English Please!

Once a month, my friends and I go to get our nails done together. Usually a relaxing experience, we are welcomed by the nail salon employees, who speak kindly to us as they paint our nails. Yet, I always seem to leave the salon a little unnerved.

The source of my irritation? The entire time that I am getting my nails done, the salon employees are chatting to one another in their native languages, usually Chinese or Korean. And I can’t shake the feeling that the employees are all talking about my friends and I, making jokes and side-comments because they know we cannot understand what they are saying.

I’m not alone in this feeling, which often makes me think that my suspicion is correct. My friends share my theory, along with millions of other Americans. An episode of Seinfeld is dedicated to this topic, in which Elaine is so sure that the women who do her nails are talking about her, she brings a translator to the nails salon and discovers her hunch is true. One can even like a Facebook page titled, “I always Feel the Chinese People at Nail Salons are Talking about me.”

So I asked my friend, whose mother owns a salon,  for the truth on the matter. Her response: “Yeah, they talk about customers all the time.”

Even if we do not know for certain if the employees are speaking about us, why do we find them speaking in another language so bothersome? It is because it makes us feel as though we are left out of the joke; we don’t know what is going on or what they are saying, and we understand that most likely its something about us. The employees are going out of their way to make us feel uncomfortable—they know how to speak English, but choose to leave their customers in the dark.

Why do they do this? P.M. Forni, cofounder of the John Hopkins Civility Project, explains in his book Choosing Civility, that “By putting down someone who is not present, we seek to establish a complicity of sorts with someone who is” (65). Because the customers are clueless as to what the employees are saying, its as though the customers are absent when the workers speak Chinese. Forni is saying that the employees do this in attempts to “strengthen the connection with those around us” (65). However, this is a false sense of “connection” as it is rooted in putting others down, creating a short-term feeling of “we are better than the customer.”

But in the end, putting others down to unite us together just makes us feel worse about ourselves. It is a well-known fact that gossiping and speaking ill of others doesn’t make us feel better overall. Therefore, nail salon employees need to stop using this tactic to talk about their customers. These customers are paying the salon for its services, and I think I’m right in saying that asking the employees to show respect by speaking in English is a fair request.

Tired of Holding

Last week, I answered a phone call from my angry father, asking me what I was thinking buying seventy dollars worth of applications and games for my phone. Shocked, I told him that I had not bought anything of the sort—that there must have been a mistake on the bill. He told me to call AT&T right away and figure out why they had claimed on the bill that I had done so, letting me know that I was in trouble if I didn’t resolve the issue.

So I did. I walked into my dorm room, Googled the AT&T Customer Services number and called it. A recording answered the phone, leading me through a series of questions in which I answered by pushing numbers on the phone. Estimated time: 10 minutes. I was then transferred to another recording in which I actually had to speak, answering simple questions repeatedly because the recording had difficulty comprehending what I was saying. Estimated time: 15 minutes. Eventually the recording gave up trying to decipher my words. I was then put on hold to speak to a real person, only to be dropped from the phone call a minute after an assistant answered. Estimated time: 10 minutes. Total time: 35 minutes—with nothing resolved.

Frustrated, I called back and went through the 30-minute process again, determined to talk to a supervisor and let them know how unsatisfactory their customer service was. When I did relay my opinion to an employee, she seemed unfazed, giving me an unconvincing, “M’am I’m sorry that your experience with AT&T customer services has been this way, but there isn't anything I can do about it.”

Over an hour later, I had finally solved the issue, yet I still remained dissatisfied. I spoke to my suitemates about what had happened, and their responses alarmed me. They both told me of similar experiences they encountered with phone companies!

So I ask this: What gives any company the right to treat its customers this way? 

Too often, businesses, especially big (phone!) companies treat a customer uncivilly and not as a person—pawning the client off to talk to recordings and computers that ask a series of complicated questions, eventually requesting that the consumer “Please hold.” This has become acceptable because corporations no long treat their customers as people. Instead of giving their customers what they deserve—an employee to talk to from the beginning—the company chooses to use the quickest, and cheapest way to deal with the problem, not the most respectful or helpful. According to Stephen L. Carter, author of the Book Civility, a key component of civility is respect, which businesses tend to lack when dealing with costumers. Companies need to reevaluate their “customer service,” ensuring that they treat their customers civilly, showing their clients that they care for them. Because I, along with millions of others, am tired of it. If the businesses I support do not improve how they treat their clients, I’m searching for new companies that do treat their customers better.  Maybe it will take some time; maybe I’ll have to switch to smaller companies. But I know I am right in my demand for change, for isn't “The customer always right?”