I dislike good customer service.  But what I hate even more is excellent customer service.  

I don't want to go into your restaurant or shop because I need some sort of escape from reality or because I need to experience some realm in which strangers are fake-nice to me only for the fake-reason that they don't want to be fired from their jobs. Customer service is only another form of detachment from reality, alienation from each other as human beings.  Excellent customer service is only a manifestation of fear and inauthenticity.  

I have enough escape from reality in my technology bubble of content, apps, and devices.  When I occasionally find the time or reason to wander into the public realm, what I'm hoping for is something which is real, imperfect, and unpredictable.  At least if my waitress is bitchy, I know she's being authentically bitchy!  Please, please don't ask me how I'm doing, if I've ever been to your establishment before, if I have a club card to save 10%, or if there's anything at all you can do for me.  I know you don't care because I know you don't get paid enough to care.

I know that my argument is silly, naive, and a complete waste of time.  I know that, in some parts of the world, if you do what I am asking, you will be immediately fired from your job.  Then you'll end up on the street corner begging.  Then it will be my turn to be authentic with you and to authentically walk past you in annoyance and disgust.  No, if you live in a consumerist paradise like the US, UK, or Canada, then you know very well how to put on your fake smile and deliver your fake lines to me as though I'm not a human but merely a consumer.  That is what your boss expects and it is a means of survival for you.  I know this very well.  So I will spend my money and we will both pretend to be happy with the situation.  You pretend to be happy to see me and I'll pretend to be grateful for your excellent customer service.  But if I don't look you in the eye, please know that is is not because I don't care about you as a human being.  It is because I'm embarrassed to be playing this silly game in this silly consumerist empire.

At least I want you to know that there is one person out here who wonders who you really are.  My occasional rudeness has nothing to do with you; rather, it is only a reaction to the emptiness and pointlessness of this consumerist play which we are both bound to.

In much of the world, outside the consumerist paradise, customer service is crap.  Where I live, they serve me crappy food and don't even give a shit.  That's ok, because it is cheap and I won't tip for it.  You hate your job and I hate the horrible food you serve.  Fuck off.  But if we somehow manage to share a smile, at least we both know that it was a smile that was shared between two human beings.  

I'm pretty sure that nobody will agree with this observation.  But I'm also pretty sure this fakeness is killing our souls.  I wish it didn't have to be this way.