Customer Service?

So all you schmucks not intravenously connected to a source of information, here's a link to the BIG NEWS STORY of the week:


"Upset flight attendant grabs beer, activates chute, goes home"

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38629517/ns/travel-news/

Never mind that an estimated 12 million people are displaced by flooding in Pakistan (a total higher than both the tsunami and Haitian earthquake combined), or that thousands are still missing or dead. I'm just pleased that this managed to knock Snookie's arrest out of the headlines. Who said journalism is dead?

However, this whole JetBlue scenario navigates a turbulent space, landing in a field of controversy. Keeping on this plane, it's possible that Mr. Slater's eruption could affect more people than an equally disgruntled Icelandic volcano. Maybe his Homeresque (we're taking Simpsons, not the Classical Greek writer) escape will spark copycats both inside and outside the aviation industry. If I was a professional journalist writing for a major news conglomerate, I would be unbiased in my critical examination of satisfaction within the service sector. However, I am writing on a free blogging site. Incidentally, I scoop ice cream at a locally owned candy store for minimum wage- that's my qualification for reviewing Mr Slater's outburst.

Customers of all sorts are curmedgeony. At my place of employment, they rant about the absence of Butter Pecan ice cream while I foolishly suggest Pralines and Cream instead. They construct outrageous requests(do we have glutenfree, dairyfree, sugarfree, fat free, low carb ice cream?*). They ask if there is hash in the Heavenly Hash fudge. They get a little too touchy feely when I hand over samples of Mint Chip. They talk about the polyps in their colon. Some customers smell bad.

I've worked in the same store for four years now, which in the shuffling world of teenage employment is tantamount to Cesar declaring himself Dictator for Life. I've survived The Great Recession, the South Beach Diet, and cold rainy summers. I've watched children grow from toddling on stubbly legs and nibbling at complimentary baby cones to devouring a double scoop of Blue Bubblegum. I've called hairdressers for emergency cuts, hotels for emergency accommodations, and customers to inform them that their emergency order of chocolate peanut butter ice cream has arrived. I've witnessed first dates, birthdays, anniversaries, and the sombre groups of people licking vanilla cones after summer funerals. A wrinkly old couple used to arrive hand in hand, always getting two cones of maple walnut-until his cancer diagnosis switched him to vanilla. I haven't seen them in months; I skim the obituaries now.

Mr. Jet Blue dealt with stress exceeding the amount I receive at a candy store. A thousand metres above the planet's surface, he is partly responsible for the welfare of his passengers. By comparison, once a woman collapsed on my chocolate cabinet. She was fine, the caramel and praline truffles were fine. Additionally, airline passengers are an irritable, impatient, and anxious group, while candy customers are remarkably pleasant. Occasionally, I struggle with the desire to reach over the counter and throttle the man complaining about our mediocre selection of salt water taffy. But launching into an obscene tirade, stealing alcoholic beverages andembarking on a sensationalist escape through an emergency exit? It offers neither Mr Slater or his beleaguered coworkers any credit to the challenges of their occupation.

When my customers are pleasant, I offer free sprinkles. Sometimes I feel the urge to flip over the ice cream freezer and use it as a bunker as I throw scoops of Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough at stingy senior citizens. But inwardly I curse their ice cream cones, hexing them to fall on the ground. Forget inflatable slides and a criminal mischief charges, nothing says sticking it to the man like chunks of gravel in your Rum n' Raisin.



* This does not exist.