Quote of the Day; also, siege warfare in ancient Greece and Rome

[edenfalling]

A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person. (This is very important. Pay attention. It never fails.)
---Dave Barry



That holds for all customer service jobs, I think. :-)

-----

Today was Memorial Day, so the smoke shop closed early: 6pm rather than 9pm. Business was very, very slow all afternoon, which meant I spent most of my time reading random entertainment industry magazines, and then reading several articles on siege warfare in the ancient Hellenic world.

A few months ago we started carrying a magazine called, IIRC, Ancient Warfare among our other military magazines. I am not much interested in the minutiae of WWII or the Civil War, but articles on pre-gunpowder warfare, even skewed toward Greece and Rome and sometimes in dire need of a copy editor (and, given that this is a mass market magazine, probably of dubious scholarly rigor), are fascinating and often of use as background information in world-building. *grin*

Comments

[gramina]

"A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person. (This is very important. Pay attention. It never fails.)
---Dave Barry

That holds for all customer service jobs, I think. :-)"

*Yes.*

People who are unpleasant in any way to those who do not have the power to defend themselves will be unpleasant to you if you ever lack the power to defend yourself. So that's one practical reason to avoid them.

A second practical reason to avoid them is that that behavior makes it clear that other people aren't fully real to them, and it is not helpful to me, at least, to be around people to whom other people are not fully real.

[edenfalling]

One of my friends once said that all people should spend a year in a retail or food service job (or something similar, that involves constant face-to-face customer service, no chair and no desk, and if at all possible a cash register), partly to get a sense of how much sheer work those jobs are, and also to give people a sense of what it's like to be required to be polite and friendly and helpful all day long. I think she was on to something.

[uminohikari.livejournal.com]

Yes at that quote! I remember reading something similar in a historical fantasy book, only it was how a man treated his servants. Same thing, though, how someone treats those who can't defend themselves.

[edenfalling]

Yeah -- it's how you act when you think there won't be any consequences to you that shows what your values really are.