The Veruca Salt Condition

As many of you know, I work in customer service, and have for my entire adult life. I’ve worked at McDonalds for a quick minute. I’ve also worked at video stores, grocery stores, collection agencies, phone companies and now health care. I’ve been a subject matter expert, training supervisor, sales supervisor, customer service supervisor, and back to being a customer service rep. In all those roles, and in the past 25+ years of employment, I’ve learned two things:

1. You need to smile, all the time. Even when you’ve got the worst call of your life on the line. Smiling while delivering the news keeps you at an even keel and tone throughout any call. Even in face to face customer service, keeping the smile, or at least keeping your face neutral, prevents YOU from reacting to the sometimes over the top ridiculousness that you will deal with every day.
2. Liquor is your friend. I’m not advocating alcoholism, but a little sip of ‘get right’ makes everything alright with the world. I’m particularly partial to Malibu and Pepsi. Jack Daniels Tennessee Honey. Straight. On bad days.

You also might want to develop a good sense of humor. It helps to be able to laugh at the stories you’re going to retell later. And you will retell them.

I say all this because I’m finding the longer I speak to people on the regular, the more I realize that humans are bat guano crazy, and that some of us are just better at controlling our cray-cray than others.

What I’m particularly sick of is people constantly thinking that their crisis is my crisis. Let me say this, I understand that things happen that we are not prepared for. Those are, by definition, emergencies – uncontrollable bleeding, your child is injured, chest pains. But you not paying your bill because you didn’t get THIS months billing statement and then whatever you’re supposed to pay gets cut off, and then you call and say you want it back on now, when you made the payment .00002 seconds before making the call to me is NOT a crisis I’m going to break my neck to rectify. Namely because I can’t and secondly, there’s a process. With steps. Something’s going to get missed in a hurry, everyone knows it, but rarely does anyone heed it and that’s why you wind up with a craptacular instead of a resolution.

And telling me you want it now, doesn’t help you. It doesn’t even help ME help YOU. What it reminds me of, when I hear the whining, the belligerent complaining, the profanity – Willy Wonka. And not Charlie, not even his family. No, I see all the other characters from the movie, but one in particular. And it begs the question:

When did we become a world of Veruca Salt’s?

For those who haven’t seen any version of Willy Wonka, Veruca was the spoiled brat who wanted everything. NOW, including a bean feast and golden goose.

Everyday I hear, see and speak with one of these people. And If it wasn’t for the above two therapies listed I would have admitted myself to Western State years ago.

Veruca’s are exhaustingly needy people. You answer their questions, and when it’s not the right answer, they poke, prod and incite you to their level of petulance. Worse, is when you actually let these pissant’s ruin your day. Then you become one – you want things to happen your way, right away, yesterday.

The occasional fit, the emotional outburst of something not going your way, I get that. We are all guilty of it. I just think it’s worse now because we’ve done generations of children born after 1976 a great disservice. By rewarding mediocrity, by giving everyone a trophy and calling everyone a winner, we don’t know what it’s like to lose so we have no appreciation for what a win really feels like. We have no idea anymore what the satisfaction of overcoming a situation, learning how to handle it better, and then winning the next time it happens feels like. You don’t win just because you show up. You have to SHOW AND PROVE!!!!

When did we go away from this? When did we stop taking responsibility for the children we were raising to be productive, self sufficient, thinking adults? Not the 25 year olds who can’t even manage to call and pay for their own services?

No, instead of being rational, sane human beings we shout, and yell and over-talk everyone who doesn’t agree with us, or thinks how we do things is wrong. And then we expect people to feel sorry for us for basically acting like the equivalent of a 2 year old spoiled brat throwing a fit in the grocery store because you couldn’t get the furry cat toy on sale in aisle 9.

Reality TV is full of this behavior. And we glorify it and think well if it works for them. That is until that behavior puts them in a situation where they either wind up getting hurt, or hurting someone else. Either physically, or emotionally. It’s not even adults – there’s a slew of reality shows on now that feature young children and teenagers in a big damned hurry to act like adults, who act like children.

Enough is enough. How do we begin to stop this trend?

Well, I know it sounds cliché, and it gets a bad rap these days, but there is a schload of self help books that talk about being calm and patient before you speak. Counting to ten, taking a deep breath. Or even not dealing with stressful situations right away. There’s even a link with 24 steps, The 24-Steps to better communication. But seriously, who needs 24 steps to better communication.

And this is coming from a communications major.

In my opinion, it stems from people getting away from the basics. There’s no need to make it complicated. In my personal opinion, it’s all because people don’t want to crack open a bible and just read a few passages. “Do to others as you would have them do to you,” Lu 6:31. Or this one: “Let your conversation be gracious and attractive so that you will have the right response for everyone,” Col 4:6.

I’m not Bible thumping, but the principles that I find there are universal, and the most helpful, and have been around far longer than any self help guru. So why not try to incorporate some of that into how we are raising our children, and bettering our own existence, and how we communicate with each other? Because while I do believe that the times we live in seem dire, I don’t want to believe that all the people are a complete lost cause and need to be thrown out with the trash, like Veruca.

So if treating someone like something you would scrape off the bottom of your shoe works for you. Expect to be treated that way, or worse. Expect to be discarded. Because that seems to be easier to do as well. I personally will continue to struggle through, because yes it sucks to be one of the few doing the right thing. But my actions just aren’t about me. Everything I put out in the world comes back – in the form of how people treat me. But also in how my example will help my daughter to be a better person.