The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [30]
Benjamin muttered, “Future Shock.” I could see him jerk perfectly upright, as if inspiration had tugged on his marionette strings. “This is what Alvin Toffler pointed out almost forty years ago.” He tried to articulate how we’d witnessed the consequence and conundrum of the Industrial Revolution and the throwaway society. We’ve got Model-T employees in Eli Whitney’s cotton-gin workplace, he explained—interchangeable workers, did I dig?
I dug. The Hallmark clerk had not required an apprenticeship to learn his job; it was largely mechanical. Even an employee who excelled could only do so much good here. Both the employer and the employee saw the relationship as temporary. The employer saw no benefit in the relationship’s being permanent, and the employee recognized that and acted accordingly. Employees in a retail setting lacked any vested interest in the company’s success or failure; they got paid the same whether the store reached its sales goals or not. Making a decision could only offer repercussions for the wrong choice, and no reward for the right one.
Switching gears before his comments had caught up to each other, Benjamin almost offhandedly added, “I’d never thought about it before, but a typo that everyone walks past and no one ever corrects signifies a much deeper communication breakdown.” He started singing Zeppelin to work off his frustrations. I wondered if Benjamin meant that a typo no one noticed signified a breakdown in grammatical awareness or if he’d meant that a typo people did notice and didn’t comment on suggested that the employees weren’t talking to one another. When he attempted a screechy high note, I interrupted. He clarified that he’d meant the latter. “No one cares about their work environment enough to deal with the drudgery of actually talking to each other. What a drag that can be.”
I nodded, then backed up to what had bothered me most about that hallmark of grammatical obstruction. “So I get that retail sales positions are as replaceable—and disposable?—as the clothing we buy rather than mend, but I’m a customer making a request. Aren’t they supposed to listen to my feedback?”
“From my own experience, no.” He then launched into a jeremiad about handling customer complaints. He would go out of his way to fix the problems most relevant to service. Someone’s order hadn’t arrived? He’d track it down. Someone ripped the soap dispenser off the wall in the men’s restroom … again? Okay, he’d arrange to get a bottle of soap in there and then survey the damage. But when someone wanted to complain about something that came down from the corporate office, well, Benjamin would have no control over the policy-making of higher-ups. When people brought up noncontrollables such as this, he couldn’t do much about them, so he’d work to end the conversation quickly rather than attempt to resolve the issue—because he couldn’t. And an author coming in with her self-published opus and wanting to do a book signing, or someone wanting to put up flyers for their half-marathon downtown, would fall into an even more unfortunate category: stuff Benjamin doesn’t care about that is interfering with his focus on actual customer service. It wasn’t his job to help a writer who’d photocopied her self-help ramblings and expected people to pay for them. Nor was it his job to run a community bulletin board, as much as he likes those. His sole purpose at that store boiled down to helping customers obtain their next awesome read, and to make that process as smooth as possible. Anyone coming to him about anything else was in his way.
He stopped to reflect. “The typo hunting is an interesting case, because I would group this in the same category as the bathroom thing. It’s a controllable thing that reflects on the store, so while I might not want to hear it, I’d still want to act on it. Also, the Hallmark store had no customers. The other lady was using the time to do