Stop being horrible to customer service people

As I have brought up before, my daughter Melanie is in the Disney College Program and is living these days in Orlando, Florida. She operates water slides at Blizzard Beach, a Disney water park.

This obviously entails dealing with members of the public, which depending on the day and the person can be the best and worst parts of the job, I imagine.

Recently she relayed a story in which a father basically yelled at her for doing her job. I won’t go into the details, but it has to do with a family raft ride, the number of people allowed on an individual raft, and the challenge of getting groups with different numbers of people onto the ride.

Melanie handled the whole thing very professionally and at the end of her shift was named “Slide Op of the Day” for dealing so well with rude people.

There are two ways to look at this situation. One is to say that, well, it’s good experience for her because that’s how people are and she’s going to have to learn anyway.

The other is to question why we’re OK just saying “that’s how people are” and leaving it at that. Why don’t we hold each other more accountable for being decent human beings? Why is it OK to be nasty to a college kid (or any person) who did not create the policy she is enforcing and could in fact lose her job for not doing so?

I know you get frustrated when you’re on the phone with the cable company. I know it’s exasperating when no one at the electric utility can resolve an obvious error on your bill. I know you just want to get in and out of the grocery store and start seething when the checkout person is slow or inept.

But this is where you need to be a grown-up. This is where you need to realize that the person to whom you’re speaking is trying to fix your issue and has no control whatsoever over the rules and regulations in effect.

If you yell and scream at these people, you have failed as a human being. I’m sorry, but you have.

I realize I’m coming at this with extreme bias, seeing as how this happened (and has happened multiple times to Mel in various jobs) to my little girl. Had I been there when that guy started popping off, I guarantee there would have been a scene.

I get that my perspective may be skewed. But it is so pointless, so immature, and so utterly stupid to yell at a person who’s trying their best to manage the situation and help you that I’m telling you right now to stop doing it.

That’s it. Just stop doing it.

Or work a shift as a customer service rep. If you haven’t done it before, I predict you last maybe two hours before you lose whatever faith you have in humanity.