Every week, I write a new blog, or essay, whatever you prefer to call them. Sometimes I write about things I know. Sometimes I write about things I feel. Sometimes I write about things I learned. And sometimes I write about things I don’t know. This essay is going to be all of those. It’s going to be very complex, but yet simple.
Last year, I wrote a book called The Nature Within Us. I was going to put this story in the book. I even started to, but for some reason I didn’t. So this is it. I was having a conversation with my niece, and we were talking about customer service. I didn’t agree with her. Me owning a business, I always felt customer service was vital. That is what you get paid for. I really don’t have another view on it, even now. If you are doing a job, you should be doing the best job you can. Period. End.
But my niece said something to me. She said, “You don’t know what those people are going through that day. They could have had a bad day. They could have something emotionally going on that you don’t know about. You have to be patient with people when they’re not giving you good customer service.” At the time, I still didn’t really agree. And even now, part of me still doesn’t. My thinking was, if someone is consistently bad at customer service, then you don’t need that person doing customer service. You just don’t have them work for you.
But the idea stuck with me.
And that leads me to a second story.
Before I had a restaurant, I had an arcade.
In the arcade, the children of people who worked in the mall, whether they owned a store or worked in one, would come down and spend time there.
There were these two girls. I knew them pretty well.
I won’t use their names, but I’ll use their initials. One was G, and one was C.
C would lead G around in what I would call bullying.
Not hitting. Not touching. Nothing like that.
It was more like watching a little scene from Mean Girls over and over again.
C would tell G what she was doing wrong. She would decide what they were going to play. She would make the decisions, and G really didn’t get much say in any of it.
C was clearly the leader.
One night, C came into the arcade with her whole family.
It was C, her little brother, her mother, and her father.
And what I saw that night changed the way I looked at her.
The family seemed very patriarchal to me. When they arrived, they gave C some money, almost like she was supposed to go off and entertain herself.
But she didn’t want to go off by herself.
She wanted to be with her family.
She wanted their attention.
And her mother and father seemed focused almost entirely on her little brother.
I can write that down now and it doesn’t sound as bad as it felt to watch.
But it hurt my heart…
I had seen this little girl look so strong. I had watched her boss G around, tell her what to do, take control of every little situation, and act like she had everything figured out.
And then there she was, begging for attention from her own family.
I don’t think I can really state enough how sad it was to watch.
From that moment on, I understood C better. I still didn’t think the way she treated G was right, but I saw her as a different person. I saw something behind the behavior that I hadn’t seen before. The little girl who seemed so strong when she was with G suddenly didn’t look so strong to me anymore. She looked like a little girl who wanted attention from her family and wasn’t getting it.
So now I’ve told you what I know. I’ve told you what I feel, and I’ve told you what I learned. Now I want to tell you what I don’t know. I don’t really know what was going on with that family. I’m sure culture played some part in it, but I don’t know enough to say exactly how much. I only know what I saw, and I will never understand why anyone would treat a beautiful little girl like she mattered less.
That is where this story leaves me. I understood the little girl better, but I still didn’t understand the world around her.
Albert Jr.
Author of The Nature Within Us
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