Apparently, somewhere in Florida an Arby’s employee refused to serve a police officer. The police officer complained and talked to a manager. The manager laughed and said the employee doesn’t like serving cops. One or both of the the employees seems to have been reprimanded although exactly what the upshot was isn’t entirely clear to me. The company apologized, saying that Arby’s values our men and women in blue, etc., etc.

The officer filed an “offense report” over the incident, not linked to above. Here’s her narrative of what happened. I’ve retyped it, so assume all typos are my own. I’ve also redacted some information:

On this date, I responded to the above location [redacted], Arby’s, to order take-out food through the drive thru window. Upon ordering at the microphone, the clerk seemed slightly rude and short with his responses, but I was having difficulty hearing him so figured there might be a problem with their speaker system. Once I received my total, I drove to the take-out window to pay for my food.

When I drove around, the clerk, [redacted], took my credit card as a form of payment. At this time the manager, [redacted], approached the window an stated, “He doesn’t want to serve you because you are a police officer.” [Redacted] was referring to [redacted] and referenced him by looking at [redacted]. At this time, [redacted] had not processed my credit card and had to be ordered to do so, by [redacted]. I explained to [redacted] that this made me extremely uncomfortable and now wasn’t certain I wanted to dine at the restaurant. [Redacted] assured me everything was ok and handed me my food. [Redacted] even laughed and said he is allowed to refuse to serve me.

I was uncertain of the condition of my food, and felt for my safety, it would be best not to eat there. I responded inside and [redacted] provided me with a refund. [Redacted] provided me with his contact information and store information but [redacted] refused to have contact with me, ignored me and refused to provide his contact information to me.

This incident is being documented for informational purposes.

Somehow, the officer seems to have gotten information about the employee “who refused to have contact with” her, too, because on the “offense report” we see the following info about both employees: birth dates, driver license numbers, domicile address, and place of birth, which in the case of the non-cooperative employee was the Dominican Republic. I don’t know how this information was acquired. Maybe Arby’s disclosed the information from its personnel records (That’s why I’m not linking to the document itself. Too much personal information.)

The employees as far as I can see didn’t commit an “offense” recognized by law. (And one thing we don’t get from this “offense report” is that the officer was refunded her money. At least that’s what the linked-to news account above says.) I think I can also easily imagine a scenario in which the manager, as the father said in the linked to article above, was just joking. I can easily imagine why the one employee might not have wanted to disclose their personal information.

Now perhaps I’m making too much of the fact that this report is called an “offense report.” Those are the words at the top of the form, but the officer does write that the report is for “informational purposes” only. It’s probably the standard form an officer fills out when something happens regardless of whether a crime is even alleged to have been committed. The employees weren’t arrested and as far as I know and hope, they weren’t tailed or followed by the police trying to pin something on them or harass them. And I guess it’s encouraging that the officer just wrote a report and didn’t, say, kill the employees. I’d rather see more report writing and fewer incidents of brutality.

And I do believe all people should be treated with respect. If it’s true that the employees weren’t joking and were really trying to stick it to the customer, then they shouldn’t have done that. And as a pragmatic consideration, you probably want the cops on your side.

Still, the fact that the officer might have responded much more aggressively and chose not to and the fact (if it is a fact) that the employees were rude, don’t put me completely at ease.  Police officers are supposed to “serve and protect” the public. If a member of the public decides they don’t wish to serve officers, that person should have that right, and, I’d add, expect the full protection of the police should, say, a robbery take place.

[Burt Likko’s post Over There has inspired this one.]

I.

I was raised Catholic, but from around the time of 5th grade through high school, I experimented with what we today call evangelical Christianity although I don’t think I used that term then. I never formally left the Catholic Church and never formally joined either of the Pentecostal and Baptist congregations I frequented. But I did participate in the youth groups of both my Catholic parish and those two congregations.

Along the way, I adopted many of the positions attributed to evangelicals. I believed we needed to be “born again” in Christ and that Christ was the way to salvation. I believed in the possibility of something like the Rapture and a time of tribulations, although I never had a firm position on when the Rapture would take place or whether it would happen before or after the time of tribulations. I believed the Bible was the truth although I probably was not a literalist. I also adopted much of the social conservative agenda often attributed to evangelicals. I believed the state should recognize Christianity on some level. I believed homosexuality was wrong. I believed abortion should be illegal.

When it came to issues like evolution and creationism, I had the not uncommon ability to heed conflicting ideas at the same time. I think I insisted that if we assume an all-powerful god, then young earth creationism and special creation were at least more than possible even though I’m not sure, now, how much or whether I believed in them. And yet, I think I accepted on some level the claims made for evolution, including the claim that humans evolved from pre-humans, who evolved from the same creatures from which apes and monkeys evolved.

But I objected to “science,” or what I took to be science. For me, “science” was best represented by those who relied overmuch on a facile rationalism and who rejected anything that was not material or observable or falsifiable. I wasn’t sophisticated enough at the time to put it in those words, of course. But I had in mind people like one physics teacher in my high school who according to some of his students (I never had him) spent class time discussing how religious people were stupid to believe in god when all the evidence seemed to disprove it. I also had in mind Carl Sagan. During my teen years, I watched reruns of “Cosmos.” I resented his repeated swipes against the claims of faith. Those swipes weren’t by any means the sum total of what Sagan was doing–in fact, I enjoyed watching the series–but it’s hard to deny that attitude was there.

II.

Enter college. As a freshman, I took a biology course that challenged those views. The course was co-taught by a biology professor and a philosophy professor ( the same philosophy professor I talked about in another post). In addition to the standard suite of introductory biology material–photosynthesis, the citric acid cycle, meiosis and mitosis, and a survey of life forms from prokaryotes to human beings–we did a lot of extra readings.

Some of these readings, like Dawkins’s Selfish Gene, an essay by Francis Crick, a book by Desmond Morris, Elaine Morgan’s Descent of Woman, and Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters,/i> seemed to insist on the (sometimes callous, almost always unquestioned) materialist worldview that I had associated with science.

But others offered critiques of this materialist view. Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions seemed to demonstrate that science is just as based on faith and the type arbitrary assumptions of which some scientists are so dismissive when they aver their disbelief in god. An essay by Paul Feyerabend seemed to argue that we give scientists too much power and too much deference to formulate public policy and we should allow other, non-scientific views. We also read a philosophical challenge to evolution. I forget the author or title of the piece, but it raised the possibility that evolution, while descriptively and historically accurate, doesn’t work well as a predictive scientific theory. This piece called evolution “the great tautology.”

In retrospect, my understanding of a lot of these works was faulty or at least incomplete. I probably misinterpreted Kuhn. I’ve since read up on Feyerabend and discovered he may not have been as “anti-science” as the piece I mentioned, taken by itself, seemed to me as a freshman. The “great tautology” piece was more a challenge to how we fit what is and is not “scientific” into neat categories and a meditation on what scientists mean when they call something a “theory.” (It definitely wasn’t the “tautology” argument you sometimes hear from young earth creationists or intelligent design advocates.)

But whatever my misunderstandings, those works taught me two things. One was that science was largely a method. The other was that not all scientists were the caricature of the raving materialists I had assumed them (all) to be, and plenty of people argued over and thought about what science is and has been, what its implications are or should be, and what it can and can’t say about the universe. And even the hyper-materialists were (at least sometimes) thoughtful people. (Whatever one thinks of Dawkins’s Selfish Gene, it wasn’t emblematic of the “irreligious right” tribe Dawkins later joined.)

There were bad things about that class. The biology professor, although a great instructor in many, many respects, sometimes used his bully pulpit and captive audience to make straw man arguments about theists, targeted especially but not solely at creationists. But being exposed to ideas you might not be comfortable with is part of what going to college is all about. And I’ve done worse.

III.

I don’t intend this essay as “an answer to Burt Likko.” Aside from some very minor points, I agree pretty much with everything he says in his recent post. I’ll just end with saying I’m glad I didn’t skip the reading.

Some study somewhere argues that women bosses get less respect from male subordinates than men bosses do. That’s probably not the first such study and it probably won’t be the last. The study, or at least the news account that summarizes the study, reflects my own experience fairly well, but perhaps for reasons different from what the study suggestions.

For most jobs I’ve had, my immediate supervisors have been mostly women. In the private sector jobs, as you moved up the food chain to middle management and upper middle management, the demographics grew increasingly male while in academia, I’ve noticed that women tend to predominate more higher up on the food chain. But in most cases, my supervisors in most jobs have been women.

I’ve noticed that I probably do treat them differently than I would male bosses. It’s not necessarily that I don’t show them respect, or that I show them less respect. I think I do show them respect (although I’m open to considering whether that’s just a self-imposed illusion). But I act differently. I’m probably more….confident? assertive?….when dealing with female superiors than I likely would be if dealing with male superiors. Something that from a male boss I’d probably interpret as an order, from a female boss I’m probably more likely to interpret as a suggestion.

I believe–but I have no real evidence, just my impressions–that I still enjoy special consideration as a male employee, even though my current workplace is dominated by women at all levels. At meetings, for example, I’ve noticed that my (by a large majority female) coworkers tend to be much more quiet and attentive when I speak. I’ve also noticed an unfortunate tendency on my part to choose to interrupt people. Therefore, I try not to speak that much.

I’ve also noticed that library patrons sometimes heed what I say more than they do what my female colleagues say, even though I don’t outrank them. I can be jovial and lackadaisical with the patrons and they take me seriously, whereas my female colleagues sometimes have to act much more sternly and come off as (…well you know the word…) in order to get the same respect.

With very few exceptions, I don’t run into anything that makes me self-conscious about “being a man in a woman’s environment.” The exception is the sometimes sexist language or jokes I’ll occasionally hear from people in authority against men. I’m not arguing that that type of banter is “just as bad as” misogynistic language. In fact, it happens rarely, much more rarely than I imagine what women in some/most workplaces have to experience. (In fact, I’m thinking only of one instance in particular.) But it bothers me nonetheless.

The study I linked to above, or at least the description of the study, posits something it calls “precarious manhood theory,” or the notion that

manhood is ‘elusive’ and ‘tenuous’. In other words, manhood is not something that is guaranteed to be achieved with age, nor is it guaranteed to remain. Instead, men must continuously prove their manhood.

I won’t discount that, but it doesn’t seem to be my personal experience. And I think that explanation neglects another, plausible explanation. Namely, supervisor/employee relationships are inherently conflictive. Apparent disrespect is often the employee staking his or her own advantage against their bosses. When the supervisor is female and the employee is male, gender privilege undoubtedly works as one of the tools the employee can use. That’s probably sexism–and misogynistic sexism–at work, but it seems more complicated than these studies, or at least popular summaries of such studies, acknowledge.

Don’t get me wrong. Even though I think there’s more at work here than sexism and even though in some cases I might be less inclined to rush to judge the worker than others might be, I’m no longer the knee-jerk, Marxist-leaning laborite I used to see myself as. I no longer believe that the worker is right just because he/she is a worker, and I believe showing less respect to female bosses just because they’re female is wrong.

I’m ambivalent about the value of a college education. I think some people are invited, persuaded, or seduced to expend valuable time and resources to pursue an education for which they are not well suited. In some of the discussions Over There, I sometimes err by digging into my heels without really acknowledging how complex the problem is and how difficult it is to formulate or implement a solution. The whole exercise becomes a cultural signaling thing where I get upset because others strike me as snobs and where others get upset because I strike them as a philistine.

Those discussions sometimes get tied up in discussions over what to study. On one side, not only should most people go to college or at least give college a try, they should study the liberal arts instead of, say, business or STEM fields. On another side, it’s wrong to encourage or support students in studying a discipline that has so little obvious or direct payoff. And there are other “sides” and positions between them. I usually come down on the side that liberal arts aren’t everything and we should be wary of the promises we make to students who consider studying them.

And yet I studied liberal arts as an undergrad and am grateful for having done so. I was introduced to ideas and books and people I would likely never have encountered had I not gone to college. I gained a lot of social and cultural literacy I would not otherwise have had. Whatever challenges my writing still has, it’s still a lot better thanks to the constant writing practice I got in college. And although my own career prospects post-BA were pretty weak–these amounted to service jobs for which a high school diploma was the only formal degree required–I still retained the ability to enjoy engaging ideas and books at a level I would not have before. It’s not true that “education is the one thing they can’t take away from you” (if anything because Alzheimer’s runs in my family), but as far as goods go, my liberal arts education is for me a very durable good indeed.

And I obtained all this without debt. That happy result was due in part to my willingness to work in high school and save up money and to work in college while studying (but I didn’t work during my freshman year). It was also due to my parents’ relative affluence. I didn’t have to pay them rent or contribute to the family finances while in high school or college, and in the back of my head I knew they would help me if my finances got bad. I also knew I could live with them after college until I got on my feet, so finding a gainful job right away wasn’t as pressing.

But my debt-free education was also due to state subsidies. Cibolia State University gave me scholarships (probably supplied by taxpayer money, but I don’t know). Those paid for most of my tuition, leaving me responsible only for room and board. And one reason those scholarships were sufficient to pay my tuition was because the state limited the rate the university could charge.

I sometimes fear my ambivalence about college and the liberal arts elides the fact that I have benefited immensely, at little financial cost to myself, from that which I criticize. Maybe that’s not relevant for what our country’s higher education policy should be. But I have gotten a certain benefit, and there’s something not entirely right about saying others shouldn’t, or saying it should be more expensive or riskier for them to do so. It’s not entirely wrong, but not entirely right.

I suspect that in any discussion about whether unions are good or about whether such and such a policy designed to promote or weaken the appeal of unions is good, most parties to the discussion will profess to support unions.

In my view, the question is less whether we support unions and more under what circumstances we do and what policies we’d support or at least tolerate. As Oscar pointed out in a recent thread, he supports unions, but not the sort of “regulatory capture” exemplified by the proposed union exemptions to L.A.’s minimum wage law (a perfectly reasonable position, in my opinion).

Here are some considerations (pulled mostly from the American context):

1. Do you support union-shop or “fair share” arrangements, where all employees must contribute union dues? Or do you support “right to work” laws?
2. Do you support closed shop arrangements, where a prospective employee must be a member in good standing of a union before being eligible to be hired?
3. Do you support “secondary strikes” or “secondary boycotts” where a union or its members refuse to cross other union’s picket lines or refuse to work for employers that do business with a struck firm?
4. Should public employees be allowed to unionize? Some public employees but not others? What powers to negotiate should these unions have (wages only, wages + working conditions)?
5. Should the law require employers to negotiate “in good faith” with a union that can demonstrate a minimum threshold of support? If so, what should the requirements of good faith be?
6. Should the state require “first contract” arbitration, where a union negotiation automatically goes into arbitration after a certain time period has elapsed, so as to ensure that the union obtains a “first contract”?
7. What should an employer be able to do, or not be able to do, to oppose unions? What should a union be able to do, or not be able to do, to promote unions?
8. What, if any, preferential policies would you accept that would help promote unions? (I’m thinking of things like the minimum wage exemption Oscar wrote about, but also of things like antitrust exemptions, exemptions from injunctions, and probably other things I’m not thinking of.)
9. Under what circumstances would you cross a picket line to shop at a struck firm?
10. Under what circumstances would you cross a picket line to work at a struck firm?

On a lot of these issues, I myself am undecided or have changed my mind. You can no doubt think of other questions, and if so, feel free to offer them.

A long time ago in a sub-thread at one of my guest posts Over There, Brandon Berg raised in the comments an interesting question about unions (in particular about conscience exemptions for union dues and the free-rider problem that union shop provisions are meant to resolve):

I’m not sure I understand the free rider problem. Why can’t unions negotiate for their members, and only for their members? Is there some regulation that requires the unions to negotiate for all employees regardless of membership, or is the idea that simply having the union negotiate wages for its members somehow makes it easier for non-members to negotiate higher wages?

Personally, of course, I don’t see the free-rider problem as a problem at all—the government shouldn’t be in the business of making it easier to form cartels

And James K. chimed in

What you describe is how it works in New Zealand. Union membership is voluntary but the union only negotiates on behalf of its membership, and will only represent its members in other forms of labour dispute. There are a couple of other differences as well, like only union members can strike.

This seems to be an entirely adequate solution to nay free-rider issues.

At the time, I filed it under “interesting things I don’t know much about.” I still don’t know much about it, but I recently ran across a book that addresses Brandon’s and James K.’s points in the American context. It’s The Blue Eagle at Work: Reclaiming Democratic Rights in the American Workplace, by Charles J. Morris (2005). His argument seems to be that our current labor law, initiated by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (Wagner Act) and amended subsequently, permits the situation Brandon and James K. describe, at least in some instances. His claims that few since the 1930s have recognized that fact, but he hopes that union supporters will endorse partial representation contracts (my term, I forget which he uses) as a step toward full-shop unionization.

I’ve read only the introduction, so there’s a lot I presume is missing from my synopsis of his argument. And I can’t speak to whether he’s right or not. But I thought I’d bring it up, especially in light of our recent discussion of minimum wage exemptions for union contracts.

WARNING: THIS REVIEW HAS SPOILERS

Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members presents English Professor Jason Fitger at “Payne University” and what I presume is only a sample of the numerous letters of recommendation his job requires him to write. It’s an epistolary novel, composed of these letters, letters to the department chair and various university administrators, and, occasionally, his attempts to fill out online forms.

I don’t like Fitger. He represents the to me all too believable caricature of the “oppressed” academics who, to quote NPR’s review, “feel that their genius has never gotten its due.” True to form, Fitger sometimes claims to feel a responsibility to the undergraduates who pay his salary but only rarely does he demonstrate that sense of responsibility by writing a letter of recommendation that actually is designed to help the student get the job or the scholarship or admission letter to grad school or law school or medical school. His letters of rec instead go off on personal tangents about his own and his department’s beleaguered position at the university or about unflattering traits of his recommendees. He’s the type of guy who says, “sure, I’ll write a letter,” but then writes something really bad.

In his letters to the department chair and to people higher up in administration, we hear the familiar complaint of “I know there are budget difficulties” with the added but unstated complaint that “but those difficulties should never have to affect me or my department in any way.” And again another complaint, his creative writing program and the English department itself is disfavored because–The Horror! The Horror!–disciplines like economics are getting more of the pie. A frequent complaint in his letters is about the renovations done for the economics department (in the same building as English, but a floor above), and dust and inconvenience such renovation causes him.

Not that he has nothing to complain of. If we trust him (see below), then it is probably a shame that his program and grad students are being continuously disfavored in favor of other programs.

Still, rare is his acknowledgment that maybe people shouldn’t go into debt to get degrees in creative writing (his bailiwick). And when he does acknowledge it, it’s only to say that creative writing students (if they’re graduate students, if not, he’ll just mis-write a letter of rec while they search for a job to pay their debts) need to be “funded.” And towards the end of the novel, we find the maudlin consequence of the paucity of funding:

[WARNING, HERE’S A MAJOR SPOILER]

His most promising grad student, working on a novel of a lifetime, loses funding and because Mr. Fitger cannot find a “residency” or more funding, this student commits suicide. There seems to be some recognition of Mr. Fitger’s own role in the case, but who can blame him? He’s in the trenches doing the best he can. Little consideration over whether he advocate restructuring the program so as to make it more appealing or at least better able meet his students extra-academic needs (like eating, mental health, a decent career).

[/END MAJOR SPOILER WARNING]

Now, one of the first things you learn in Literature 101 is that you can’t trust the narrator, and exhibit A is the epistolary novel. We see the letter writer’s words–his rendition of events, his recollections, his biases–but we don’t see others’ perspective. In this sense, the maudlin moment [spoiled above] can be interpreted as the way the very self-centered Fitger sifts through and make sense of the sad event.

Perhaps Schumacher does not intend that we like the character. Perhaps Schumacher is exposing vicious academics for who they are. The blurb on the back of the novel tells me that Schumacher has a position at a university and has “written more letters of recommendation than she cares to remember” (quoted from memory, maybe I’ve got it a bit wrong, but that’s the gist). She’s seen what it’s like, so she can call it out. Or she’s seen what it’s like, and she wants to sound the alarm about the “crisis in the humanities.”

It is there I have to decide whether I trust the author, and not merely the narrator. Presumably as an author herself, Schumacher realizes the don’t trust the narrator rule, but does she observe it? Does she want us to take as granted that about which we should be skeptical, or is she opening up the whole things for grabs, as a good (in the Literature 101 don’t trust the narrator sense) author should?

I don’t know the answer. I’ve taken some lit courses, but don’t know all the permutations and explorations of the “problem of the narrator.” Neither have I ever read anything else by Schumacher, so I can’t judge. I also, deep down, would like to believe the author’s intentions are not important, or are of only minor importance. I would like to believe the work should stand or fall on its own. But I find myself going back to the author and distrusting her artfulness, at least in this case. That I do so probably has as much to do with my own “ambivalent about academics” bias as anything. But there you are.

[p.s. I’m out of town and may not be able to respond as quickly as I’d like to comments.]

I was originally going to write a do/don’t list about how to interact with customer service reps (CSR’s). But those lists preach only to people who don’t particularly need to hear the sermon.

Instead, I’m offering things to consider when dealing with a CSR. I’m deliberately leaving my definition of CSR open-ended, but examples of what I mean are waiters/waitresses, fast food workers, bank tellers, in-bound call-center reps, and retail or grocery store workers and cashiers. (For the record, I’ve had all of those jobs except waiter.)

TEN CONSIDERATIONS.

1. Unless you’re a regular customer, the CSR doesn’t know that you’re not a jerk. Let’s say a transaction requires you to present an ID. (as in a teller transaction). If the CSR has to ask you for it–instead of you just presenting the ID–he/she doesn’t know you’re not the type of person to get upset and scream at him/her for having the temerity to ask for it. Similar deal if you’re at a takeout restaurant and you need to present a receipt to pickup a food order. If you don’t just present the receipt, the CSR might not know how you’ll react if he/she asks for it.

2. When you ask to see/speak with a supervisor, it’s sometimes interpreted (by the supervisor) that the CSR has failed. There’s a game in a lot of customer service interactions. The CSR does what he/she is told by management. The customer disagrees with the decision. The CSR has no authority to change the rules. The customer asks for a supervisor. The supervisor then reiterates the rule or changes it. This can reflect poorly on the CSR, because an often unstated part of their job is to run interference between the customer and management. There’s usually no disciplinary action taken against the CSR, but when it comes to review time, the CSR’s failure to run interference consistently might be mentioned and taken into consideration.

3. [a variant of consideration no. 2] A lot of the rules that the CSR has to enforce don’t seem to make sense, actually don’t make sense, and the CSR knows they don’t make sense, but the CSR has to enforce them anyway as part of their job.

4. [another variant of consideration no. 2] A lot of the rules that the CSR has to enforce don’t seem to make sense but they actually have a rationale behind them or their rationale isn’t quite what you think it is. I’ll return to the example of ID’s at the teller window. It’s not always that the teller doesn’t know who the customer is. It’s sometimes that the teller doesn’t know that the customer isn’t the type of person who makes a withdrawal, later forgets about it, and then claims that it wasn’t they who came in to make it. (ID practices vary. In my experience, tellers often make compromises, and sometimes it’s bank policy not to even ask for ID if the amount withdrawn is below a certain amount.)

5. If the establishment does not have enough CSR’s to handle the volume of customers, the CSR probably doesn’t need you to tell him/her that, probably dislikes the situation as much as you do, and probably doesn’t have the authority to remedy the situation. The CSR usually can’t hire new people, sometimes co-workers call in sick or don’t show up or aren’t scheduled, and a large influx of customers with too few CSR’s means the CSR has to work a lot harder to help the customers. Often even the shift manager lacks hiring or scheduling authority, and they’re often the ones scheduled to be in the store/restaurant at the odd hours that a CSR shortage is most grievous.

6. If the CSR seems rude, maybe he/she is just shy, or has had a difficult day, or is using a defense mechanism because of the types of customers he/she usually gets. Sometimes a grudging attitude or working inefficiently is one way of coping. Male customers, I have heard, sometimes interpret a smile or friendly from a female CSR as flirting or as an invitation to be asked out. She doesn’t know the customer isn’t a potential stalker. (I bring that up because I know of one example where a customer exhibited what in my opinion were stalker-like behaviors to one of my female coworkers when I was a bank teller.) Or maybe the CSR is just rude. But it’s important to know what you don’t know before or when you decide to call the employee on, or speak to a supervisor about, their “attitude.”

7. [a variant of consideration no. 6] If the CSR seems lazy or seems not to be doing things he/she is hired for, the “laziness” might not be what it seems. Most CSR jobs in my experience have busy times and slack times. The slack times are often a chance to rest. To a certain personality that seems like laziness–and to another personality, that seems like “stealing from the employer”–but it can be just taking a much-needed couple minutes to relax. In some cases, what looks like slack time is actually not even slack time. When I was a teller, we had to run numerous nighttime deposits on a tight schedule–before a certain time in the afternoon when we rolled over to the next business day. Running those deposits was stressful because we had to be very careful to accurately count the money, fill out slips to note any discrepancies, and help customers in the teller line in the process. In the middle of running a deposit, it could sometimes look to the customer as if the teller is just counting his/her money. Again, it’s important to know what you don’t know.

8. If you are on “friendly” terms with a CSR, and see the CSR taking a lunch break, that CSR probably doesn’t want to spend the break talking with you. That break time is the CSR’s time. Depending on the employer or laws of the state, the CSR might not even be paid for that break time.

9. The customer is often (but of course not always) a lot better off than the CSR. Before you lecture the CSR about how you work for a living (with the implication being the CSR doesn’t work), you might consider whether you actually earn more money or have better working conditions than the CSR. I got this talk occasionally in many of my jobs. Once was as a retail stocker and the lecturer was an irate teacher (pro-tip: if a customer goes out of their way to tell you they’re a teacher, that usually means they’re going to treat you poorly. #notallteachers, of course.) Another time was as a bank teller, and the lecturer was someone who (judging by his paycheck) earned a lot more than I but who seemed to think that because I worked in a bank, I was automatically raking it in. (It was the mid-1990s, and I was earning $8 per hour, without benefits, and with a restriction that I could work only 1,000 hours in a year. $8 went further then than now, but still….this guy seemed to be earning a lot more. [/grinding axes])

10. There’s a master/servant dynamic going on in customer service transactions. This dynamic probably underscores the main principle behind all the preceding ones. It is in my opinion deeper, more complicated, and more fraught with potential conflict and emotion than the fiction we have to adopt as a shorthand to explain the employer/employee/customer relationship. In that relationship, it is presumed that an employer agrees to pay an hourly wage, the employee agrees to work at that wage, and the customers deal with the employee, and after a certain amount of time the employee goes home. But add to that a sense of being told what to do and having to do it and facing bad consequences if one doesn’t do it to the customer’s or boss’s satisfaction. The power differential can be something almost visceral and can transcend rational action. Sometimes even the best paying job has its frustrations and moments when the worker just needs to detox or whatever. That’s not always captured in the quid pro quo, money for service equation we, among whom I include myself, tend to talk about when it comes to policy discussions.

CONCLUSION.

I tend to over-think these things. And I’m not perfect. I probably err too much on the side of defending bad CSR behavior and I probably therefore come off as condescending or obsequious in my interactions with CSR’s as a customer. There are times–probably more than I realize or would like to admit–when I as a customer have lost patience or been snippy or otherwise let my frustrations show.

Finally, I really do intend the above points as things to consider, not do/don’t commands. I’m not saying, for example, “never tell people the shop is short-staffed,” “never call out rude behavior,” or “never ask to speak with a supervisor.” I do admit that some of the “considerations” I describe are just part of the job description and in other cases, the “considerations” over-determine or at least strongly imply what I think customers should do. But what I really want to say is that if we as customers want the marketplace to be more humane, maybe one place to start is in reflecting how we treat those whose job it is to serve us. And one step to that goal is considering how they feel.

Warning: In this post, I’m going to use something that somebody said in order to make a point that I would have tried to make even if I couldn’t find anybody who said it.

Four years ago, at around the time that Scott Walker was doing what he did to public employee unions that made himself famous, Doug Mataconis wrote a critique of public employee unions to which I’m largely sympathetic. But Mataconis ends with this almost throwaway sentence:

The party is over guys, and your days of feeding off the government trough are coming to an end.

My problem with that statement is that it’s unnecessarily confrontational and a goad to anyone who sees the issue differently to knock the chip off his shoulder. As a public employee who for a long time thought he was in a public employee union* and who works with other public employees, most of whom are in said union, I’ve heard enough complaints about how those who oppose public employee unions don’t care about the workers and are trying just to demonize the mostly minority employees who make up the bulk of public employees.

I’m not well-versed in the rhetoric of those who oppose public employee unions. But it seems hard to find one, especially if he or she holds elective office, who doesn’t choose to demonize public employees in some way while opposing such unions. Too few people maintain that it’s possible such unions represent mostly hardworking, well-intentioned people, and yet those unions just don’t function well for the state, for taxpayers, or for people who rely on the services provided by those employees. (Yes, I know some public employees who seem to just phone it in, and that’s a pretty big problem. But it’s not the sum total of the problem.)

Again, I’m tone trolling Mataconis’s piece. The rest of his article makes mostly an argument about why such unions can present a problem, and that argument and similar arguments need to be part of the discussion. But if those who oppose public unions wish to garner more widespread support and not appear to be merely partisan hacks, they should make the case on the merits and shy away from the “government trough” language.

*I got very mixed messages as to whether I was in the union. When I finally got up the courage to formally rescind my union authorization card (Sangamon is a card check state for public employees), I was informed that I wasn’t in the bargaining unit anyway, even though the union let me vote on the contract back when it was up for consideration. Fortunately, the union had never deducted dues, but I had walked out with it when it did a short strike, and in retrospect, doing so without being in the bargaining unit put me in danger of being fired. I shouldn’t have walked out anyway since I didn’t agree with the union, but I didn’t want to be “that guy” who scabbed.

I used to think being gay was wrong. I supposed that if you asked me, I would have said “being gay” wasn’t wrong, but “choosing to live as a gay person” was. I’m not sure I made that distinction at the time. I also thought it was appropriate for the state to encode its objection against homosexuality in its laws. While I probably would not have supported outlawing gay sex or instituting/continuing a formal program against gays, I believed the state shouldn’t offer any protections to gay people as gay people.

For example: In 1992 (I was 18 then), Cibolia had an amendment up for consideration by voters that would have invalidated then existing civil rights protections for gay people. These were laws that Danvar and a couple other cities had adopted to forbid discrimination in housing, hiring, and other practices based on sexual orientation. I supported that amendment, not so much because I bought into the “special rights” argument that amendment supporters invoked. I supported it because I thought such anti-discrimination laws meant the state “legitimized” and therefore implicitly recognized that being gay was acceptable. (For the record, the amendment passed and was overturned by the US Supreme Court 4 years later, the first of a string of decisions written by Justice Kennedy that led to Obergefell.)

My views then made up an almost textbook case of “bigoted position.” I can see that now. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I didn’t see that then. It took me a long time to change my mind on such issues.

The principal reasons I changed my mind were the following, in descending order of importance:

1. I noticed a pretty strong disjuncture between the Lockean idea of consent of the governed and the need for civil liberties with laws restricting gay rights.

2. As I grew up and from a variety of personal experiences and revelations, I came to have more empathy for gay persons.

3. Gay rights activists forced me to try to justify and rethink my position.

No. 3 was in last place for a reason, and in my opinion, was the least important for my conversion. My anti-gay views at the time certainly had a hearing at Cibolia State University, but it was a minority view there. I don’t think I ever voiced it, in part because the pro-gay rights position, as I heard it, was of the shaming sort, similar to what we find in Sam Wilkinson’s post Over There. It wasn’t uncommon to hear any objection to gay rights be answered with “why are you insecure about your sexuality?” or with a lecture about how Ancient Greeks thought homosexuality was good, so we should, too.

One thing the activists accomplished, however, was to compel me to justify, at least to myself, why I opposed gay rights. The stark reasons I mention in the first paragraph of this post solidified as my own answers to activists’ positions. As later events challenged and undermined those reasons, I began to see them as I see them now, as bigoted positions.

Perhaps my position would have changed sooner if the activists had tried to engage people like me more empathetically than they did. Perhaps not. But I realize that the goal of such activism isn’t necessarily to change my or anyone else’s mind or to honor my position on the matter. It could be to rally those who already agree, or to marginalize a certain position as bigoted or beyond the pale. In 1992, it was probably as much of a defensive posture as anything. Matthew Sheppard’s murder still hadn’t happened yet. And not only was Cibolia State University very close to where the murder would happen, it wasn’t a comfortable place to be gay or to support gay rights despite what seemed to me at the time to be the majority pro-gay rights view. There was one story  of a person wearing a “straight but not narrow” button being physically assaulted, assuming I’m remembering things right.

Even now, in 2015, the righteous, crusading, vengeful tone we see in Sam’s post is probably not wholly about righteousness, crusading, and vengeance. It’s still probably not safe to be openly gay, regardless of what the Supreme Court says about the right to marry. Still, perhaps that tone ill serves the cause, as several on that thread, including Will and Mr. Blue from Hitcoffee, have tried to note there.