This is an excerpt from something I wrote for a sociology class. I liked it and thought I might publish it here.
Interacting with customers at work has been a major socializing force for me. I got my first job around the time I turned 16 and worked consistently until moving to college. Starbucks was the most demanding of those jobs. Our store was constantly understaffed, and I thought it would be cool to work overtime (“No, I’m not busy at 4:30am; sure, I’ll come in!”). I would sometimes talk to upwards of 40 people per hour in the drive through. This constant loop of communication, where I would have approximately the same conversation with dozens of people in a row, gave me good feedback on what worked and how I could get the best responses. My greeting, after trying (A/B testing?) many variations, eventually solidified to, “Good morning, welcome to our Starbucks; what can I get for ya?”. I still use techniques1 I learned during my time there, even in everyday situations.
One time, while working as a host at a sushi restaurant on a particularly busy night, a customer who had been waiting to be seated for a few minutes came to the counter, where I was taking an order, and asked if I was going to leave him waiting there much longer. I am not an angry person, but I, in the moment, could imagine a reality in which I told the gentleman exactly where he might take his business if he was so displeased with our service. It took me a second—maybe there was a loading symbol over my head—but I smiled, thanked him for his patience, and said we’d be with him as soon as we could given the volume of patrons. He seemed a little taken aback and walked sheepishly back to his party.
Something my partner noticed is that I apologize very often for things that aren’t my fault (e.g., “I forgot my water in the kitchen.”). I joked with her about another possible cause of this behavior, but I think the real one is socialization from my time in customer service. The way my coworkers, or at least the ones who seemed effective to me, would field customer complaints was to apologize immediately and (seemingly) sincerely and offer a solution (“Oh, I’m sorry you left it there; let me go get it for you.”). Interestingly, doing this at work rarely felt insincere to me, and it never does in my personal life. I think imitating that has affected my emotional response as well as my verbal one.
1This is intentionally vague because it includes a wide range of things, from “being patient and understanding” to “getting the FedEx clerk to make a minor exception for me while picking up a package.” Maybe it warrants further explanation in a later post.