Hi, My Name's Michael. How May I Help You?

"This flower is scorched, this film is on, on a maddening loop."

I was walking back to the bar from the kitchen tonight when I looked up and noticed a sign above the swing-door that I hadn't seen before. It said:

Never Pass The Half-Empty Glass

My current workplace is full of such cheesy slogans and unity-encouraging posters. For example, the staff room isn't referred to as such. No, it's the Team Room. The fucking Team Room. You know, where the Team hang out. I have two words for whoever it was that went to the McDonalds University and came back with ideas like that one, and one of them's 'off'.

So anyway, I was sitting in the Team Room (italics indicate weary sarcasm) during a cigarette break (shut up. I'm working on it, okay?) this evening when I noticed a couple of things. The first was that, on the noticeboard in the corner where they scrawl various inane comments about staff performance, one of the management team had written the following:

Mike, new to Toby Carvery, already seems like he's been for years.

Funny, I feel the same way. But...uh...when did I sign the slip that gave you permission to call me 'Mike'? And in the Team Room, no less. As Maddox would say, CHOO CHOO, here comes the clue train, last stop you: I didn't. If you address me, you will call me 'Michael'. 'Sir' is also acceptable. You will not call me 'Mike', 'Mick', 'Mickey', 'Mikey', or any variation thereof without my written consent. Especially not in the fucking Team Room, which, by the way, should be renamed the Hate Room, seeing as all the Team ever talk about when they're in there is how much they hate the job/management/customers.

The second thing was a 'hilarious' poster reminding the Team that they should always offer the customers drinks and table service when travelling about the bar area. It was styled after the posters that show the actions you should take in the event that somebody stops breathing or has an attack of some kind, and featured intricately drawn diagrams of thirsty clients with empty glasses that you didn't replace before they were half-empty.

It was funny...like throat cancer is funny.

My point is that I was a customer service manager not so long ago. Over a period of time I built a group of staff that were reliable, punctual, hard-working, and pretty cool in general. I liked them, and I like to think that they felt the same way about me. But I never expected them to believe that we were a Team, that we were working together to achieve the goal of total customer happiness. We weren't. We were a loose grouping of people who worked reasonably well together and were united only in our unanimous hatred of our job and the people it forced us into contact with.

That isn't a unique situation. By and large, customer service jobs pay minimum wage and are frequented by people who are either just passing through or aspiring to reach the next level in whichever company or trade the job happens to be in. Nobody LIKES being on the bottom rung of the customer service ladder, and nobody feels that they are part of a Team.

So fuck off with your team-building, your humourless slogans, and your twee posters. If you've got money to spare on such pointless 'motivational' tools for your Team, then maybe, just maybe, it might be better spent on giving the poor bastards a little pay increase. They might even work harder, at least for a day or two.

But to be honest, I doubt it. After all, that glass we're always passing? I couldn't help but notice that it was half-empty rather than half-full.