Influences: John Irving, Stephen King, Chuck Palahniuk, Raymond Carver, Larry David, David Bowie, Mike Patton, and Ayn Rand.
Style: Short sentences, easily readable, and little in the way of description.
Genre: Information, humor, and psychological interpretation.
You should read this blog. It’s funny! Very Funny!
One would suspect that such obnoxiously, over-the-top self-promotion wouldn’t work, but some productions are successfully marketing themselves with such ad campaigns today, and they have been doing it for some time.
If I were to put word out that we were going to pay a ridiculously high amount for promotion, and of the hundreds of ad agencies that began vying for this pay out, one suggested that we build a marketing plan around the idea that “It’s funny!” that campaign probably would not finish in my top 100.
“It’s funny!” just wouldn’t seem, to me, to be a campaign built for the long haul. This simplistic approach might generate some traffic in the short term, but I would think that a true, funny designation would have to be earned over time through meretricious production, and that the obnoxiously over-the-top suggestion that it was funny, would only take me so far. “We’re not even making a suggestion,” I would complain. “We’re making a statement. Isn’t there going to be some backlash to that?”
“Look, your blog is already funny,” would be the sales pitch that ad man would surely employ. “We just have to get the word out.” Or, he might pitch it under the power of suggestion umbrella.
“That’s great,” I would reply, “But aren’t there going to be some unintended consequences involved in skipping the steps in the long haul word of mouth process?”
“Haven’t you already been trying that?” I can hear him asking. “Where’s that gotten you?”
He would be right, of course, but there’s something about determining what is funny that seems intimate to me. You determine what is funny according to what fits your “my sense of humor” designation. This “It’s funny” ad campaign appears to be saying: “Look, we’ve already determined that it’s funny for you, so you don’t have to go through all that. All you have to do is watch (or read) and laugh. You don’t have to think about it. You can just sit back, relax, and enjoy. You don’t even have to tell your friends about it. We’ll take care of that too. So just sit back and enjoy it! Not only is it funny,” they say. It’s very funny!” Isn’t there a cardinal violation of the principles of that intimate decision process that every production under goes as we determine what’s funny and what’s not? Do we appreciate the idea that someone is taking away all the work we put into that determination, so we can just relax now and laugh?
Pull quotes, such as these, are effective. As are critical praise and peer review, but I would think that if a prospective audience member were to find out that I was the one making the claim, about my blog, that there would be an immediate rebellious backlash. I would expect to see my fellow cynical minds loading up the comments section of my blog with “You might think this is funny, but it doesn’t appeal to my sophisticated sense of humor”. Or, “You may think this is funny, but it’s not funny to me.” Even if I wrote what was unquestionably the funniest blog ever written, I could see some rebels wanting to stand out from the crowd by saying, “It’s just not for me. I can see this appealing to the common man, but I’ve read Kafka and Voltaire, and I’ve seen George Carlin at Carnegie Hall, so I know funny, but my expectations may be higher than most. I prefer cerebral, subtle humor that this author apparently knows nothing about.” One could say that such responses would happen regardless, but I imagine that an obnoxiously over-the-top ad campaign, like “It’s funny” would only provoke more of this type of rebellion.
Saying, “It’s funny” or “Very funny!” also tells me that the product in question may be funny in a universal way, in a way my parents thought Milton Berle was funny, and Bob Hope, or Andy Griffith. These guys may have been funny to them, and they may have even been very funny in that universal manner, but they don’t appeal to me, or my sense of humor. I have always preferred the risque humor that comedians like George Carlin and Sam Kinison employed. There was something bitter and angry about their humor that appealed to me. They confused and angered my parents, and I idolized them for it. And when Andy Kaufman did the things Andy Kaufman did, few people around me got it. They thought he was weird. I got it, and there was something about getting it that gave it an intangible quality that may have been diminished had Kaufman prefaced one of his bits with, “Watch this next skit, it’s funny.”
I enjoy the universal slapstick, body function humor as much as anyone else, but to get me enjoying your product over the long haul, you have to be different, and over-the-top in a manner that leads me to believe that no one has ever tried that joke quite that way before. If my parents think it’s funny, or that guy at the deli who repeats Andy Griffith jokes thinks it’s funny, I may find it humorous, but it would never achieve that long-term, “wait with bated-breath for the next episode” level of hilarity for me.
The ad campaign reminds me of the obnoxious retort, obnoxious people like Tony Kornheiser, make to comedic sentiments: “That’s funny, and I know funny!” I’ve always wanted to ask these people, if you know funny, why haven’t you ever been funny? You may know what you consider funny, but I haven’t heard you ever say anything that I consider funny.
I don’t know which team started this promo. Whether it was the promo Ricky Gervais ran for his show Idiot Abroad: “You should watch this show. It’s funny.” Or, if it was the TBS switching from the “Superstation” tagline, to the “Very Funny” one. I would think that telling the audience what to think about their product would be a major no no in marketing, but if it didn’t work, they wouldn’t keep these campaigns going, and it shows that I know little-to-nothing about marketing.
In the case of the show Idiot Abroad, one could argue that Ricky Gervais probably needed to clarify that the show was a comedy, as opposed to the serious travelogue one might perceive after reading a brief description of the show. I still find it condescending. I find it condescending in the same manner I find laugh tracks condescending. I know where to laugh, my cynical, rebellious mind responds to laugh tracks. I don’t need to be told where to laugh. and I don’t need to be told what’s funny … because you know funny.
It could also be argued that when a star like Ricky Gervais tells us that something is funny, we apparently listen to him because he is a star. We know that when a star tells us how to vote, we listen. We know that when stars tell us how to live, how to eat, and how to dress, we listen, because we’ve wanted to have people see us agreeing with cool kids since the fifth grade. When these same cool kids happen to be hawking their own products, however, we shouldn’t allow them to have any authority over whether it’s cool, good, or funny. They should, at the very least, be required to hire another star to make such a comment, just to avoid appearing obnoxious. There’s a part of me, a part that always hated the cool kid aesthetic –because I’ve never been a cool kid– that says that not only should this not work, for the cool kids that do it, but that they should be shamed for even trying it.
As I said, I don’t know who tried it first, but I saw the Gervais ad first, and my first reaction was that this must be common in England, the place that treats royalty like superhumans. My next reaction was that this type of shameless self-promotion would never work here, until I heard the American broadcasting company, TBS, do it too, saying that they were “Very funny!” I refused to watch TBS, and Idiot Abroad, for these reasons, until a friend of mine told me that Idiot Abroad was, indeed, funny, and I determined that it was, but it wasn’t the marketing that convinced me of it.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of being real, it was the age of delusional thinking, it was the epoch of honesty, it was the epoch of lies, it was the season of transparency, it was the season of delusions, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were going to achieve, what we had already achieved, what we would never achieve – in short, it was a period of time that needed to exist to rectify a period that may never have existed to the superlative degree of comparison that some of its noisiest authorities defined for the era.
As that paraphrase of Charles Dickens’ epic intro to A Tale of Two Cities suggests, reality TV did not the divide American culture in the manner some purported it would in the age of being real. The doyens and doyennes of our culture asked if reality TV was art imitating life, or if it was reflecting it? Others suggested reality TV represented such a small sample of the culture that the shows’ producers projected it out into the society as a measure of realness that wasn’t real to the superlative degree they portrayed? Others wondered if the culture used reality TV for what it was and dispensed of it in manner similar to the way a body puts out byproducts it can’t use? Some people I knew, very real and intelligent people, acknowledged that while reality TV focused on a sample of a society none of us knew that didn’t mean it wasn’t real.
“Lars and The Real Girl”
How many times in one episode did an actor say, “Hey, I’m just being real with ya” to assuage the guilt they might otherwise have while insulting another person? How many times did these show participants gain a certain degree of realness on the back of another? How many times was being real used as a confrontational device to belittle those who were less real, until the real proponent managed to gain some real definition on them?
Being real, in such instances, was nothing more than a cudgel used to diminish a person who wasn’t like the speaker. They used this device to make the unreal more like the real, and the viewer at home was supposed to accept all that as real thinking, if they ever hoped to gain real stature in the real world. Most of us now reflect back on the being real era, and see it as an intellectually dishonest era, designed to promote the position of the proselytizing speakers.
Those of us who thought the age of being real was anything but, couldn’t deny the influence it had on the culture in general, and our friends and family. Otherwise kind and polite individuals who wouldn’t say an unkind word about anyone yesterday, started lobbing verbal grenades at us. “Hey,” we would say.
“I’m just being real with ya,” they would respond. For word watchers in search of colloquialisms, it was mandatory for real people to use the less formal incarnation of the word you as a literary device to gain familiarity with the subject of their insults.
“Why did you say that? That was not very nice.”
“We can do that now, in this era of being real.”
No one said that latter line, of course, but that was the import of the discussion. It didn’t happen in a day, and it didn’t happen this way, but friends and family felt they could say anything they wanted in this era, and they didn’t need to bother being conscientious, if they were just being real with ya.
Those of us who experienced this era and studied it for what it was, learned it was based on the false premise that one could be real with ya without undergoing any substantive reflection of their own. Even those who may have watched a total of one hour of the more sophomoric shows of reality TV, could not escape its influence.
We thought the era of white lies were over. Even if being real had nothing more than a conjugal relationship with brutal honesty, and some of us used the nuggets of that message to put more brutal honesty in our presentation, regardless if anyone thought we were being real or not. In any repeated message of this type, there is a personal takeaway for some. Most of us didn’t believe the real characters in reality shows were being real, in other words, but the presentation affected us nonetheless. We changed our presentation to one that could be called brutal honesty, in regards to how we thought we should be perceived, and we encountered a number of surprising reactions.
The most surprising reaction we received was no reaction. We would detail our weaknesses for our audience and our trials and tribulations, and they would not say anything. We would finish our testimonial, and if someone didn’t say something to change the subject, the lunchroom table would go through a seven-second lull. Our audience presumably took it in stride, because they thought they were as honest with themselves as we purported to be. They lived with the idea that they were so honest that most people couldn’t handle their special brand of honesty. It didn’t dawn on them, however, that that interpretation of brutal honesty was limited to assessing others. Very few have the wherewithal to evaluate themselves honestly, and their particular brand of being real incorporated many of the elements the dictionary uses to define the word delusional. Those who attempt to help them be more real learn that it’s pointless, because the subject will attempt to be more real than you, with you, until the discussion devolves to something equivalent to the type of gunfight banter Hollywood writes into scripts to provide a tense setting for paragraphs of exposition.
Those who have never made a concerted effort to be honest about themselves, might expect that being harshly critical of one’s self to be somewhat influential. The expectation I had was that others might “raise their game” in this regard, to be more honest. They didn’t, because, again, real people already think they are brutally honest.
Another surprising, and somewhat depressing, reaction to displaying brutal honesty, in the age of being real, was that our friends began to think less of us. In any other era, it might make sense to consider a person who provides us a laundry list of weaknesses a weak person. In the era of being real, we might fall prey to the belief that our friends and family might consider such brutal honesty refreshing, and that they might consider that moment the perfect time to be just as honest in return. No such luck. What often happens is that they join in on the discussion and add other weaknesses that the brutally honest person neglected to include.
“How do you think you’d do in jail?” A Delusional Person asks Frank.
“Not well,” Frank replies with refreshing, brutal honesty.
When Frank provides a laundry list for why he probably wouldn’t do well in jail, the Delusional Person might laugh, because being this honest can be humorous when the recipient is allowed to bathe in the weaknesses of its purveyor. The Delusional Person will often agree with Frank’s frank assessment of himself, but they won’t assess themselves by the same measure.
“How do you think you would do?” Frank returns.
“I think I’d do all right,” the Delusional Person replies.
Even in the age of being real, most people fell prey to the idealized images they have of themselves. One of the more effective measures weight loss programs will employ are progress charting photos. They ask their clients to do this, because we can look in the mirror every day and fail to see our progress or regressions. We need a somewhat distant perspective to truly evaluate ourselves, and the same holds true with conversational scenarios such these.
Most of us live with idealized images of ourselves, as if they happened yesterday for the rest of our lives. This particular Delusional Person was a championship-level wrestler in his teenage years. While on the wrestling team, he endured exhaustive workouts, and exercised levels of self-discipline, that most non-athletes will never know. This resulted in The Delusional Person being a finely crafted specimen who at that time may, indeed, have been capable of handling the hand-to-hand combat situations reported to occur within the confines of a cell block. When he answered Frank’s question, the Delusional Person remembered himself as finely tuned wrestler who won championships. The idea that lifted a weight or sprinted in fifteen years didn’t enter into his equation. A more brutally honest assessment of his stay in prison should have been, “I don’t know how I would so in jail, but I suspect that all of the years I’ve spent sitting behind a computer, and avoiding physical activity, would be exposed early on.”
We all picture ourselves in peak physical condition when we listen to others speak about how they have let themselves go. We laugh when others joke about those who have gained weight, conveniently forgetting that we just graduated to a thirty-six inch waist pair of pants last week. We’ll do this when we speak about the people we grew up with who “now look so old”, even though we’re now using hair-dye, wrinkle cream, and supplements to fight the aging process. We aren’t lying when we do this either, we’re projecting an idyllic image of ourselves into these scenarios that used to be able to lay out an entire prison yard when we were called upon to do so … in the movies.
Another surprising, and somewhat depressing, reaction I encountered was a kind, polite person who had no interest in being real, adding brutal honesty to my brutally honest presentation.
“Are you sure that you’re capable of that?” she asked after I informed her that I threw my hat in the ring for a promotion that had everyone abuzz. The surprising element of this question was not that she asked it, for it could be said that she was looking out for me in her own way, but that she never asked that question of any of our other co-workers. With them, she expressed in what we could call a Hallmark card-style response to their desire to advance within the company. “Good luck!” she would say to them, or “I know you can do it.” She may have said those words to be polite, but she wasn’t polite with me.
She asked me to reconsider whether I might be qualified. I told her that I had as many, if not more, qualifications than some of the others who applied for it. I assumed her question was borne of jealousy, but I didn’t say that. After processing her warning, I acknowledged that she was kind person, and I realized that her concerns were simple reactions to my presentations of brutal honesty. She didn’t want me to get hurt by the realities of my limits, limits that I had expressed in the course of being honest about my vulnerabilities, and she was just reacting to what I told her over the years.
Yet, people like my sweet, polite friend can inadvertently assist those striving for brutal honesty into a depressing state of their reality. The honest assessor realizes, about halfway down the spiral, that they’re doing this to themselves, and that they’re becoming too honest. Their friends aren’t helping, but their friends are just reacting to what they’ve heard us say, and they’re regurgitating our harsh and brutal opinions of us to us. Our friends are, in fact, greasing the skids to a form of depression. An honest assessor realizes, about halfway down this spiral, that they’ve become so realistic in their assessments that they’ve become brutally realistic.
We might start avoiding attempts to advance ourselves, because we’ve become so realistic in our abilities that we’re now asking ourselves so many brutally honest questions that we’re afraid to try and advance. As a result of such thorough examination, we’ve also become so realistic that we don’t think it’s realistic for any honest assessor to succeed. These could be called minor setbacks in the grand scheme of becoming more honest with one’s self, until we begin to see the Delusional People around us –some with half of our talent– begin to succeed beyond us. These Delusional People may even know that they’re lying to themselves, on some level, but they’re harmless little, white lies that everyone tells themselves in the quest for advancement, and if you can get all of them to add up just right, they may become a reality that no one can deny.
When the company selected Molly for this promotion, the confusion it created was almost painful. It wasn’t Armageddon, and no one was harmed by the company’s decision, but the aftermath of this tragedy left a proverbial wasteland of confusion. Those who devoted a large portion of their lives to this company felt that it could only be outweighed by familial or personal tragedies. The world moves on after political disasters, and religious hypocrisies can be overcome through personal devotion, but a seismic disaster on par with a person of Molly’s character, and work ethic, landing a top gig in their company can lead to reverberations that are felt throughout a person’s life. The company is where most people live most often. It’s a better indicator of how they’re living, as it’s the place where most people devote most of their resources. When matters in the workplace take a divergent path, different from all of the scenarios workers list in their head, it can lead to a company wide crisis.
“Part of an interview involves salesmanship,” those in the know tell the employees gathered in a team meeting, and that assessment was to remain within those closed doors, as off the record comments. This assessment was a “wink and a nod” attempt to assuage the confusion building around what many considered an absolute travesty.
Those who have been in similar situations know the term “new reality”, as it becomes the theme of the many presentations that follow. If those in the know do comment on such a situation, they will say something along the lines of “You should be happy for Molly”. This leaves the suggestion that most of the confused, are confused about her promotion as a result of personal animus.
“We wouldn’t have a problem if Marsha, Kelly, or Dan received this promotion,” one person argued to reflect the general sentiment of the aggrieved, “but if Molly has any moral fiber, or conscience, she won’t be able to sleep at night.” No one cares. Molly has scoreboard. It’s the new reality. Deal with it.
Amid the personal and professional confusion, one honest assessor, from the out of the loop sector, stepped forth and professed the harsh reality of the situation: “Molly simply fed into the leadership mystique of her superiors better than us.
“When we were concerned themselves with learning the inner machinations of the company’s system in a proficient manner they hoped might impress their superiors,“ the honest assessor added, “Molly was purchasing gift baskets for her bosses on boss day. When others were out volunteering for special projects to pad their resumé, and working untold amounts of overtime to put a smile on their bosses’ faces, Molly was at the bosses’ lunch tables laughing at their jokes, and when all of the applicants were drilling the interviewer with the bullet points of their resumé, Molly was feeding into whatever mystique they wanted to gain in that particular setting. This was Molly’s primary skill set.“
It was a bow atop the corporate basket of lies given to bosses, on boss day, in the age of being real. In the age of being real, employees began to demand more recognition for their accomplishments, and management responded, but in the end the employees realized that it was all part of a scripted, choreographed, and edited production designed to pacify their audience by mentioning their name in the credits that rolled out at the end of the day. When crunch time came, however, it was the Delusional People who had learned how to feed the mystique of those in the know that left everyone else feeling malnourished.
“Those who live in a dishonest manner will eventually get theirs,” our nuns told us in grade school. They also told us that, “Truth has a way of prevailing”. The company eventually discovered what everyone knew at the time, Molly was eventually discovered to be “not a good fit” for the position, but she was promoted up and out of the position, and out of the department, and the person who replaced her was yet another mystique feeder.
Those of us who lived and breathed corporate America heard all the stories about evil corporations, but we knew our corporate leadership board. They weren’t faceless corporate entities. They were people named Jeff and Sandy, and all the others who had kids and cats. We had one boss who was learning how to ride a motorcycle, and she drove one of her friend’s beloved Harleys into the ground, and it wasn’t funny, but it was. She was a real life, flawed individual who wasn’t afraid to show us her scars, literal and otherwise. When they speak in our corporate meetings, and our one on ones, we learn a little bit about their essence. We learned how they took their coffee, and what shows they went home to watch, and it all seemed so real, until they selected Molly for a big promotion.
We were all temporarily and permanently disillusioned. We thought our corporation was different, and that they hired and fired, and promoted and handed out raises based on merit. We believed that our corporation did not rise and fall based on the whims of faceless corporate entities. Ours was a real corporation comprised of people who knew us as well as we did them. We weren’t so delusion that we thought Jeff and Sandy knew us, but we thought some knowledge of our essence ascended from our bosses through the spider web, hierarchy, until we felt our efforts were recognized.
The problem –those naïve enough to believe in the age of being real– discovered was not with Molly, but that Molly was emblematic of the problems inherent in a system that honest people once believed would find a way to provide rewards to those honest, hard working people who put their nose to the grindstone. The problem that seemed so complex to those of us who tried to wrestle with it, turned out to be so simple. The problem was that the various Jeffs and Sandys who controlled the spigots of reward for the hard working women and men in our company were humans themselves, and humans are inherently susceptible to flattery.
The nuns also provided their grade school students the proviso that if you’re living the honest life with the expectation of eventually receiving concretized recognition for it, you’re doing it for all the wrong reasons. We knew they were preaching gospel when they said this. Even if we didn’t know the depth of their statement, or how it might apply over time, some part of us knew that the rewards of living the honest life involve intangible, internal, and spiritual rewards. When the Delusional People begin to beat us to the more tangible goals in life, however, even the most honest assessors in a group will admit that it is difficult to avoid being affected by it, if they are being real with you.
Casinos want to help you find ways to help you part ways with more of your money. They will spare no expense to accomplish this. Some would go so far to say that anytime that a person steps into a modern day casino, they’re stepping into the finished product of think tanks, and well-paid psychological studies. These casinos want to create an exciting, yet soothing experience that distracts the gambler from the levels of stress they might normally associate with losing all of their money, but there is no psychological tactic more endemic to the ultimate success of a modern casino than the psychological manipulations of expectations.
“We’ll always have Paris.”
Some think the slot machine is a game of chance, and it is, but long gone are the days of pure chance. Technology permits casinos to manipulate the slot machine now that it is no longer a game of pure chance. The breakdown between pure games of chance and technological manipulation of the games is a long and intricate explanation that is loaded with jargon and terminology that is available to interested parties. The gist of this breakdown is that various legislative bodies were required to step in and regulate the industries so casinos don’t make too much of your money.
One vital ingredient the think tanks and psychological studies submitted to casinos creating was that the most successful slot machines the expectation of winning can be more powerful than the psychological thrill of actually winning. When a player sees a triple bar drop into the first slot, only to be followed by another triple bar, that brief moment of expectation has been determined to provide the player a psychological boost that gives an incentive to keep playing more than the reality that would occur if that third slot were filled with another third triple bar.
When that king eventually drops, with strategic slowness, into that third slot, we’re disappointed when we look up at the menu list of winnings atop the slot machine and realize we’ve actually won nothing, but the thrill that occurred before that third slot was filled, and the idea that we came so close is more powerful, and more conducive to us continuing on that machine, than winning would actually be. Without drawing on that exact scenario, Rosecrans Baldwin, author of the book Paris, I Love You, but You’re Bringing me Down, suggests that this powerful thrill of expectation drives vacation plans to a place some call the capital of love Paris, France.
Paris has been called the capital of love for as long as most of us have been alive. Paris is the setting of some of the most famous, romantic movies, books, and songs. Many people we know list visiting Paris on their bucket list. If, for no other reason, than to find out what everyone is going on about. There’s an air of mystery about the city that we all need to experience for ourselves. As is normally the case, the narrative, and the expectation derived from that narrative, is much more powerful than the reality. Some, who have vacationed in Paris, are often so distressed by the reality of what they experience that it can cause a psychological disorder called The Paris Syndrome.
“Japanese visitors are particularly susceptible to this,” writes Rosecrans Baldwin. “This is possibly due to the uber-romantic image that Paris holds for the Japanese.” This can get so bad, for some Japanese travelers, Baldwin writes, that “The Japanese embassy used to repatriate sufferers of The Paris Syndrome with a doctor or nurse aboard the plane ride back to Japan.”
NBC News also had a report on this subject that stated that:
“Around a dozen Japanese tourists a year need psychological treatment after visiting Paris as the reality of unfriendly locals and scruffy streets clashes with their expectations, a newspaper reported on Sunday.”
That Sunday newspaper also quoted psychologist Herve Benhamou saying:
“Fragile travelers can lose their bearings. When the idea they have of (a place like Paris) meets the reality of what they discover, it can provoke a crisis.”
Bernard Delage, from an association called Jeunes Japon, that helps Japanese families settle in France, is also quoted as saying:
“In Japanese shops, the customer is king, whereas (in places like Paris) assistants hardly look at them … People using public transport all look stern, and handbag snatchers increase the ill feeling.”
A Japanese woman, Aimi, who had some experience with this disorder, told the paper:
“For us, Paris is a dream city. All the French are beautiful and elegant … And then, when they arrive, the Japanese find the French character is the complete opposite of their own.” {1}
After deciding to take up residence in Paris, author Rosecrans Baldwin found that:
“Smiling is discouraged for Parisians posing for documentation like Metro passes or tennis-court permits.”
Most citizens, the world around, can identify with this procedure. We’ve all had experience with employees in legal departments, and DMVs, telling us that smiling is discouraged when posing for head shots that will appear in legal documentation. It’s not illegal to smile in those situations, just as it, presumably, is not illegal to smile when posing for Parisian documentation head shots, but it may have something to do with the idea that smiling changes our appearance a bit, and for official documentation, a smile might make a photo appear less official. With regards to this practice in Paris, writes Baldwin:
“The discouragement of smiling for various legal documents gets to an elemental fact about living in France’s capital. That for a madly sentimental and Japanese tourist, visiting Paris is mostly about light, beauty, and fun with berets. Living in Paris is different. Living in Paris is business, and nothing to smile about.”{2}
Though this particular Paris Syndrome is obviously indigenous to Paris, the tenets of it could just as easily be applied to any popular tourist destination the world around. Midwestern Americans, for example, live under a similar “customer is king” mentality, and they have for so long that they begin to take it for granted. Midwest Americans know that the hotels and restaurants of their locale, are so competitive that they won’t tolerate even an ambivalent employee. Those of us who have worked in the service industry know that customer service is paramount. We’re trained to believe that one dissatisfied customer tells ten people, and those ten people tell ten other people, until it could damage the reputation of business for which we are employed. Customer service trainers in the Midwest, suggest that those who do not offer customers a pleasing smile, or a pleasant disposition, in the Midwest, will be confined to backroom work. There are exceptions to the rule of course, but most people who travel to the Midwest, are shocked by the Midwestern hospitality.
“We expected it from you guys,” a hotel resident once said of the hospitality she experienced from Midwestern hotel employees. “You’re paid to be pleasant, but wandering around your city, we’ve discovered that you’re all like this,” she said as if she believed she had stepped into some alternate universe. “You’re all so nice.”
Thus, when a Midwesterner grows accustomed to their locale’s common pleasantries —like the Japanese traveler, traveling to Paris— travels to preferred travel destinations, they are shocked by the contradictions they encounter on their vacation. They probably assume that the top-notch customer service they’ve come to expect would be a given in their chosen destination, if not amplified with the kind of money they’re spending. They probably consider it such a given that they focused most of their attention on the other aspects of their dream vacation. Once they’ve come to terms with the reality of the situation, they’re so shocked that not only is their dream vacation ruined, but some become physically ill as a result.
This degree of ambivalence, directed at tourists, in some popular tourist locations, can occur in some of the first steps tourists make from the airplane to the terminal. Those wondering why this happens, should ask themselves what they thought of the thirty-second ant they watched leave an anthill. If they confess that they didn’t take the time to pick that ant out, and that they didn’t spend more than two seconds looking at that ant, they may expound upon the idea that seeing ants leave an anthill is such a common experience that they don’t even look at ant hills anymore, such is the plight of the service industry worker watching tourists disembark at popular tourist destinations.
You’re not an ant, you say? You’re a human being, and you’re not just any human being, you’re a human being with money to spend, money that helps pays the wages of service industry employees. The problem is that you’re probably not the thirty-second tourist that service industry worker has seen disembark that day, or even the 132nd. By the time you’ve stepped up to their counter, they’re probably so burnt out on tourists, that the tourist becomes a lower life form than the ant. At least ants are self-sufficient, they might say, and ants don’t complain about their lot in life, and they don’t live with the mindset that their existence should somehow be catered to in a manner that makes the ant feel special. Ants know their role, and on a less conscious level, they know their station in life. The harmony in that ant universe works so well that most service industry workers, in popular tourist destinations, probably believe that tourists could learn a lot from ants.
Some tourists are objective enough to acknowledge that poor service industry employees exist everywhere, even in their small town, yokel community, and they try to view this one ambivalent-to-hostile employee in that light. They also try to view their one bad experience, with this one ambivalent-to-hostile employee, as an aberration, so that they can go about enjoying the rest of their trip. Some Midwestern tourists also attempt to reconcile their indignation by convincing themselves of the fact that they’re small town yokels, unfamiliar with the ways of the big city, but they can’t shake the idea that their appearance should be considered somewhat special by these employees.
Before long the tourist comes to the realization that every counter the tourist approaches has ten special tourists looking to have a special time behind them in line, and those tourists just want the special transaction in front of them to end, so they can finally get to the front of the line, to finish their transaction and get back to the craps table.
That “customer is king” mentality that these tourists live with is usually gone within hours, and the pattern of how things are done in this popular tourist destination becomes so apparent that by the time the tourist reaches the employee that dutifully hands them change without smiling, or even looking at them, and possibly trying to shortchange them, they’ve come to terms with the fact that those first few rude service industry employees were not, in fact, aberrations. Those who do not recognize these patterns think that if they were that thirty-second ant, they might have a better chance of receiving more courteous treatment, if for no other reason than the idea that they might be considered something different from the lowest form of life on earth that service industry employees have deal with hour after hour, day after day: tourists.
Time; personal experiences published in online, travel forums; stories about mafia versus corporate ownership of Vegas; tales of prostitution and pickpockets; and the unsettling, almost weekly, appearances on the show Cops have done some damage to the mystique of Las Vegas, but the mystique of Paris has not undergone such storms.
Living in Paris, Rosecrans Baldwin writes, does do some damage to that mystique however. Those who believe that Paris is the home of cutting edge artistic exploration are not wrong, in the greater sense, but they also have to explain how Britney Spears’ song Toxic, remains a staple of Parisian parties years after its release. Those who believe Parisians have analytical palates far superior to the American one, have to explain Paris’s culinary fascination with the food from a chain of American restaurants called McDonald’s. These quirks may be no different than any popular travel destination around the globe, but it takes traveling to the destination, and living there, to find all this out.
“I enjoy the French Roast flavor,” I tell friends, “but I know that the term French Roast simply means robust. I have no illusions that the beans I use have actually spent any time in France. I know that some Americans make attachments to the term French in the same manner some French make American attachments to the food of McDonald’s, but I’m not so silly that I believe that the French Roast bean I enjoy is anything less than an Americanized version of this robust bean, but” and here’s where the wrinkle will form on the nose of the listener, “I actually prefer this Americanized version.”
That wrinkle will form on the nose of our fellow Americans, because most of those blessed with analytical palates believe that that ‘A’ word, Americanized, should never be used in conjunction with the exotic flavorings of the products that they deign worthy of purchase. Their use of the word French entails exotic styling in the chain of production, transportation, that might involve some slow crossing of the Seine River on some French version of a Gondola before being docked in an elegant port with a beautiful French name that we cannot pronounce, and that those individual workers involved in the chain of production might have, at one point, sang a French sea chantey in striped shirts and handlebar mustaches. Those who wrinkle their nose believe that they are able to sniff out any ‘A’ word that may have wormed its way into the process that ended with them purchasing a French Roast product.
When one reads the descriptions from those who have actually walked the streets of Paris, and dined in her cafes, and tasted the true French Roasted bean, they learn that those cafés actually use old, over-roasted beans, and second-rate machines. We read that Parisians so prefer the robust flavoring that we term French Roasted, that their cafés actually use a low-cost, low quality bean to please their customer base. This actual un-Americanized, French Roasted bean would leave the unsuspecting, and truly analytical palates, with a thin and harsh taste in their mouth.
Paris is not about the taste of the coffee, some might argue, and no trip to Las Vegas should be ruined by the fact that a towel boy didn’t smile at us and welcome us to his city sufficiently. All of these complaints seem so trivial, and inconsequential, in lieu of everything these two, popular travel destinations have to offer. Taken one by one, these complaints may seem trivial, and inconsequential, but when a romanticized, excited traveler sits down to complete their dream of having a lunch in an elegant, little Parisian café, only to have an ambivalent-to-rude waiter deliver a cup of coffee that is so shockingly –and perhaps to them insultingly– inferior, that might only be one cup of coffee, and one waiter to the rest of us, but it might also be only one incident in a series of incidents, that leads to a pattern of behavior that shatters all of the illusions and dreams the starry eyed tourist may have had about that vacation they saved for so long for, that their country finds it necessary to have a doctor, or nurse, on board the plane home to help them deal with the fact that so many of their expectations, and so much of what they once believed in, were wrong.
“It’s funny!” just wouldn’t seem, to me, to be a campaign built for the long haul. This simplistic approach might generate some traffic in the short term, but I would think that a true, funny designation would have to be earned over time through meretricious production, and that the obnoxiously over-the-top suggestion that it was funny, would only take me so far. “We’re not even making a suggestion,” I would complain. “We’re making a statement. Isn’t there going to be some backlash to that?”
Rilaly 