Are you really being served?

Press, 21 February 1987, Page 16

Are you really being served?

The recent news that all the jobs we are likely to get from now on in Western Countries, will be in the service . sector, raises again the question of what “service” actually is. What sort of transaction is it, when people pass across money in exchange for this thing? Let. us skip the ritual moan about the decline in the deference of bus conductors, shop-girls who file their nails while you are banging on the counter. , It is not bad service, or absence of service, that interests me, but what happens when it is good. When you dWer a service, you are always supposed to offer something more than just the cheque cashed, the suit pressed, the drinks poured into glasses: you have to make the customer feel good. If you yourself happen to be feeling energetic and cheerful and in favour of the human race, fine; but nothing ensures you will always feel that way. Small wonder increasing numbers of firms run training courses to instil at least the appearance of such sunniness.

The routines are fairly standard. You smile. You look up. .when people approach. You call the customer by name — and, a sophisticated variation, you call up further details on a computer, so that you can ask him how his son or his automobile is doing; that way you don’t have to fall back on the all-purpose: “How’s the old complaint?”

You are supposed to take the customer seriously, which might seem too obvious to mention if garages weren’t so hopeless at believing what women tell them the car has been doing.

Above all, people on such courses are taught to seem interested; and this is the trickiest bit of the lot. Because if the person behind the counter is supposed to have a “real” conversation, then, she assumes the customer might be interested back — only he isn’t.

When the travel agent tells you about his holiday, you don’t want to know; you have to be on fantastically good terms with the girl at the washbasin not to be irritated when she talks about her own hair.

The queues at the. automatic machines outside banks demonstrate that, far from aching for warm human contact, people half the time would do anything to avoid it: we didn’t rush out on the family this morning, we think, just.to have to relate to a lot of strange bank’tellers.

The exchange of “service” involves buying a smile — which the customer may not even want like those throw out supplements in women’s magazines or the hideous glass you’ often get with petrol, it may not, I sup-

pose, do much damage to the person providing the smile — if you act cheerful, you may end up feeling that way. But there’s an essential falsity to it all the same — everything implied in the phrase “friendly neighbourhood grocer.” One has a lot of sym- ' pathy for the woman who refused a service job and went firmly back on the assembly line with the words: “I only hire out from the neck down.” If service is where the jobs are, we need a far wider range of images for men, and for those women who don’t care to be called “girls”. We must riot just think of air hostesses, highly polished car salesmen, glossy receptionists; of the clean, the young, the slick. We need not only a “nippy” waitress or dewy face under a McDonalds cap, but also the sort of immense woman you get in Westerns, banging a pan outside the hashhouse and saying “for them as don’t like beans,, supper’s over.”

We could do worse than go to thrillers, for the crusty characters who will forge you a passport by midnight, or the old East End Jew to whom (when Hitler made Sapper feel emorseful' about his earlier anti-semitism) Bulldog Drummond always repaired for his disguises. We need not just the Brigadier’s batman, but Batman.

It- is women, plus the young and part-timers, who stand to get most of these jobs. I’m not bothered about the part-time aspect, as i suspect we all will be — or should be — working part time in a decade or two. But if these jobs are only for the young and for women, it ■y

is that they are going to be poorly paid, or is it also a matter of the image involved for men? Of course not all service jobs are upfront with the public in the way I’ve described. Even in retailing, the packers and wrappers and heavers of boxes outnumber the sales staff; there are vast numbers cf backroom boys, even in things like catering and dry-cleaning and banking, who never have to provide service with a smile. But it’s where they do that men may have a problem. When I wrote about smiling some time back, readers wrote to tell

me of countries where grown men never smile — if they do they’re assumed to be gay.. The irony is that the one image of serving men that is wholly manly involves a uniform — the fireman, the policeman. The uniform must make them feel they are serving something higher than just the customer in front of them — how long till that conviction makes them uninterested in the customer at all?

Maybe the service jobs should stay in women’s hands, after all. — Copyright London Observer Service.