Customer Service

After waiting patiently in a big box store for at least 30 minutes without seeing hide nor hair of a service person... After being told repeatedly by people that obviously worked in the store "sorry, but this isn't my department, someone will be along to help you"... After finally being helped by a bored and seemingly humourless customer service rep, who seemed to do the absolute minimum required to help, I am left wondering, oh customer service, where have you gone?

I can see it dwindling in the place I work too, where coworkers go out of their way to say "I'm not on client service today, I can't help people" "It's not my day" or "it's not my job". I see the frustrated look on the client's face - they only came here to ask for what we said we would provide. They're not asking us to go out of our way to help them - and in fact, we're getting paid TO help them, so why do we act like it's such an inconvenience???

I'm not sure if this is a symptom of an individualistic world, where we can tune others out using our technologies, or whether this is a symptom of the commodification of everything, or whether it's merely apathy, but I do think that if we fail to service our customers, we will lose them. They will find what they want elsewhere for a better price (probably the Internet, because if they're not getting service ANYWAY, they might as well shop where there isn't any) and we stand to lose our reason d'etre. And so customer service apathy is a dangerous trap to fall into.

It sounds cheesy, but if we simply CARE for other people in small ways on a day to day basis, then customer service isn't even an issue. I challenge everyone to care a little more today - at work or elsewhere, and see what comes of it.

What we become

From http://www.quotationspage.com/qotd.html:

"What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books".
-Thomas Carlyle (1795 - 1881)

Yes, Thomas Carlyle, that's certainly true, but more than what we read, what we become depends on what we do after all our teachers have finished with us. You can read the best, most informative, most important books in the world, just as you can have the best, most informative, most important teacher in your field, and you may still become nothing of consequence. Similarly, you may have the worst mentor in the world, and you can move beyond it (though it is often incredibly difficult). While Carlyle's self study may be an important first step in many fields, reading is not doing, and what we become has more to do with what we do with our book collection after we've read it.

Another quarrel - most books do not teach critical thinking skills. So a collection of books in lieu of a university, while seeming like a good idea on the surface, would be an education built on pretty shabby foundations if the books in the collection are say, trashy romance novels. Sometimes we need guidance to know which books to include in the collection, or how to read with a critical eye.

Still, however, a good mentor does not have to come from a University - If we're lucky perhaps, what we'll become is decent mentors for others, then our quotes can show up on someone else's website one day.

The Surrealism of Everyday life

Found out from BoingBoing today (my favorite alternative news source) a woman at an art gallery came face to muscle (?) with her own heart. She'd had a heart transplant and donated her former, now it's part of an educational art exhibit.

This leaves me pondering the surrealism of everyday life.

This link to mortality, this representation of life and love and humanity, sitting in a box as part of an art exhibit. What makes biology art. Is it enough that an art piece make people think, or must it be more to be classified as art? If it must be more then what makes a useless (diseased) muscle art? If all that is required of art is that it make people think, what is the difference between art and education?

Is a heart in a box a biology class, or an art exhibit?