We too nice not to be nice, my arse.

When did Trinis become so damned obnoxious? One of my supervisors said we were always so but I seem to remember a time when I could expect a salutation to be reciprocated instead of the blank, bovine stares I now receive.

Someone recently told me that with our booming economy, Trinis have become more sophisticated because of the opportunity to travel and thus we have become more demanding. That’s all well and good, but why did we lose our sense of politesse? Why is it that more and more I’m coming into contact with people the majority of whom think that they are entitled to better treatment because of who they are or the thicknesses of their financial portfolios, and act as such?

Customer Service is the new buzz phrase for our business community and everyone is jumping on the bandwagon with various horror stories of the horrendous “customer service” meted out by whoever at whatever establishment they had the unfortunate experience of patronizing. Now I can sympathise since I also have had quite a few less than stellar episodes involving the local service industry, but I will say that customers and management should shoulder some responsibility for the sad state of affairs. Innumerable times have I seen employees put up with disrespectful, offensive, insufferable patrons without going berserk. And their children – their goddam, spoilt, unruly children. Last Christmas I ended up in a toy store looking for something with which I could bestow upon the former larger half’s nephews and thus ingratiate myself into the good graces of their grandmother. A rug rat leading his mother entered the store. Replying to the clerk’s offer of assistance with a condescending “No dear, he knows what he wants”, mama proceeds to look on lovingly while her grubby-handed fuck-trophy played Hurricane Gustav with shelf after shelf of stuffed animals, puzzles and action figures. Upon locating his item of choice, junior skipped happily to the cashier with mom in tow who breezily told the shell-shocked clerk “Take care of that won’t you dear?”, waving her manicured hand in the general direction of ground zero. Minimum wage ain’t worth that shit.

And that’s another thing. Remember when a former Minister of Finance declared that he couldn’t live on $2000.00 a week? And remember when all dem business people and dem Chamber of Commerce and Industry persons get dam vex cause de govament raise minimum wage from $7.00 to $10.00 a hour? The argument was that if the basic rate of pay was increased, as a sort of ripple effect, everything else (food, transportation etc.) would follow suit; as if prices weren’t already rising even without the help of increased salaries. Realistically speaking though, how do they expect minimum wage workers to survive on a paltry $7.00 per hour? How in good conscience can expect people to buy food, pay rent and provide for children with the minimum wage? I once knew a girl who worked in a clothing store where her weekly salary was less than the cost of a pair of jeans sold at the same store. That’s tough.

I think the problem is that too many Trinidadians equate good customer service with ass-kissing. They don’t feel fulfilled unless they get a virtual colonic irrigation courtesy the hapless employee who has to deal with them: “Can you believe that bank teller had the nerve to ask for my ID?! Everyone knows who I am! Well of course you know I let the manager know about it and that kind of thing isn’t going to happen again.” How more unfuckingreasonable can a person be? Believe me shit like this happens all the time here, it's just not publicised.

I work in a customer service environment. At every meeting we minions are constantly reminded that the customers pay our salaries and therefore it is in our best interest to provide the best customer service. We are also reminded that surveys show we have the #1 rating for service in our field, so to keep our salaries we must ‘wow’ the customers by offering the best goshdarn service EVAH! That’s great. In response, we suggested to management that they find a way to educate the bloody customers on the attitudes and behaviours with which they should visit the company to do business. Head office sent us a DVD on how to deal with difficult people in the workplace.

Recently the local media has been running advertisements from the Ministry of Tourism, presumably with the intent of increasing the ‘niceness’ of us Trinis. If memory serves me correctly, one of the ads is seemingly a 30 second crash course on simple etiquette: “Good morning!” “Thank you!” “Have a nice day!” Ummm…shouldn’t we have already learned manners from our parents and the elementary school system? And isn’t it embarrassing that a government has to spend money to teach its population basic manners? Even so, the ads are geared towards us being nice to tourists. So it’s ok to be hognoxious bitches to each other, once we smile and bob our heads and tip our hats to the tourists. Well put me out in the plantation and whip me silly ’cause those ads will change nothing.

Until we, as a people make a conscious effort to return to our (now defunct) value system where we did not measure each other by the size of our bank accounts but by the worth of our actions and our principles, then excellent customer service will be like Vision 2020 – nought but a pipe dream.

For the love of the children.

I’m going out on a limb here, but Trinidadian parents have got to be the most ignorant in the world. Not ignorant due to lack of knowledge you understand, at least not in all cases, but rather because you stand the risk of personal injury in the event you are misguided enough to comment unfavourably upon either their offspring or their parental skill.

I didn’t realise that Prestige Holdings’ greasy fingers had grabbed a hold of another piece of Arima with the opening of a Long John Silver’s restaurant along with Pizza Hut, TCBY, and an additional KFC until earlier on this year. But although Arima is now officially cinema-less, you can still stare at some inane movie while sending your cholesterol level through the roof, via the flat-panel television screens that hang from the ceiling. And all those years those bouncers spent blocking movie goers from sneaking KFC into Windsor. Ha! Well we’re eating KFC in the at least what used to be the cinema bitches. Whatchoo gonna do now, huh?

So I’m at a table munching on some fries and wondering if, with all the renovations, they ever got rid of the roaches that had made the Windsor, in all its dank, urine-(and God knows what else)stained glory, their personal utopia. Of course it’s hard to stick to a chronological, coherent train of thought as there is an inordinate amount of seemingly unsupervised children engaged in vigorous physical activity all around me.

Now the good people at Prestige Holdings have supplied a playroom for the children presumably to encourage the whole ‘family friendly’ aura or to provide a place where the little fuck-trophies could burn off all those large servings of trans-fats. What the playroom does however is turn an otherwise routine bout of digestive tract abuse into a mental dissertation on the benefits of mandatory sterilisation.

’Member ting like licks? ’Member how like ah arse yuh used to feel after yuh get a good boff from mammy and daddy because yuh was playing de arse an embarassin dem in front ah everybody? Remember discipline? Parents nowadays are pansies. I’m sitting there listening to children refuse to leave when their parents call them and I’m seeing the parents concede defeat without even making the effort to straighten out the little buggers. Hell, there were so many kiddies running wild and unsupervised that if I were a paedophile, I would have been in heaven.

A woman at a neighbouring table decided to take God out of her thoughts and brought a couple’s attention to the antics of their female progeny:
“Da’s yuh chile? Buh look she missin ah shoe. Come dahlin, wha yuh do wit yuh shoe?”

“Hello, hello! Dat is not your chile. Leave my chile alone. I go deal wit she. I cyah onerstan why allyuh cyah leave odder people chirren alone yuh know!”

“Buh yuh cyah see de chile runnin arong wit only one shoe?!”

“Well she fadder here an he go handle dat. D_ look M_ lorse she shoe.”

“Oh gorsh. Doh jumbie de chile nah. Mih mudder go sen a new shoes fuh she.”

And that was it. The whole issue wrapped up nicely without once having to bother little M_ and having to divert her from her busy schedule of scampering behind a budding bandit.


I don’t know if the headache was brought on by my body’s exertions to assimilate partially hydrogenated soybean oil, dehydrated potatoes substitutes and whatever other crap Long John’s fries are made of or if it was because of the knowledge that same situation, albeit at ritzier locations and with more hybrid accents, is echoed throughout the country almost constantly.

So I left. And I thought of little M__ and her lost shoes. And I thought of her parents hostile reactions to a stranger who was trying to help. And I thought of the general lamentations of how today’s youth have no sense of responsibility, no sense of sacrifice. And I thought of how when we were younger we would take care of the two pairs of shoes we had (school shoes and ‘going out’ shoes) because we knew “mammy and daddy were working hard to feed us and provide for us and send us to school so we would get and education and make something of ourselves”. And I wondered if that litany would have any meaning to the children of today and I am tempted to try it out, but I don’t want to be the one hundredth and somethingth person killed for the year and over a shoe no less.

I leave de people dem chirren alone.