Wordpress doesn’t offer a way to subscribe to comments without first commenting, but I’ll look for a plugin that does that. Meanwhile, you CAN subscribe to the comments feed RSS (see link top of sidebar), if you use a feedreader at all. (I would offer to burn it to Feedburner so you can get email updates, but that service has been 100% unreliable lately, so I’m not convinced you’d get them.)

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How is that legal? I mean, obviously it is, but I’m left confused.

Customer service jobs up here pay shite and get buckets of abuse. It’s like the theory is that anyone can do the job, so no one who does it matters as a human being, and if you did matter you wouldn’t be working there anyway. Walking into Zellers, a big Canadian retailer, is so depressing because of everything about the store – the colours, the lighting, the merchandise and the employees wearing awful uniforms and an air of exhaustion – that I can’t imagine working there.

Whenever we start having financial difficulties I get the shakes at the idea of going back to working in customer service in general and convenience stores in particular. I was in far more danger from the public working in a gas station (I was robbed twice, once at gunpoint, once at knife point) than I was when I worked at a bar, since bars tend to have security.

Jennifer, is there a way to subscribe to comments without having to comment? Hoyden has that option.

That is what human beings are really like, deep down. That doesn’t mean things are hopeless and we can’t do better – we do, most of the time. But we need a culture that demands we do better, and uniformly punishes acts of selfishness whether they result in a death at Wal-Mart or corporate executives raking in millions from this latest catastrophe (they caused) in the world economy. I see a direct relationship here: we’ve got a couple of generations now who’ve never seen a major player in the power structure held accountable for his or her misdeeds. We KNOW there’s a set of rules for the rich/powerful and another set entirely for the rest of us. We’re disillusioned and angry, and NOW they’re destroying what prosperity any of us were managing to enjoy. We should be trampling CEOs on Wall Street instead of workers at Wal-Mart, but (sadly) abuse usually gets passed on rather than returned to the server.

The epitome of assholian customer behavior was displayed when the inconsiderate, self-absorbed Christmas shoppers complained about the store closing for half the day due to the worker’s death, and the injury sustained by a 28 year old pregnant woman who was also trampled in the public’s mad rush to get the best deal on some stupid gadget. The entitlement attitudes of those who think everything is all about them knows no bounds; or as you put it, the public often regards customer service workers as “enhancement tools” for their shopping and dining experience.

A major part of the problem is the fact that we live in a society that labels some people as less “worthy” and less “deserving” as others, a society that labels some groups of disenfranchised people as “trash”.

Once any individual or group of people is relegated to the status of “untermentchen” (German: meaning “sub-human”), the public at large views them as disposable. Given our propensity for disposable items ranging from paper plates to Pampers, it is no surprise that our society thinks nothing of mistreating certain people and treating them as cheap disposable commodities.