“A person who is nice to you and not nice to the waiter is not a nice person.”
This quote comes from Dave Barry, so forgive me. (Some of you are not old enough to know what an embarrassing reference that is. He was a humor columnist for the Miami Herald for years who possibly invented lame dad humor. It’s kind of like quoting Jeff Foxworthy. Both of these men are far more successful than I’ve ever been, but then again so is Tucker Carlson.)
The logical pithiness of this quote has had me repeating it for decades. It also has the added benefit of being true. In my experience, people who act entitled and haughty with employees in the service industry have a thread of asshole-ishness somewhere in them. It may not emerge immediately with their friends, but it will emerge.
At least that’s what I thought until I became one of them.
Don’t worry. I’m not about to go David Sedaris on you. My years waiting tables are still too brightly burned in my brain to become *that* asshole. But I’ve noticed that in recent years, my expectations to be… satisfied in customer service situations have definitely risen.
As I was thinking through this last night, I realized that the problem has been particularly pronounced when it comes to hotels. I don’t know why exactly this is. Maybe because they’re so expensive these days? Or their purported vibe is, ‘let us take of everything’? Perhaps the hotel industry in general has changed in the era of AirBnB? I don’t really know. But as I write this, I can think of 4 recent experiences that were pretty damn sucky. The last hotel I stayed at, for instance, in Boulder, had an entire swimming pool out of service, stray bits of food on the room of our floor upon check-in, and I got stuck in an elevator just to tie a bow on it. All of these things probably merited at least a heads-up to someone on staff, but I didn’t bother. I’m tired of being Karen. It takes too much damn energy.
The reason I’ve been pondering all this is thanks to a recent show on HBO, The White Lotus. When you first look at the description and cast list, you’ll think as I did. “Oh look at all these fun people, I love these actors so much. What a fun premise, yes I shall watch this!”
It took approximately 10 minutes before I realized what I’d gotten myself into. It’s one of the deftest criticisms of white moneyed privilege I’ve seen in a long time. And while I’m nowhere near a one-percenter and am pretty positive I couldn’t afford to stay at a place like The White Lotus, the behavior of most of these people toward the hotel staff cuts a little too close to home. The characters are overdrawn for drama’s sake, but I’d bet good money that something they say or request or imply at some point is going to feel familiar.
Every interaction between guest and employee, no matter how ‘nice’ the guest thinks they’re being, has the heavy undertone of caste to it. The guests forked over a lot of dough for this vacation, a transaction that implies their needs and expectations must be met at every turn. Those needs and expectations have to be met, of course, by other human beings. Humans that, a large majority of the time, have much bigger worries than whether their hotel suite has an ocean view. I’m not ruining much when I tell you - it happens very early in the first episode - that a new pregnant employee goes into labor on her first day at the hotel and ignores it until her water breaks on the lobby floor; she can’t, she tells her partner on the phone, lose this job.
Juxtaposed against the shithead rich boy (and man is he awful) mad that his honeymoon suite doesn’t have a plunge pool… Well go back and read my complaint about “an entire swimming pool being out of service” and see how it sits now.
“Caste is more than rank, it is a state of mind that holds everyone captive, the dominant imprisoned in an illusion of their own entitlement, the subordinate trapped in the purgatory of someone else’s definition of who they are and who they should be.”
Yes, that’s from Isabel Wilkerson’s phenomenal book Caste and yes you should read it if you haven’t and yes it’s going to take you a while. What, you’ve got a plunge pool to dive into?
As I’ve gotten older, I have without a doubt become more entitled. The Old Man Yells at Cloud meme has real-world roots apparently. But it doesn’t sit quite as funny when you stare yourself in the face onscreen. Yes, sure, you can argue it’s been warranted at times. Our complaints earlier this summer got us money back from what turned out to be a really crappy resort. But it also required the manager of a second-rate condo complex in Port Aransas, Texas to smile obsequiously as two women with disposable income ran through a laundry list of grievances. What a shitty job to have.
“When someone works for less pay than she can live on, then she has made a great sacrifice for you. She has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The 'working poor,' are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.”
That’s Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickel & Dimed, a book that is even more relevant 10 years later. I’m digging the idea of rethinking ‘customer service’, reframing it in a lens of, if not philanthropy, basic human dignity. My ability to spend money that you may not have doesn’t mean I get to dictate the terms of your humanity. At the very least, I think I’ll just keep my damn mouth shut for a while.