Parenting

Admittedly, I’m only 24, unmarried, and childless.  I haven’t exactly been deployed in the trenches.  On the other hand, I would say I’ve been a solid member of the medical teams who take care of those in the trenches.  That is to say, I have spent the last four years of my life working in the service industry.  Most of those four years were spent in a well-known retail store working either at the register or behind the returns desk (do you like my attempt at anonymity for my former employer?).  Then, about 3 weeks ago I abandoned the world of retail to come work in a customer support call center for fairly sizable national security company.  What that amounts to is a lot of experience dealing with unhappy people of all ages.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two sorts of disgruntled customer.  There is the passive and then there is the aggressive.  The Passive Customer is someone who is ready to bend over backwards to make sure that you, the person who has, by proxy at least, screwed them over, don’t get offended.  They apologize for the inconvenience of bringing their problem to your attention.  They don’t insist on anything.  They don’t argue with anything you tell them.   I had a woman call me the other day who was mistakenly charged $150 more than she was supposed to and she actually told me that it was ok, not to worry about it, these things happen.  One hundred and fifty dollars she was willing to throw away because she didn’t want to be unpleasant or make a scene!  I could have kissed that woman.  Needless to say, I went all out for this lady to make sure that, whether she insisted on it or not, we did not rip her off.  I got her problem taken care of and there was much rejoicing throughout the land.  For a Passive Customer, that is to say someone who is Nice, I’m willing to go to the ends of the earth. 

why doesn't this guy work in my office?
I bet he gives great customer support

The second type is not so pleasant.  This is the Aggressive Customer.  This is the guy who calls you already worked into a rage and all you have to do is tell him your name and sound happy and he lets loose a string of profanity that makes the polyester carpeting around you wilt.  This is the woman who holds you personally responsible for, not only the problem she’s having right now, but also for your failure to be  intimately acquainted with every single other misfortune in her life which entitles her to special treatment, right now, from you, in the resolution of her issue.  These are the people who believe whole-heartedly in the philosophy “If I haven’t yet gotten what I want, I just need to yell louder.”  When I get these customers I find that, somehow, loopholes in the system which I may or may not have exploited happily just moments before have mysteriously closed—indeed, even regular channels to solutions become strangely clogged and difficult to navigate.

Good thing he can't stab me through the phone...

But what does this have to do with parenting, you ask?  Well now we get into my time as a cashier.  I’ve often said that there is a special place in Hell reserved for whoever it was that decided that it is a good idea to put a big stand full of candy and toys right next to the cash register.  I mean, I understand it from a commercial angle, but as a decent human being, not to mention the woman who gets to stand in front of it all day and witness any and all scenes, I find it to be a horrid idea.  But it has allowed me to witness numberless examples of good and bad parenting.  I have seen some wonderful examples—children screaming with a volume and power that would make Pavarotti jealous and their mothers stand firm.  Tantrums that include the loss of fine and gross motor control, hurled accusations of hatred, and physical attacks are all weathered with that particular expression that is sacred to the enduring parent.  I’ve seen mothers pass through this maelstrom and come out the other side victorious (in the sense that they drag their still-screaming child out the door without having purchased him or her a single thing). 

Alas, this is not typical.  Far more often I see a sad collapse of the parental fortress of discipline.  There are certainly reasons—embarrassment, exhaustion, or inattentiveness—but the end result is the same.  The parent tells the child “no”, the child takes extreme offense to this remark and makes his displeasure known, the parent ignores the child’s display of temper for approximately 7 seconds, and finally she snatches the item from her child’s hand, thrusts it at me and says, as though I’m supposed to collude in this failure of parenting, “can you just scan this please?”.  Actually, that is the better option.  What is far more infuriating is the mother who wearily says “Johnny, I said no.  I’m not going to tell you again,” four or five times.  I don’t even believe her.  Of course, Johnny has been through this ritual before.  He knows that he just has to hold out a little longer and his mother’s already anemic will-power will crumble before him.  It’s almost a game, one which he knows he can win if only he endures.

  Of course, all of this is really none of my business, isn’t it?  After all, aside from those 20 minutes of screaming at the register, it is really only the mother who suffers from her lack of discipline, right?  Wrong.  The purpose of parenting is helping this small, inexperienced creature develop into a functioning member of society—in brief, the mother of today is creating before my very eyes the Customer with whom I must deal tomorrow.  Therefore, I have a deep and vested interest in what sort of person she is turning out.  It’s true; most people develop at least a patina of self control and maturity that carries them successfully through their basic daily interactions.  But it is the way we deal with contradictions of our will that truly exemplifies our maturity.  Scratch the surface, tell them they can’t have something they want, and for too many people you will watch that façade crumble.  You are confronted with, not a sane and rational adult, but essentially a screaming 3 year old.  Suddenly some random girl answering a phone or processing a return is forced to take up the job this man’s mother or father never finished.  Somehow I must confront a lifetime of training that has conditioned this woman to believe with every fibre of her soul that, like her mother, I will crumble and give her what she wants if only she keeps screaming long enough and loud enough.

In the end, there is nothing I can do but take up the burden of neglected parenthood and struggle with it as best I can.  Me, the unmarried, childless, 24 year old who isn’t supposed to know anything at all about what it is to be a parent.  Not only that but I am expected to do a better job of it than this man’s own mother.  She had the luxury of giving in or even losing her temper.  I do not.  After all, I’m just a cashier.  I’m just the girl answering the phone.  It is my job to take whatever abuse is given me and smile and respond politely.  That’s what they pay me to do.  

What no one ever mentioned was that
Mona Lisa actually worked in customer service