Recently I needed to go to the post office in downtown Chicago for a certified letter. Yes, it would seem, the post almost writes itself… the lines were long and, in the middle of it, one of the two employees wandered off to take a break or something. The guy next to me, an older guy, was about to lose his mind with rage. He said “this must be how it is under communism” and seethed with rage. My response was that the selection of employees was essentially designed to “employ the unemployable” in the name of limiting social unrest as a thinly disguised government work program. At one point, an actual competent employee came in and took all the people in line to self-service machines and helped me personally, for which I was thankful. The entire process, which should have been simple, took over an hour.
I was in a local sandwich shop called “Corner Bakery” (which I usually call “Corner Confusion”) where you order in one place and they give you a tag to put on your table, and then you wait for your sandwich to come to you. This sort of process always scares me, because the shop is big and there is a patio outside, so they don’t know where you are sitting and it just seems like they could miss you. Well, this time they found me… a waiter who didn’t speak English very well came over and set my sandwich in front of an older guy and gave him my sandwich (one was flat bread so it should have been obvious which was which). The other guy was about to go apoplectic with rage but I had been watching the whole thing, just assuming that it would be screwed up, and I calmly got up and switched sandwiches with the guy (I was watching him, too, to make sure he didn’t take a bite out of it). He was in mid rant but I didn’t care, I just wanted lunch.
Often I go by McDonalds for coffee (I don’t like Starbucks very much, although I usually go there just because it is preferred by others and I don’t care very much overall) and it is part of the rest of my order. There are two dimensions for my coffee – “black” and “large”. I have learned through hard experience to wait until the clerk is ready to receive this complex and easily forgotten information; you’ll just have to repeat it five more times. It is beyond expectations that you could ask for your order (like a number “9” or something and AT THE SAME TIME say “large coffee, black”) without having to repeat it later. But you need to stay on it, or you never know what you’ll get.
Through myriad travels and eating out continually for years I have three expectations for the US service sector, so that I am never disappointed:
1) they know nothing
2) they do nothing
3) they annoy me
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