Civility 0
From the local rag:
Sound familiar? It has a name: the Service Gap.
That’s not a hip clothing store for soldiers. Or a new motto for the London subway system.
It’s business-speak to describe a phenomenon fueling plenty of holiday-shopping frustration: the difference in how baby boomers and members of the “millennial generation” define the concept of customer service.
(Aside: If clerks are using cell phones while they should be checking out customers, that is not a service problem. That is a management problem. Management has clearly failed to lay out the expectations of the job. And this surprises us how?)
The other day, when I left the cooling tower place and before I started my quest for a Real Ham (TM), I stopped at the Cooling Tower Town’s Super Wawa to fill up with gas ($2.85). The pumps, as usual, were crowded, with at least two vehicles waiting to get to them.
I pulled into the nearest line where the pumps were on the correct side of the vehicle.
The person ahead of me was not pumping gas. Rather, she was sitting in her car.
“Okay,” thought I, “She’s waiting for the car ahead of her to pull away so she could move.”
More fool I.
After about four or five minutes, she got out of her car, ended her cell phone conversation, and started to open the little cover over the fuel pipe on her Cattle-Rack. (Something she proved incompetent to do, but that’s another story.)
SHE’D BEEN SITTING THERE BLOCKING THE BLANKETY-BLANK PUMP TALKING ON HER BLANKETY-BLANK CELL PHONE FOR HEAVEN’S KNOWS HOW LONG.
And was easily 20 years older than me. (And I’m old.)
My friends, being a rude, selfish, inconsiderate a$$hole is not a generational phenomenon.
It is rather another manifestation of the constant,
K sub I,
the Idiocy Constant in human nature.
When you get enough persons gathered together in one place, a certain percentage of them will be idiots. It’s just a fact of life.
