At a certain point in your life, you move past using terms like “One day I’ll….”
As in, “One day I’ll learn to play the guitar.”
Or, “One day, I’ll fix that leaky faucet.”
It’s not that you’re ever too old to learn to play the guitar, or to fix that leaky faucet – you’re not.
It’s just that deep down, you know you either will or you won’t, so there’s no point in saying you will if you won’t. For example, I will never learn to play the guitar, no matter how many times I told myself I would, because I know that deep down, I don’t really care that much about learning to play the guitar, so what’s the point in pretending?
*****
The reason I bring this up is because right now I am tempted to say to myself, “One day I’ll laugh about all this.” But I know I won’t one day laugh about it. I won’t say it, and I won’t laugh about it.
In this case, the thing I won’t one day laugh about is the never-ending series of moving headaches we have experienced since departing London six weeks ago for the US of A. I will not one day laugh about these headaches. There is not enough time left to laugh about them.
Here’s a partial list of the aforementioned headaches:
- My wife spent about 430 hours on the phone with various corporate bean counters trying to sort out a litany of problems concerning shipping costs they didn’t pay, temporary housing costs they didn’t pay, credit card charges that went to the wrong account, bank charges that went to the wrong account, etc.
- One of my bicycles was damaged beyond repair during overseas shipping, for reasons unknown to God or man, and we still have not gotten the money from the claims department to pay for the bike they ruined.
- We went to a CarMax car dealership to buy a car about five weeks ago, only to find that just about all the cars on the lot were already reserved. So, we went on the website to order a car and have it delivered to the lot. We were soon told the car was on its way – yayyy! – and we’d be able to drive it home in no time at all. Well, we waited, and waited, and waited, and waited. Long story short: the car maybe was delivered, but there was some paperwork problem, so we never could get it. So we went to a different dealership to buy another car. And as soon as we bought that car, we got about 25 messages from CarMax saying your car is now ready!
- We hired a contractor to install a new shower about, oh, 5 weeks ago. He said he could get started ASAP, no problem. As of today, he still has not started, and has not bothered to keep us posted on when he will get started, even though we have paid half of the total cost upfront, which ain’t cheap. But he’s cool with it.
- A week ago we went to Verizon to set up a new mobile phone plan. In so doing, they sold us on four new phones to replace our old ones. Two of those phones are still not ready – even though a few days ago they said they were ready. When I asked them when the phones would be ready, they both looked grouchy and clueless, and never gave an answer.
This is only a partial list, mind you. There have been dozens of other, smaller headaches that collectively have sent us on the brink of a nervous breakdown, if not for our steely fortitude and bottomless well of character….
*****
Look, I know problems like these happen. I even anticipated that problems like these would happen. In fact, I remember saying, “There are going to be some problems with this move, you can bet on it.”
But somehow, this feels different. It’s not just the problems. Those you can live with – people make mistakes on the job, we all do,
I’ve personally made so many mistakes on the job in my career that if you stacked them on top of each other they’d reach halfway to the moon. And because I’ve been a writer/journalist for most of my career, my mistakes were out there for all the world to read, and you can believe that the world let me know about it.
But: I made a decision early on that I would always be accountable for my mistakes, and would never make excuses for them. This wasn’t because I was so noble. It was more that I knew you’re better off just admitting you f*****d up and trying to fix the problem, because then it would go away, and you’d move on.
The stuff we have been through lately doesn’t fit into that box. The people who f*****d up not only don’t seem to want to take responsibility – they go out of their way to make every excuse under the sun, and then try to flip it back on you for being upset about it. They are almost aggressively unaccountable, as if we’re the problem for bringing the problem up in the first place.
They don’t seem to comprehend that the people they are supposed to serve would have a problem with the service they didn’t provide. They don’t seem to care. In fact, they could not give less of a shit if you paid them extra for giving a shit in the first place.
*****
Something is different about the working world, circa 2023. It seems broken. Workers seem broken. Systems seem broken. The supply chain, the labor force, the old ways of doing things – they all seem broken.
I don’t think I am overstating this. There is sufficient data showing that customer service has taken a nosedive in recent years. There aren’t enough people doing enough things, and the ones who are doing things are overwhelmed. Employees have been run ragged. They are expected to do more and be more, during more hours of the day, for less pay. A lot of employees have said, screw it, I’m sick of it, screw it and screw you.
I’ve personally written about the Great Resignation for various websites. This was the term given to millions of workers around the world dropping out of the workforce for a while to do nothing. I think the media coverage of it (including my own) probably overhyped this phenomenon, though I also think it held certain kernels of truth.
COVID-19 changed the world, in countless ways. It put many people on the sidelines, no longer able to earn a living. Businesses closed in bunches because of mass lockdowns.
Folks were forced to hunker down at home. Many of these folks decided they liked it, which is why many are hesitant to return to offices, even now, nearly four years after the first COVID cases hit. Others are hesitant to work at all, or to give any more effort than they have to, because there’s a massive labor shortage, and workers can pretty much do as they please.
What you are left with are understaffed organizations that just need warm bodies to fill the hours. And if those warm bodies ruin a bicycle during shipping, or twiddle their thumbs getting mobile phones ready, well….
WTF are you gonna do about it?
*****
We Americans had it awfully good for a long, long time. The United States that I grew up in was the richest country in the history of the world. It still is, for that matter. Most of us were blessed with premium service and the best of the best, all the time, every hour of the day. There have always been pockets of poverty and want here, but even those look rich in comparison to much of the world. A ghetto in America is middle class in many other countries.
I mention this because I am fully aware that my inconveniences are trivial compared to people with real problems.
Even so…..
Man, there used to be such pride in doing a good job, providing premium service, going the extra mile even though you didn’t have to. I hate to think we’ve gotten away from that. I hate to think that the nonstop, automated, digitally controlled, post-COVID world of the third decade of the 21st century has made us question why we should care about a job well done.
I’m going to tell myself this is all a hiccup, a temporary fluke, an unfortunate collision of different circumstances that has contributed to poor service and poor attitudes.
I’m not going to say, “One day I’ll laugh about all this.”
But hopefully, one day I’ll laugh about all this.
Note: The drawing accompanying this blog was done by our oldest daughter, an uber-talented artist. This was from a school assignment, I believe. It seemed to fit the theme.
Vance Cariaga 
My first thought on seeing the drawing was: Gollum. Was it meant to be that?
Anyway, welcome to the rest of the world in terms of customer service. It’s a joke down in this country. I’m flabbergasted when I experience excellent service from a company here. You expect either incompetence or indifference a lot of the time, and one has to chase people to get things done quickly.
Downsizing is a reason, as you say. For example, often, stores have like 15 tills open, but half are attended to. So I realise that employee morale is a challenge.
I think part of it is also the generation change in the workforce. The younger ones, who are taking more and more positions, don’t seem to have a work ethic that was a norm in the old days. There’s a sense of entitlement and lack of genuine care, which I think is really a mirror of society, to some degree.
As for labour being in short supply, it’s the opposite here. If your country imported from here (or similar), it would quickly fill up.
You’re not alone in that shortage though. I see see places like Canada, Germany, Ireland, and others seeking large numbers of work from outside, and part of it is their shrinking working population as older people retire and there’s not enough new people to replace them.
All in all, expectations need to be shifted, because we’re living in a world of degraded standards. The best you can do is to make sure YOU don’t drop your own standards of work, and teach your kids the same. Complaining about the general trend won’t change the outside world…
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Full disclosure: I had to google “Gollum.” Funny you mention that, because the daughter who drew that picture finished reading “Lord of the Rings” this year (she’s a big fantasy/Harry Potter type reader) so maybe that inspired it. I do know she drew the image from another image. I will have to ask her.
In terms of customer service — when we lived in London we were introduced to inferior service vs. what it was like in the U.S., so we sort of lowered our expectations anyway.
The restaurant service in the U.S. is still much better than everywhere else — they actually put water on the table when you sit down, without you having to ask and ask and ask. They check on you regularly and generally keep a good attitude — probably because they know there is a tip in it for them, whereas in the UK and elsewhere the tip is already baked into the price of the meal, which kills the incentive of doing a first-rate job.
But in most other areas, service in the U.S. has noticeably declined from previous standards. There is no doubt that a post-COVID labor shortage has a lot to do with it. The unemployment rate remains very, very low, which is great for workers but not great for companies that remain understaffed. And a lot of bozos here want to tighten immigration restrictions when our economy obviously needs more workers.
In terms of your point about younger generations — I can see that playing a part as well. Twenty-somethings have grown up in a digital world, with everything at your fingertips and remote personal interactions, which means that many have not had the opportunity to develop social and life skills that earlier generations learned early on. They were not exposed to the value of excellent service. Maybe that has something to do with it.
We have definitely driven home the point to our daughters that your word is your bond, and when you say you will do something, you do it with no excuses. We have also tried to instill in them the importance of earning your money through hard work and meeting or exceeding expectations. I guess in a lot of ways it is a matter of leading by example — they see how hard their parents work, so maybe that will rub off on them. Hopefully.
Anyway, thanks for your input, Yacoob. Always appreciated!
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When Mrs. Chess and I actually find someone who provides great customer service, we immediately ask them if they don’t mind being cloned so we can put them in other organizations or companies we might have to deal with down the road. The days of people taking satisfaction in doing a great job, or even trying to do a great job, seem to be long gone. However, I must say that I think bad customer behavior certainly had a hand in creating bad customer service. Some of the horrible customer behavior I’ve seen first hand would drive me nuts if I was on the other end of the abuse. Customers and customer service personnel are both quite “broken” at this point.
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