When did ‘The customer is always right’ become ‘The customer is always rude’?
I ask this, having frequently been told a variation of the same story by friends, who have been on the phone to a bank or an airline, an internet service provider or an energy company. The organisation has screwed up and they, the customer, are attempting to rectify things.
In response, the customer-care call-centre employee is parrying their efforts with a rota of empathetic phrases that they were taught on a one-hour induction course. Finally, exasperated, my friend will have expressed their frustration a little more firmly. Not the F-bomb. No raised voice. Nothing personal. But at this point a ripcord is pulled: “I am sorry, I do not have to accept language like that, I am transferring you to my supervisor.” The supervisor, without being privy to what has preceded, informs them that the call is being terminated because they, the customer, have not remained civil.
It has happened to me too. A young plumber, visiting to fix a repeatedly failing pump in our basement, explained that the problem was a faulty batch from the manufacturer. He removed the pump and returned an hour later with a new one. On closer questioning, he conceded that it was from the same faulty batch. I hesitated, fearful of appearing naive. “But mightn’t that also be unreliable?” The plumber admitted that, yes, there was that possibility. But I could always go down to the basement and just, you know, nudge the ballcock, if the drain filled up. Presumably he imagined that I should sit all night beside it, like an Inuit at a fishing hole.
Instead, I made him an offer. “If the basement floods, you come on Monday morning and clear up the water. Or pay me compensation. How does that sound?” He blanched and stuttered. A few moments later, his boss rang me. “You should talk nicely to people,” he admonished. “You should behave properly. It isn’t Alan’s fault.” Alan was upset. I apologised to Alan. He replaced the faulty pump with the other potentially faulty pump. And so, the circle of life continued. I hadn’t raised my voice to Alan. I hadn’t insulted him personally; I had merely expressed my frustration and offered what I thought was a reasonable solution. But I had supposedly overstepped the mark.
I have been reflecting on how that mark must have moved in recent years, without anyone telling me. Or had there been some other shift, a diminishment in a sense of personal responsibility, an increase in the fragility of the collective ego?
I offer these stories not with any eyeroll about snowflakes or political correctness gone mad. The most famous perspective on all this is probably Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind, which focuses on the youth of their homeland, but I don’t think that the issue is generation-specific.
What is odd is the anonymising distance afforded by the digital world, turning a large section of the population into total monsters, unafraid to hurl obscenities and wild accusations. Similarly, offence can now be taken so easily and, it seems to me, arbitrarily.
So who is to blame? Well, as ever, it’s the politicians: this kind of tactical, performative offence-taking is particularly loved by the right wing. Here in Denmark, one far-right politician often deploys the “Are you accusing me of being a racist?” defence in the manner of an affronted maiden aunt fluttering her lacy handkerchief at the mention of sexual impropriety. In the UK, Nigel Farage uses the technique of pretending to get upset at some imagined slight, raising his voice in protest – “How dare you suggest…!”; “That is grossly offensive!” – when he knows that he is on shaky moral or factual ground.
Politicians might be beyond saving but the rest of us really need to buck up. If the Russian army really is about to roll across Western Europe, are we as robust as we need to be? Before we spend billions on our defence hardware, shouldn’t we also spend a little time considering our mental resilience to the quotidian vicissitudes of life? If we indulge in offence-taking to evade our basic responsibilities, is that likely to help us resist the crushing heel of the Russian jackboot? And if anyone has a good water pump spare, feel free to drop me a line.
Michael Booth is Monocle’s Copenhagen correspondent. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.
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