Is it changes in corporate training practices?! I'm grasping at straws bc I desperately want to know WHY.
I quite literally CANNOT operate in public the way that they are, to anyone, ever. If I bump into someone extremely lightly, I'm already apologizing before I can even THINK of anything else. It just happens. When I worked a fast food window, I was the same. This YOU MUST SAY SORRY is ingrained in me whether I like it or not and traces back to my grandmother's raising of me. Where I come from she'd say it something like, "your home training is better than that!!!!!! You're embarrassing me, go back there, be polite, and stop showing your ass." if I didn't immediately apologize to someone when I was a kid/teen.
[[[I'm of the generation of women who not long ago were trying to unlearn the knee-jerk overly apologetic behavior in the workplace and such, and I decided that I like being this way.]]]
Listen, as an autistic person, I love me some rules that make sense. It makes sense to me to say sorry if you do something that's less than ideal to a stranger in public.
I am trying to rearrange my thinking to not have my feelings hurt when this occurs. But let's be real, I'm getting my feelings hurt by it currently.
Is this just me? You'd be my fave person if you read this all and have something to add into the mix 💗
Courtesy is the best part of culture, a kind of enchantment, and it wins the goodwill of all, just as rudeness wins only scorn and universal annoyance.
Two things I wish would become more common social etiquette, especially in the realm of activism are 1) Communicating the minute you know you are or are going to experience an extenuating life circumstance that will affect your ability to work on projects you've committed to, and 2) When you have advanced notice that a life change like that is coming, making an effort to find your replacement on a project you know you will have to leave.
I've just been a part of so many projects where people promise to commit then disappear, and when I finally catch back up with them, they're like "Oh I moved," or "Oh, I was having health issues," or "Oh, my coursework got too heavy." And it's like okay??? Those are valid reasons to no longer be able to help with the project, but why did I have to hunt you down months later to find this out? Presumably you knew stuff like a move was coming up in advance? It would have taken you less than five minutes to write any of that in an email to me instead of just ghosting a project that you said you cared about???
Obviously there are circumstances where that really isn't possible like if you're experiencing such severe anxiety that you can't even open your email account, or you're making a sudden move for a job, but in most cases, it's totally possible, and I think it should be expected that you communicate with the people you've committed to working with when you can no longer carry out your responsibilities.
For example, I stayed on in the lab I worked in as an undergrad as a volunteer while I was searching for my first big job post college. My professor had wanted to hire me, but he didn't get the grant funding to do it. I stayed because I wasn't doing anything else anyway except searching for jobs, and I believed in the importance of the research. Every time I got a new job interview, I told him. Every time I moved forward in the interview process or had an idea of when a new job might start, I told him. When I finally did get the job and had an official start date, I let him know, and I wrote out a full schedule of procedures we were doing so that we could discuss what he might have to take over while I was at work, and what I could help with on my days off/after work. He wasn't going to fill my position after I left, so finding someone new to replace me didn't apply here (though I did offer to recommend some undergrad friends), but I knew a month before I was going to start my new job, and I told him a month before I was going to start that job. I didn't wait until a week out or the day of. I didn't leave him scrambling to make up for my absence, and I just wish that was a more common mindset.
I understand the "fuck the two week notice" attitude when it comes to shitty jobs that don't care about you, but when it's an organization that you volunteered to be a part of it, obviously you cared about it to some degree, and you should act like it? The advanced or as-soon-as-you-know notice of life changes that will affect your ability to participate in things you committed to should be the standard, and then suggesting someone to replace you should be bonus points.
