That’s good enough, as far as it goes.
But that’s not far enough.
It doesn’t explain why so many of us feel like we’re on the way to lives as soulless bureaucrats.
The notion came to me a couple of weeks back while visiting a Twin Cities Target store.
If you’re a Target attorney or public relations person, put away the anti-anxiety pill and don’t search me out on your smartphone. I’m not coming after you.
I was actually on the side of the guy who was wearing the target on his shirt – the poor guy waiting the counter.
It’s not that he was a sympathetic figure.
His answer to the customer wasn’t particularly creative.
“Sir, I’m just following company policy,” he told the complaining man.
But they are the exact words I would have used.
Even as he approached the counter, you could tell the customer had a twist in his shorts. It was over whether he was going to get the discount price on a gallon of milk. He’d been promised it twice, and when it didn’t ring up the register, he went for the jugular.
“I’ve had a Target card since 1962,” or some such year, he said.
Soon, the intolerant lactose man demanded to see the manager – and wouldn’t settle for the assistant. And it was clear he wanted to terminate the career of a poor guy who might have been happy to be terminated if he didn’t need the job.
Everyone else in the store knew the discount would be granted as soon as the manager arrived from women’s undergarments, or wherever he was. If the customer would have wanted one, the manager probably would have scared him up a cow.
Even I was willing to pay for the entire gallon of milk just to get him out the door.
That’s why I didn’t blame the guy behind the counter for going turtle, pulling in his legs and head and giving the call so many modern bureaucrats make in captivity: “Sir, I’m just following company policy.”
The truth is that most people facing the public these days are caught between a rock and an economic hard place. The public might like policies that seem to make sense in human terms. But that’s not how they’re determined.
They’re based on models and algorithms figured out buy folks whose main wardrobe accessories are pocket protectors and wouldn’t recognize a customer without being provided the last four digits of a credit card number.
These are the folks have been hired by accountants trying to police bottom lines — accountants who have forwarded the pocket-protector reports to lawyers, who have checked them for company exposure, then forwarded them to public relations experts charged with offering pleasant explanations for the incomprehensible.
Those explanations are available to you via an offshore call center, which will be happy to issue you a small gift card to cover your troubles — an offer you ultimately accept, although it falls short of the prescription relief you need by the time you relent.
It all unfolds like the Abbott and Costello routine Who’s on First, save for it leaves you with a dull ache on the brain rather than in stitches.
Well, look for it to get worse.
The bottom line in this: Most of us have no more understanding of how policies work than the cell phones we use to inquire about them.
And since, by now, all of us have been on both sides of these exchanges, we are apt to give one another a break in the end, when either person in a conversation goes turtle and lets out the call of the modern bureaucrat in captivity.
Now raise your right hand and repeat after me: “Sir, I’m only following company policy.”
About the Author