June 3, 2003
Vacation, All I Ever Wanted

Friends, I am famously a curmudgeon when it comes to travel. I prefer to be at home, surrounded by my glorious possessions, doing what I like doing best, which is lying around my home, surrounded by my glorious possessions. I was not built to move much; ask anyone, I'm fragile. Easily injured. Move too much or too quickly and I break, resulting in a lot of whining and pitiable writhing. I've tried to minimize my travel-risk, and the main way I do this is by complaining about it, because nobody likes a whiner.

When I'm on vacation, I just spend my time feeling continuously sorry for maids, waitpersons, and attendants of all stripes, because most of the middle-class nightmares on vacation around me are actively treating them like shit.

Still, I am married to The Duchess, who loves to travel, and my powers are useless against her, so that means that despite my best efforts I will find myself with traveling shoes on from time to time in my life. That's okay. I'll survive, and you've definitely heard enough of my bitching about travel to make you think Jesus, it's not like I'm going to make you travel, Bubble-Boy, give it a rest or something like that. The reason I bring this up, however, is that recently I went on my first lengthy vacation in a long, long time, and while the trip was fine and I kept my grumbling to a minimum, it did remind me of a very important fact, which is: I am one of the luckiest people in the world simply because I do not work in anything even vaguely resembling a service industry job.

That's what vacations make me think about: The miserable existence of people who make their livings serving others. I'm not sure what the actual gene is, the Asshole Gene, but baby it sure does kick in when most people find themselves in a temporarily superior economic situation. When I'm on vacation, I just spend my time feeling continuously sorry for maids, waitpersons, and attendants of all stripes, because most of the middle-class nightmares on vacation around me are actively treating them like shit.

Of course, for a lot of people that's part of the allure of a vacation: The ability to live above your usual means for a while, and the ability to lord it over other people. A key component of the American vacation philosophy is living as if you were aristocracy for a short period of time, and that almost always involves beating the crap out of those lesser than you. I can't imagine being a maid at a hotel in a popular resort area, having to deal with all these middle class yahoos from the mainland who think that just because they've carved out two precious weeks of free time and a little nut to spend on the pleasures of life that they can prance around like the Prince of Wales. I'd stab someone within the first week, no doubt.

The problem is the warped view of the Customer/Service Relationship most people have, wherein people imagine that The Customer is Always Right, translating this to mean that because you are pondering spending money in an establishment it's their responsibility to kiss your ass, tolerate any behavior, and generally dry-hump you in joy the entire time you're there. This is completely wrong: The Customer/Service Relationship is a contract between equals. The Server has something—a service, a product—for sale. The Customer has money. Yes, a certain amount of tolerance is expected from the Server: The customer is supposed to be able to browse in peace, to not be assailed by high-pressure tactics. The Customer is supposed to be able to ask questions about the product(s) and expect honest, polite answers. But the same can be said for the Customer: They have responsibilities, too, like not wasting the Server's time if they don't really intend to purchase anything, or observing whatever rules the Server has posted in his space (i.e. No Shirt No Shoes No Service, Please Don't Touch Merchandise, or Genuflect or Be Beaten). The point is, it's a social contract between equals, and the health of any society can be accurately measured, I think, by the respect it gives to social contracts.

So many people have this warped view of the Customer/Service Relationship, however, that they march around like Royalty, convinced that simply because they hold the magical dollars in their clenched, bony hands, they can make the rules and tell everyone else to go shove it. This gets applied to any situation where they're spending money, and thus the eternal misery of the service provider. These people aren't scrubbing your toilet because god created them a certain caste and it is their divine destiny to scrub your toilet, they're scrubbing your toilet for a variety of reasons, any one of which might come and bite you in the ass someday, bubba.

What it all boils down to, of course, is that we're all assholes, and the world will end in violence and bloodshed. Have a nice day! If you want to tell me what you thought of this column, you know where to find me.

Jeff