The complaint economy

I am very, very bad at complaining about things. Whatever the gene is that allows people to indignantly send back a martini that has the wrong type of olive in it, or be aggrieved about a shop assistant who didn’t sell them a flip-flop with enough fake politeness – it skipped me.  

This manifests itself in a thousand tiny ways. From the time I said “Don’t worry, it could happen to anyone,” when a flight attendant borrowed a rather precious pen and then broke it, to not returning a toasted sandwich that had actual mould on it because “I didn’t want to make a fuss.” In most service-related interactions, men with machine guns couldn’t make me complain.

I mean… they probably could? But I definitely wouldn’t put my back into it.

The Karen divide

I know this is a stark societal dividing line: those who are just itching to see the manager versus those who would rather perform their original poetry about how sad and lonely they are to a room of belligerent pre-teens. Proud Karens vs The Rest.

The thing is, no one likes being complained at. Even if you’re in a job where that kind of thing is baked in, being told you did something wrong or not to Derek’s satisfaction (because you know he went to France once and these crêpes aren’t up to his expectations) is just one of life’s great Shit Things.

In my head, there are two general scenarios where complaining happens: the first is where someone genuinely trying their best made a silly mistake, and the second where people or institutions who aggressively don’t care or are deliberately negligent just decided that you were the thing they were going to do today.

In both of those instances I’m not entirely sure that anyone’s complaint is ever going to have a positive or restorative effect. And creating “official outlets” for complaining is basically just the corporate version of giving a toddler some iPad time so that they’ll leave mommy alone for five goddamn minutes. 

Rage-bait as business model

Which brings me to car rental companies.

Car rental companies are like, “What if rage-bait was a business?” It’s a service that feels designed to go bafflingly and inexplicably wrong every single time you try to use it. Oh I’m sorry sir, the vehicle you requested isn’t available today because you see, just before you arrived we were unexpectedly besieged by a platoon of military-equipped seagulls, and most unfortunately they flew off with our fleet manager.

So you see we’ve had to send your Renault Captur as part of the multi-pronged rescue attempt we’ve launched to get him back. Yes, it’s hard to believe. No, I’m afraid the only replacement option is this single broken roller-skate. No, there isn’t a choice in the colour. Would you like rim-protection insurance with that?  

This was roughly how my most recent attempt to hire a car went. Not… incompetence, but just an hour and a half’s worth of baffling missteps that peaked with being asked if I could possibly drive to the nearest petrol station with one of the staff members because, so sorry, the car I was taking didn’t have any fuel in it. 

It’s the first time I’ve ever felt on the brink of a complaint. Especially since, after I’d returned the car I instantly started getting the inevitable carpet-bombing of “How was our service?” emails.

Complaining calculus

My fingers were twitching towards actually writing one of those “Let me tell you what I think of your service” responses, a life’s worth of backed-up service-related vitriol about to vomit itself through Gmail, but then I started doing the complaint calculus. None of the things that had gone wrong that day were the fault of individual people. It was all next-tier-up management stuff: one person manning a counter that needed three, a trainee who hadn’t had enough training and a database entry system that looked like it had been designed as the vicious finale of the Saw franchise.

And suddenly I felt like the kind of disgruntled guy on the internet that I really hate. Whether or not sending that email was going to change any of the things or make them retroactively better didn’t matter quite as much as suddenly having the aura of a complainer.

I didn’t want to participate in the complaint economy, because by empowering every single person to complain as easily as it is to click “send”, complaint inflation has turned disgruntlement into a 50-million Zim dollar note that can’t buy you a coffee. Making venting easy has had the inflationary effect of making it meaningless.

Sure, I got crappy service from a big company, but saying something about it just felt … futile. Like jumping out of quicksand into a different bit of quicksand. And I know that’s a frustrating viewpoint, because I also know there are a thousand anecdotes about how one person’s complaint fundamentally changed X company’s way of doing business and how will anything change if we don’t?

As I said, I just don’t have the gene. 

“Black, white. Two”

On a trip to Athens, I found myself standing in a before-sunrise queue of tourists who were all the type of people who had gotten up at an ungodly hour to trek up to the Parthenon because they wanted to get ahead of… all the tourists. We were shuffling blearily forward to the only coffee stand at the entrance, and I watched in a kind of silent awe as the craggy, greying man behind the counter dealt with two American girls who asked for two decaf lattes with almond milk.

With a stony, unbothered face that could have sheared off a tectonic plate if he’d thought it worth his time, he barked at them in heavily accented English: “No! There are two coffees: black, white. Two,” emphasising his point by bluntly waving two fingers at them like Churchill definitely knowing that he wasn’t making the V for Victory sign.

They were aghast, then deployed the only weapon they had left – to loudly declare that this rude, ignorant old man could not possibly expect to stay in business if he didn’t listen to the needs of his customers. I’m not sure if they expected us all to rise up in violent revolt against the indignities visited on Americans by Greek coffee sellers, but when it didn’t happen, they sulked off to sit on a rock.

And this is the thing. Sure, they had the right to complain. But equally, he had the right to not give a shit. And in this instance, I couldn’t have supported him more.

There will always be people who want coffee that is either black or white at sunrise waiting to get into the Parthenon – a building that has survived invasions, earthquakes and British thieving. I suspect it can survive the absence of almond milk.

Maybe some indignities are small enough to let go.

For more of Jono’s magic go here.

_{Top image: Rawpixel/Currency collage.}