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.

Adventures of a chronic underachiever.

Remember the good old days when success meant just getting a job and not getting pregnant too soon or out of marriage? Ok, so I may not agree with the pregnant thing but the job issue I can understand.

I will admit that I have not lived up to my expectations. I may have not lived up to the expectation that others had for me either, seeing as how the majority of them thought I would end up as a drug dealing, alcoholic, STD carrying, lesbian, prostitute – sorry to disappoint, folks – but damnit I have an ok paying job [at least for my lifestyle], and my personal situation isn’t so bad as to warrant any drastic changes. So why do I feel lower than worm turd whenever I have the misfortune of meeting up with people I knew?

Lately I’m being haunted by people I went to school with. I last saw these bitches over eight years ago and since I never really kept in touch with anyone I blissfully thought our paths would never again cross; so much for blissful thinking. Between then and now, some names kept popping up – who passed the bar, graduated from medical school, became a veterinarian, entered politics or became an IT professional – and I could deal with all of that. I’m not hypocritical enough to say I’m happy for them, but I could deal with that. What I pisses me off though is when they lord their successes and achievements over me.

So I’m at work, rowing with the other slaves when I am approached by a customer. In the middle of my attempt at rendering assistance, he would ask “Hey didn’t you go to _ ?” Now usually my response would be “No. Do I look like someone who would go to that school?” That sometimes shuts them up. But this guy I remembered. He was pretty decent. Which is why what transpired next bowled me over:

“Didn’t you do the languages?”

“Yeah…”

“So how you’d end up here? As a __ ?”

“Mmmmm. So what do you do?”

“I work for a consultancy firm.”

“Oh, ok…. well that’s the end of your business here. Have a good day eh!”

See what I’m talking about? It’s the same thing with goddamn strangers sometimes. People I don’t even fucking know! I remember ending up in a similar situation with a supervisor once. There she was yapping about how happy she was that her son had graduated from Howard because she didn’t want him wasting his youth working in some low-pay entry level position like her subordinates, and here I am telling her to go fuck herself.

My father always lectured to me about book sense vs. common sense. He used to say you could have the world of degrees under your belt but once you have no idea what’s going on around you and how to handle the shitty situations life throws at you then you’re nothing more than an educated jackass. Honestly, I used to think papa just said that to justify his lack of tertiary education but now I can appreciate the truth to his statement. I realise what he meant whenever I ask one of these supposedly intelligent people their thoughts on the crisis in Sudan and they look at me quizzically: “There’s a crisis in Sudan?” Or when I ask them their thoughts on the political situation in Zimbabwe and they have no idea who Mugabe is. Hell I’ve even asked them about shit that affects us locally, Martin Joseph’s three year crime forecast, the Unions’ call for a nationwide day of strike action; and these university graduates would just gape at me.

Now I know I’m giving the impression that I’m anti-university or something, but I’m not. I just get the impression that tertiary level education is used in our society purely for financial gain. It seems to me that people enroll in these institutions just to get that expensive piece of paper that somehow deems them to be superior in intellect to us lesser mortals. I remember encountering a newly graduated dentist who couldn’t spell the word ‘thousand’; man, I should have made the effort to remember her name.

We in Triniland here like to talk about education. We like to say how we or our children just graduated “with Honours you know” from the University Of Wherever, and Some Big Company is already courting us/them with a nice salary, vacation perks and a pension plan. We like seeing those letters behind our names. And this is good. Really. I mean it. But I think that in the quest for the almighty dollar we have forgotten that higher education is just that – higher education. I mean, if you already have the privilege of being accepted into an institution of tertiary studies the least you can do is actually learn.

Another problem lies with our education system itself. We’ve already eliminated science and social studies from the S.E.A exams resulting in whole generations who know the lyrics to every Rhianna song but not the words to the national pledge. In addition to renaming and caribbeanising G.C.E to C.A.P.E, we’ve also dumbed down those exams, yet secondary schools countrywide celebrate their heretofore unprecedented astronomical pass rate. Thus we end up with a pile of graduates some of whom don’t know how to represent fifty cents as a fraction (yes I’m serious), those who can’t string a sentence together without using ‘like’ every other word and others who find difficulty in grasping the concept that life exists outside the student guild.

I swear, with the present degree craze that’s sweeping the country, I won’t be surprised when Triniland turns into an Orwellian nightmare without the revolution of course. We’re way too complacent for that.