How can I help you help me feel great?

Here begins the newest, most amazing musing from The Loudest Fan. Bow appropriately:

I'm baaaaaaack! I refuse to apologize for my extended absence. Deal with it.

Recently, I was perusing what I believe to be the most entertainingly intelligent content on the web: cracked.com. In their recent article entitled "5 Reasons It's Still Not Cool to Admit You're a Gamer," reason #1 discusses general issues of entitlement that prevent the gaming industry from respecting its clientele, thus preventing gamers and gaming from ascending beyond their social stigmas. The article as a whole is precise in its analysis of what plagues the media form of gaming, and reason #1 is absolutely the most insightful of the 5, clearly demonstrating the human tendency for short-sighted selfishness.

It is this tendency that I want to evaluate further. We are selfish pricks, to the point of hurting our chance of survival on this planet. That's nothing new, and neither myself nor Cracked are original in pointing this out. I just aim to illustrate how deep this tendency goes, and detail how it factors in making customer service the Hell that it is (more on why I chose that later).

First, I want to point out something that was pointed out to me over a decade ago, but has always factored into my perspective on selfish idiots (read: people) ever since. One of the founding principles of moral attitude in Western thought is the Golden Rule: Do unto others that which you would have done unto yourself. Granted, it is specifically a Christian principle, but you'd be hard-pressed to argue that it doesn't inform Western culture as a whole. I bring it up because it is an altruistic teaching, yet it founds itself upon an assumption of selfishness. It is not "Do unto others that which is only good." Rather, it uses self-interest as a motivation for altruism; altruism is communicated in terms of the selfish.

I love working in customer service. I really, really do. I even have a knack for it. Working to help strangers and creating a peaceful, pleasing environment for the customer are things I actually enjoy. Do not let this fool you, though: nobody, including myself, does it to help people. At least, "helping others" simply for the sake of just that is never our motivation.

Customer service is a competition. Unlike sales, which has quantifiable outcomes (e.g. commissions) that justify the competition, customer service pits employee against the customer in a war in which the only reward is entitlement. The best customer service employee never loses. He will often tie, but only because the customer failed to challenge the employee. Thus, tying, for the customer service employee, is only another form of winning.

Losing is yet another form of winning to the employee, and the degree to which the loss is a win is proportional only to the skill of the employee. If a customer proves to be so difficult that the customer service employee cannot help them, the employee leaves the confrontation knowing that the customer was stupid and at fault for everything, considering that everything the employee does is literally designed to make the experience as enjoyable as possible for the customer. If a customer is too difficult, it is usually because he is ignorant to that which is best for himself. The more difficult he is, the more clearly ignorant and stupid he must be. The only exception to this is the customer who is difficult only to entertain himself, but they usually tend to only be other people with experience in customer service. Those cases are as close to "sport" as customer service gets. Everything else is war.

Winning outright is easily the crown jewel of customer service achievement. An employee yearns for a customer so difficult that he can walk away feeling superior in every way, and to have that difficult customer yield to the will of the employee by the end. The most altruistic customer service employee is the most sadistic. Patience has nothing to do with it. Nobody hurries through that which they enjoy.

Customer service employees like me help others in order to feel superior to the general population. Writers like me write in order to feel superior to the general reader. Commenters like you write in order to feel superior to me. You will fail entirely.

Arguing about morons

Here begins the newest, most amazing musing from The Loudest Fan. Bow appropriately:

Recently, I have taken up the habit of perusing bulletin boards of awesome similar to my own. Most recently, Rachel of culture.spawn has caught my ever-brilliant eye with this post: READ THIS.

While her other posts are devoted to the archaic (read: useless) medium of literature, this one touches on my area of expertise: morons of the interwebs (read: you). Her rant essentially suggests that otherwise decent human beings abuse the gift of anonymity provided by the interwebs, thus dis-entitling them on a moral level to the privileges of privacy and protection from retaliation.

To this, I have a rebuttal: we are not dealing with otherwise decent human beings, and this is nothing new or specific to the internet. Who hasn't experienced bathroom-stall graffiti? Even better, how many of us have never contributed? My point is that those who have a proclivity for abusing anonymity are the ones who do so. I don't imagine that everyone who visits a bathroom is a closet white-supremacist, itching to scrawl swastikas and "Fuk the Joos and Blax" everywhere, but any space surveyed would certainly suggest so. The internet is simply the flame that such moths are drawn to (just insert "lolz" in front of the messages you'd find in a restroom, and you'd be surprised how similar it is to any given comment thread), and it also happens to have other redeeming qualities that draw the rest of us, allowing a different kind of interaction than the bathroom stall example (in that people largely ignore bathroom stall communication).

The only solution (one which I support 100%) to the abuse of anonymity is a plutocratic exclusion of access to the internet of everybody whom I choose is unworthy.

P.S. Rachel specifically mentions the abuse of gossiping anonymously: "If I'm out with my friends, they will not tease me in front of strangers about scandalous things." I think I'll turn the tables on that one. For some juicy scoop on the sordid life of Rachel, click here: JUICY GOSSIP.