I have friends in the service industry whom I infrequently (at best) have the opportunity to see or socialize with when neither of us is at work. Conversely, there are usually plenty of convenient times to see them while they are working, but then that is asymmetric: they are, still, after all, on the clock and the friendly interaction is in the end one-sided. Most of my friends in such roles have been met either while they were working, or through incredibly coincidental timing. This led to the hopefully-obvious point that service-industry workers are, and have been for some time now become an "other" to their customers, and not simply for their subservient professional roles. Their work hours mean that they tend to socialize with one another far more often than they do with me and my nine-to-fiveish cohort. From that, forming close ties across the social strata is very difficult and the cycle perpetuates into a tacit, permanent underclass.
Then over last weekend the opportunity presented itself to look a little harder at the concept. First, though, when I use the term "service industry" above I primarily think of restaurant/hospitality staff, but the term, along with the sociological rift it carries, is growing less rigid. Where we once saw the Clerks-type roles as distasteful, the tar has begun to creep up the ladder. Teachers for example are now being marginalized as a strange, graspingly undesirable sub-class of a profession. Business interests have gained traction painting them as indolent recipients of taxpayer largess -- even as their pay lags far behind other industries and their pensions seem near-constantly under budgetary assault all while providing an indispensable service to society at large. I suspect medical professionals -- and the division of the once-monolithic "nurse" profession into various levels of skill and responsibility has hastened this -- will be painted as increasingly corrupt, particularly if the "government takeover of healthcare*" remains an issue.
However, one small part of my job responsibilities is to act as an "escalation" point if some other layers of support have been unable to rectify some outage or other.** This happened this weekend. It happened during an outing and required me to get home to a terminal to log in and set things aright, but in all it was not a terrifically strenuous problem to fix and I was done with my part in around sixty minutes, allowing for time to check and verify that my fix was going to hold. However, during this period the original customer*** had become incommunicado and was unable to be reached; however all available were convinced the problem had been resolved satisfactorily. I returned to my social engagement.
And then about fifty minutes after my return, or roughly eighty since I'd begun work on the problem, said customer returned the call and now offhandedly wanted the problem explained to them, in detail. It was now creeping up around eleven PM. And so after a few intermediaries I spoke with them -- having a received a perfunctory and not terribly-sincere-sounding apology for "calling late" -- for another half hour to reconfirm the points that had already been made.
That conversation is what ties all this together: while I know the customer's name and have maybe been in email contact with them before, their office is miles from mine and we've never in my memory met in person. Given our status differential we probably will never meet, and even then we would certainly never interact in any socially significant manner. So they're free to think of me as an interchangeable servant, and I'm free to think of them as petty and remote, if not callous.
Okay, you're reading this maybe and wondering where's my point? A few points, really:
1. That I've been othered just as I've seen others be othered before me. ****
2. That my job largely exists to be abused in this fashion.
3. That it's always been this way, the ramifications never examined.
4. Socioeconomic class may be the last, best divisor America has left.
Without it, where would we be?
* I hope not; but just now it's uncertain.
** Some of whom are off-shored employees, all of whom almost everyone here has a vague distaste for, either for some job-insecurity sense or a worse ethnocentric ire.
*** internal, but a telling piece of institutional psychology wherein we otherize our co-workers and submit willingly to their lowered opinion of us.
**** Couldn't resist. Sorry.
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