It’s easy to complain today, because there’s so much to complain about.
Because we live in a society dominated and shaped by mega-corporations, we deal a lot with inefficiency, products that aren’t necessarily made with an eye for quality, and interesting “customer service.” While it’s something we reluctantly expect and accept, at the same time, we know it’s wrong, and things could be better.
There is a child inside of all of us who wants to be accepted and treated with dignity. Hailey, art print from Steve Henderson Collections
Layers of people between us and the CEOs and shareholders — the ones with actual power to change things — mean we get frustrated and irritable when we feel that we’re being put off, ignored, stuck on hold, and not listened to.
So, we get cranky with the person we’re dealing with, a person with limited ability to make any changes, who’s working there because they need a job and probably doesn’t like the situation any more than we do. The messenger, so to speak.
And this makes the day poor for both us and them. It also doesn’t solve the problem of products that look nicer (and bigger) in the ads than they do in our homes, and the vague suspicion that, to many billion dollar profit making entities, we are nothing more than a piece of currency.
But there are solutions beyond attacking the messenger, perhaps one of the best ones being that — if our voice cannot reach the ears at the top — we look elsewhere for the same product, preferably from a business (small? mid-sized? local? start-up?) that is more attentive to quality and customer service. (Don’t give up! We spent years thinking we were stuck with an impersonal, inefficient, and frustratingly inept bloated company that effectively monopolized our rural options, but we never stopped looking for alternatives. We finally found one.)
The artwork, Hailey, is a reminder to us of what individual people — us, and those we meet in person and on the phone all day, look like. Like children, we are vulnerable: nobody likes to be yelled at, denigrated, publicly embarrassed, and excoriated.
And while mega-corporations — which are not individual human beings but, in the U.S., carry many of the same rights that individuals do — can handle critique and excoriation, the wage earners who work for them are our brothers and sisters on the planet, and they could use a smile, a polite greeting, kindness, an egalitarian interaction that reminds us both that we are equals.
As individual people, valuing honesty, respect, compassion, kindness, and goodness, we can make a difference. One individual person at a time.
Thank you for joining me at This Woman Writes. Posts complementing this one are
People Who Can’t Say “Please” and “Thank You” Have a Problem
This Woman Writes by Carolyn Henderson 
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