This week, Dan and John talk about:
- John being back from Hawaii (Hawaii)
- John being able to put a face to the helpless person in his head who is blocking all of his decisions (Personality)
Bonus-content for Patreon supporters:
- Beandad was the best thing that ever happened to John (Beandad)
- John moving into his new house, having a whole box of white suede shoes (New House)
- Dan wanting to live on a sailboat, in a hotel room, in a small apartment, or in a Victorian mansion (Dan Benjamin)
- John not having an ID for a long time, being all in on society or being out (Early Days)
- John’s thrifting hobby being materialism and consumerism, even if it is cheap (Objects)
- Stats about number of non-male listeners sending in emails (Podcasting)
- Feedback about the power outage in Texas (Geography)
- Dan having a hard time finding the right emails (Podcasting)
- Feedback for John planning to read the Bible (Podcasting)
The show title refers to the fact that you can’t be mad anymore at the service economy because big corporations have succeeded to have you interact with subcontractors who are trying to make ends meet.
Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.
John being back from Hawaii (RW216)
John is back on the continent of America. USA! He had promised he would stop flying eye flights because whatever you save, it is just not… forget it! But Alaska Airlines canceled John’s afternoon flight and funneled everybody into this overnighter. John used to sleep on planes, although it is never the best because he is too big for airplanes. He got his little child sleeping on his lap, she went to sleep immediately and slept through the whole flight, but her being in his lap the whole time was not exactly sleep-inducing.
Because it was an Alaska flight there was no in-plane entertainment system and John is not the kind of tech person that brings a device that has any media on it and airplanes don't supply magazines anymore, so he spent most of the 5-hour flight staring at the back of the seat in front of him, thinking deep thoughts.
Hawaii is the same distance as it would be to fly to New York, but out in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by nothing but sharks and you definitely are just on the flight for the duration and if you got engine trouble you have to keep limping along, which is fine. John has always dreamt of going to Hawaii and inviting friends to join him there, like one summer they went back East and visited some friends in Maine for a week or 10 days and then they drove down to Cape Cod and visited some other friends in Cape Cod for a week or 10 days and: ”Oh, since we are back East, let's go visit all of our friends in their various summer locales!”
John has always wanted to reciprocate by saying: ”We are in Hawaii! Everyone come! We will get a big house and everyone can come and stay!”, but to come to Hawaii from anywhere? Seattle is 5 hours away and that is as close a flight as you can find and from New York it is 10 hours and 10 hours from New York you could be in Argentina. There is a world of places. In 5 hours from New York you are in Paris, France, so why would you fly all the way across America and then all the way across America again, just to be in what is arguably the nicest place, but still: It is a long haul!
It is good to be back, it is nice to be in the world. His audio quality is a little better because the wire isn't as long.
John being able to put a face to the helpless person in his head who is blocking all of his decisions (RW216)
John feels now that there is no question that he is both doing good and doing well, relative to any external metric you would apply. He is a creative person who makes a living by his wits, he is in middle age, he has a healthy child and a solid family, he lives in a nice place, and he doesn't suffer from maladies (Knock on wood!). Everyone in his close and extended circle all seem healthy and happy and there is no way to look at his circumstances and his accomplishments and say anything other than: ”Well done!” John is doing well, but it is possible to do well and not feel well, to do good and not feel good. Curiously, doing well does not necessarily make you feel well.
John feeling like he is always guilty of everything
John experienced this the first time in the 1990s when after most of his late teens and 20s he was in arguably unwell. He was on drugs for a long period of that and after he got off of them he was very poor and struggling. creatively he didn't put the rubber to the road, he was making stuff, but wasn't putting stuff out into the world, it was just filling up spiral bound notebooks, but at a certain point in his late 20s things started to click into place and he had stability in his life, he had a job, he had a girlfriend, he had an apartment, and then he had a band.
When those things lined up by the age of 28 John had all the pieces that at the age of 22 he hadn't been able to put any of those things together. He couldn't manage to have an apartment or a girlfriend or a job, certainly not a band. Those were his dreams and by 28 he had them and looking at it from the outside he had a pretty cool apartment and a super-cool girlfriend and a pretty cool job and a cool band that at that point started to attract attention. It wasn't just that he had achieved the minimum standard of those things. A lot of people would say an apartment and a job is not much of an accomplishment, it is just the regular things, but for John it felt like an accomplishment because the job was one that suited him, the apartment suited him, the girlfriend suited him and his band did.
But it was not what he thought would happen, which was that getting all those things would would fulfill him and whatever that thousand-yard-stare that he had, whatever that feeling of restlessness and discontent, but also just dread that those things were situational and that was a big surprise and disappointment at the age of 28/29, having planted this small constellation of flags on his way to the Antarctic pole of of joy, that he didn't feel like he had made any progress at all.
John’s dream of being in a field of flowers
One time on a sunny day, a month and a half after he got sober, he was walking down Olive Street in Seattle, and he felt like in a Terry Gilliam animation where light shone down upon him, breaking through the clouds. He thought: ”There is a version of Me, an intrinsic Me, a corporeal Me, a child brought into the world, that could have been raised in 1000 different environments!” He could have been raised in Mumbai, he could have been raised across the street from the house where he was raised by those people, but there was an intrinsic Me.
At that point he was used to thinking of himself entirely in terms of who he came from, what his environment was, how he had been raised, who his people were, and that those things were the things that made him who he was, and like anyone he sat around plenty of cafes debating nature versus nurture, but he had never applied that idea to himself, that there is an intrinsic Me. Who would that person have been?
John had a crazy vision that felt almost like a dream sequence in a SciFi movie where he could see himself in an open meadow of flowers and the light was golden and he was running through the flowers and he wondered if that dream was implanted in him by whatever science organization has raised him to believe he was human?
He was at some level guiltless. At some level he was innocent and he had never felt a moment of innocence in his life. There had never been a time when he didn't think of himself as guilty of some infraction, and ultimately some crime, some culpability in larger crimes.,The crime of why he couldn't make everyone happy, the crime of why he couldn't solve the problems of the world. There was an innocent Me that he had no contact with, no relationship with, and here he was walking down the street, a month and a half sober, wondering what to do next.
This lightning bolt helped me because for a while at least he was able to picture that dream, that field of flowers, whatever that implanted memory of of piano lessons, to forgive himself a little bit, at least temporarily, like a hall pass or something, that he could briefly allow that he wasn't necessarily guilty of everything. But although he can still picture that dream sequence, he lost touch with the power of that feeling and the experience of in his 20s and early 30s getting everything he wanted and finding that it did almost nothing to absolve him of the guilt he felt.
John’s character being independent from his upbringing
It was not just little guilt, but he felt complicity and feel in the flaws of the world, the original sin, whatever that is, however that got into him. Raising a child and realizing that his daughter was who she is when she was 10 months old, her personality was fully formed, caused him to reflect back on that innocent child in a field of flowers and realize that if that were his daughter she would be bossing those flowers around and telling them which princess they were and that is not a product of how she was raised, and in that sense there was never innocence there.
She was who she was, and if John had been taken out of his life and put into a different one, raised by a benevolent hand, raised by Jodie Foster's imaginary father that she discovers when her spaceship falls through a time hole and Matthew McConaughey goes: ”All right, all right, all right!” John did not watch that movie recently, all Matthew McConaughey movies drive him absolutely insane and although he is not a believable scientist in Interstellar they doubled down on him being a believable scientist and he is just not one. Stop making him a scientist or a priest or whatever the hell he was in that movie! He is a surfer, bro or maybe a stoned cop. Don't make him an intellectual!
Maybe that feeling of culpability, that original sin, was in John from the dawn and he is meant to perform that role in the world. It didn't matter who raised him, it didn't matter what culture he came up in, and if he had been raised in Mumbai he would still be that person because the world makes babies that it needs and the world makes a lot of babies that it doesn't need because it is trying to make the perfect baby or it is trying to make babies to fill baby- shaped holes and whatever the day it was that John came down the assembly line he was slotted to be this baby.
John has suffered his whole life from that feeling of never having found his baby shaped hole and feeling culpability for things that he didn't even understand. He certainly didn't understand the borders of the things that he was complicit in and he didn't even understand the matter. Trying to navigate that and find something he can do and find something he can do outside of himself so he is not just trying to alleviate his own suffering, but he is trying to find meaningful work that fulfills his programing.
John’s sister telling him to forgive his inner voice
John was having a conversation with his sister the other day and he talked about the parliament of voices in his head and the fact that he is able to give characterization at least to the louder ones. He is able to put mustaches on some of them and to say: ”I know you! You appear all the time and I recognize your voice. Although I have not spent enough time with my Vipassana app to be able to silence you or ignore you or even hear you and be unaffected, I at least know that you are you and not necessarily me!”
John was trying to explain to his sister that there are times in his life, usually around what a lot of people would consider pretty easy decision making, decisions to choose between the green and the blue where it doesn't matter, where he often feels a paralysis that is real and affects the quality of his life in a big way. He was trying to identify what that was and why that voice, although a very passive and ultimately helpless voice, should in those moments become the deciding voice, even though there are all these Brigadiers marching around in his head and there is a Hindenburg in there, smacking is riding crop down on the conference table, but somehow this helpless child is able to steer the ship of state right up on the shoals. Why is that?
All of a sudden he gave shape to this helplessness that is in him and he could see it as a as a person, not a child but a grown up! He pictured this this person as a very clean-cut preppy 27 year old up against a prison wall, like on the cover of Band on the Run (album by Paul McCartney and Wings), except all by himself, caught in the spotlight of a prison tower, standing there against the wall, unsure in which direction to run, like a deer in the headlights and that character is John in those moments: Frozen in the spotlight, just waiting for the bullet.
John’s sister is a guru and over the years he has resisted her woo-guru take on things, but she was just talking to him while he was quietly picturing this helpless person, and she was saying: ”Every time you have one of these experiences, although the situation is different and it is a completely different story and you are telling yourself that the conditions in this situation are unmanageable and this is why you can't come to a conclusion, every time it is actually the same exact situation and you are just recapitulating it across every aspect of your life, you become helpless in relationships, you become helpless in business, you become helpless in matters of the spirit, and somehow something puts you against that wall in that spotlight, waiting for that bullet, and whatever that is, that is the thing that you need to discover. It is not solving any one of the small problems that put you there. It is the thing. Why do you keep going? Whoever that helpless person is, you need to forgive that person.
John became enraged at the idea that he would have any compassion for this weak-willed, helpless bastard who has put him in these situations over the course of his life, his face contorted, he was actively furious, not just at his sister suggesting that he needed to forgive this person, but actually the person, this person that he is conjuring, that lives inside his head alongside all these other time bandits that live up there. He had found the one that he hated the most, the helpless one, and he could not and cannot find anything sympathetic about the person to allow him to begin any kind of process of understanding or forgiving that helplessness.
Coming back from Hawaii
All of the worst moments in John life had this person at the helm, all the moments where decisiveness would have protected him and would have set him on a different course and made him feel that life would have been a lot easier, dating back to the decisiveness of: ”Kiss her, you fool!” and then the helpless person against the wall was: ”What? No!”, waiting for the bullet. Then she gets up off the couch and goes: ”Well…” and walks away. From this all the way up to every aspect of life he at some point made an appearance, often under the cover of a small decision, but ultimately by failing to act everything else stacks up behind and as often as not the project goes off the rails.
Coming back from Hawaii to that waiting Telenovela happening inside his head, the worst telenovela because there aren't any women, it is just a dozen guys with fake noses standing around a conference table, the worst television show you ever saw, arriving at this point in the story is a product of going to Hawaii and recognizing that even if he didn’t get that much time there to reflect, which he didn't this time, he spent a lot of time playing charades at his daughter's instruction and not very much time walking along the beach and staring out at the ocean and asking the whales the big questions.
But John does feel like it is a product of having been to Hawaii and the work that he tries to do there, a global reset every winter, he doesn’t make resolutions on New Year's Eve, but he does hope at some point in February to walk on one of those sandy beaches and unravel the next little rat's nest of yarn.
John letting the cable guy install the router in his daughter’s bedroom
Yesterday the cable guy came to install Internet at John’s new house, one of the most important utilities. Once you get electricity and the water running you need to get that Internet going because not having Internet you are not really living. This was a watershed moment, a big milestone. Internet is now at the house, and with Internet things can truly start to transfer. John could be doing this show from his house today and the only reason he is not is that he only got Internet yesterday and he hasn’t moved any of the wires.
He was there, waiting for the Internet guy. He was a 27 year old from Belarus who emigrated to the United States and really wanted to be a landscape architect, but people mostly just wanted him to move rocks around their yard. To be a landscape architect is to be a big dreamer, but to practice landscape architecture, often you find that you are just a landscaper, which is not what any landscape architect wants, so he ended up getting a job in IT and then he got laid off because of COVID and now he is a contractor for Comcast, driving around in his own Volvo with a sticker on the door, trying to hustle and install Internet in 10 houses a day so that he can pay for health insurance for his wife and himself.
John told him he wanted it to go down the side of the house here, go into a hole that he was going to drill right here down into the basement, there is where he wanted the router to go, and then he wanted to run another line of coax up through the rafter and over here, and the ceilings are down, so it shouldn't be a problem, and we are going to go through this wall because the bomb shelter has three foot thick concrete walls and there is no way Internet can penetrate, so we need to have a hard wire go into that room.
The guy was listening to John, nodding, and as John was done he said in his very charming Belarusian accent: ”I can't do any of that, I am just here to put the Internet into the first wall that I find, which is this wall I am standing in front of, and on the other side of this wall, I will put a router!”, pointing at the wall where the Internet used to go in, he could see the hole, and he is like: ”He is going to go in that hole and on the other side there is going to be a router and then I am going to leave because I have 11 more appointments today!”
”Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You have to have a much larger drill than that one that you have, and we are going to go down into the basement, we are going to put the router over here and then we are going to run a line…” - ”No, I can't do any of that. I mean, honestly, I can't! If you want that all done, you have to hire an electrician and the electrician will run coax under your bathroom floor if that is what you want, but I am just here to run cable in the wall right here where we are standing and it is going to be right on the other side.”
John said: ”That is my daughter's bedroom, I don't want a freaking router in there!” - ”Well, that is all I can do!” and they stood there and that helplessness, that person was suddenly up against the wall again. ”This isn't how I want it. I had a plan! It was an elegant plan! I am basing the whole idea of how I am going to use Internet in this house on the idea that this goes there and that goes there and that goes there, and you are telling me that not only do they not go there and there and there, but they do go here, a place that I decidedly do not want!”
John’s guy was up against the wall and the instinct of that guy up against the wall was to do a thing that John has done 1000 times, which is to say: ”Okay, you are not the guy for this and today is not the day, so thank you for coming and have a nice day and I will call Comcast again one day when you guys figure out how to give people what they want!” and what usually happens in that situation is that the installer shrugs and goes: ”All right, whatever, give us a call! You wasted my time, but anyway!”
He would get in his car and drive away and then John would nurse a resentment against Comcast for between 1-50 years, but the real result is that he would not have Internet in his house for weeks or months because he would have eliminated the possibility that this guy or Comcast or that any of those directions were a solution and he would have now on a list of todos that he needed to hire an electrician and get them to put coax to all these different places and he would have paralyzed himself because he had a plan and the world did not acknowledge or respect his plan and did not make any allowance for accomplishing it.
John had sympathy for this kid, he was hustling, he is a Belorussian who doesn't have health insurance and he is trying to get as many of these done and every other person in the world is so freaking simple. The guy puts the router in the child's bedroom and the people at the house go: ”That is where the router lives! Let's cover it with a with a Kleenex box or something!” and John was: ”No, unacceptable! Impossible even!”
John was sitting there, thinking about the conversation with his sister, visualizing this completely unsympathetic, hateful, helpless, pathetic complainer while the Belorussian kid was looking at him over his COVID mask and John was looking at him over his COVID mask and said: ”Okay, just put it in the place!” and after a moment it was done and he said: ”You got great Internet now. Look at all the lights! I gave you the good router! This is better than the other router! I gave you the top router!” - ”Sure you did, the top router. Wow! I got one hundred million billion Kabilobytes. I can stream Marvel Comics!”
They virtually shook hands and he got in his Volvo and drove off and now John got a router in his daughter's bedroom and that is not what he wanted, but it is there. John can still hire an electrician and run coax all those different places, but that electrician would be working with an actual Internet service and he would then hook that router up to where John wanted it and not just run coax from here to there without knowing why.
The entire reason John was able to do that was that he had just given a face to that helpless person the day before and he could picture them very clearly and he could hear his sister's voice saying: ”It is a different situation every time, but it is the same guy in the same exact place, always up against the wall with the light on him, always waiting for the bullet, it doesn't matter whether it is love, money, politics, or Internet!”
Why is he there? What do you have to say to him? Why would all the petty Hindenburgs in your mind cede so much control over the moment to this person that feels so helpless that they become aggressive and that although they are a victim they become an oppressor? 40% of the Internet is that now: People that feel victimized to the point that they become victimizers. There is one of those in John’s head, or maybe more than one, this helpless victim who was going to exert control over the world and his destiny by saying: ”I prefer not to!” Maybe John should call him Bartleby, although Bartleby at least had more agency than this one does.
Dan’s take
That is where John is today. It seems to be a Buddhist thing, but John doesn’t know enough about it to know if it is Buddhist. You have an expectation for something and then things are not going to be the way that you wanted or thought that they would be and the suffering comes from clinging to something not being the way that you want it to be, or something changing because of the whole impermanence thing. But knowing that your suffering is being caused because you are clinging to things being different than you thought they would be or that you wanted them to be doesn't make the suffering go away, it just might take one step closer to the path to making suffering less.
John’s attitude about it is the right way to be, which is: ”Well, I guess this is how it is going to be now. There is a router in my daughter's room, it is not where I wanted it, but here it is! At least we have Internet!” Dan still doesn't understand why it couldn't have been different, and that is why he still suffers, too, because you want something to be different from the way that it turns out and what do you do? You are stuck!
Dan thinks that the world changed a little bit. Getting what you wanted used to be easier, for example: Dan’s friend runs a company in Austin. When he started it was just him and then he had a couple people and over the last few years it has grown to 50-60 people working there. He has a really big office and because of COVID they don't go into the office very often and they have a rule that only employees can go to the office, they don't let outsiders in because of the 60 employees all of them are perfect and implicitly trustable, but bringing someone else in that is not okay, other people who are not employees are diseased and people who are employees are healthy. No one has ever gotten COVID from a coworker if they are working in the same company.
He had invited Dan over because he had built a space for podcasting and they wanted some advice and thoughts and that kind of thing. Dan had never seen their new space and he absolutely wanted to come. He is a big deal now because he has this 60 person company. It used to be that Dan could just text him and say: ”Let's grab lunch!" and now there is a person in between him and Dan so that they can mutually agreed to have lunch, they can pick a location and a time, but it is not real until it goes through this third person who then coordinates it and makes it real.
He had said to her: ”I am going to have Dan come by, he is going to check out our little studio!” and everything was fine until a couple of days beforehand Dan got a very long email from this woman, explaining why this just can't happen. Apparently it was all because of their COVID rules and Dan could be deceased, he could have COVID. He was not going to mess with that. He has no respect for their rules. That is irrelevant to him and he has no respect for their chain of command or their authority or anything to do with that, and he is certainly not going to talk to their go between person. She may be the loveliest woman in the whole world and the kindest, sweetest, most helpful, it doesn't matter, Dan was talking to his friend!
Dan texted him and said: ”Hey, I just got an email from this lady who says he can't come in. Do you want to meet at the burger place instead?” - ”Yeah, we could do that!” - ”All right!” As they were sitting there at lunch, eating their burger, Dan said: ”You are the founder and creator and CEO of this company and everybody there works for you, including this woman who is laying down the law saying that you are not allowed to have your friend come by and see your podcasting studio? What about on a weekend or off hours?” - ”No, I still can't do it!” - ”On a weekend, when your office is empty, if we are wearing masks, no one is there, I can't walk into a room and look at the room and then leave? This is your company, though, right? You run this, right?”
”How come one of your employees is telling you what you can and can't do? Do you think an employee at Apple would tell Steve Jobs he couldn't go somewhere and do something you wanted to do? If Steve Jobs wanted to drive his Mercedes through the front glass of the office building and park it there, you think anybody at Apple would say: Steve, you can't do that? I don't think so! They would take one look at him and say: Well, that is Steve, he can do whatever he wants! Maybe they would say: Are you okay? And he would be like: Yeah, this is where I felt like parking today, and people might clean up the glass, but they are not going to tell him he can't do something.”
”I signed the same agreement that all the employees signed and I have to uphold it to be one of them!” This stuck with Dan because obviously his friend knows more about building a business and running a company than Dan does and he is very successful in much less time than Dan had been doing business, but nobody is going to tell Dan he can't do what he wants to do in the company that is his, literally nobody.
He is not talking about HR stuff, but if on Sunday afternoon he feels like having somebody come by and they are the only ones there, that is his prerogative to do it, but obviously he is wrong. It was so weird! Dan always felt like you could do what you want, but apparently not. This is what Dan means by the world being changed: 5 years ago this wouldn't have been an issue, and 15-20 years ago if that cable guy had gotten there and John had said: ”I want it over here!” he would have said: ”Yes, sir!” There was the old saying the customer is always right, but that is history, that is gone!
Corporations having figured out a way for you not to demand more
The writing is just right there: This was not an employee of Comcast, he did not come out in a Comcast truck, they are not getting paid an hourly wage or a salary so that they only install as many cable installations as they want or as they can get to in their day. A Comcast employee in a truck with a uniform on, if John had said: ”I want you to go in here and down through and around and over and up and down!” they would have said: ”It doesn't matter to me. I could be here all afternoon!”
Comcast has figured out: You know what? We hire a bunch of Belorussians and we make their salary contingent on the number of people they install and that is going to make the bottom line better for our shareholders. And this kid doesn't have the tools to do it, and he has absolutely no motivation to do it. If he spends two hours with John, that is 4 people he didn't get to. John’s satisfaction is not on his hierarchy of needs at all, that is not the point, and nothing John could do would make it the point other than to give him a $500 tip.
Now we are living in a service economy and there is a voice in this equation saying: ”Look, you have to respect this kid's time, you have to understand that asking more of him is an imposition on him and he is a working class person, so you are in a posture now where you are interacting with a giant corporation that is screwing you out of customer service, but as a consumer you are interfacing with a person that is struggling to make ends meet, and so you can't throw a fit, you can't be a Karen, you can't complain to his manager. The corporation somehow manages to do this, that your human sympathy directed toward this fellow human dictates that you not ask for more and that you don’t demand of this giant corporation any better service!”
It is the same with everything. If you ride in an Uber and your Uber driver is like: ”I am trying to feed 11 people who live in a big house with me.” - ”Your car smells like olives!” - ”I also have a side gig where I drive olives around places!” you can't say: ”I would rather have a car that doesn't smell like olives!”, but you are: ”Okay I am riding with you then!” and meanwhile Uber is just like: ”ching ching ching!” They are screwing them, they are screwing you, and that is the new economy where we are all leasing Microsoft Word instead of owning it.
That is the injustice: The last time John had cable installed, which was a long time ago, the cable installer came out and spent all afternoon with him, a pas de deux with the cable installer, and now it is like: ”My meal was cold, but I can't take it out on the waiter and I can't take it out on the manager either!” All you can do is just suffer in silence. The people who go through life with grace just factor all that in, some younger people never lived in a world where there was service, an expectation that the customer was always right or anything approximating that. We live in a commercial culture now, which is: ”The customer is who? The customer isn't even the customer! The customer is the shareholder and the person buying the service is the raw meat that goes in the hot dog!”
There is also a way to do it, which is just to assume that everything costs twice as much as it does because you have the person come and then you have to have a different person come to make it right. That is when you factor in the fact that: ”Clothes at Target or so cheap!” - ”Yeah, but it is part of a world where if you want it done right or if you want the thing to be good you have to pay twice as much!” and that is hard to get your head around, because when things started to get cheap, when it was like: ”What, you can fly all the way to there for $199? Whoa!” it all felt like we really cracked the system, we figured it out, everything should be available to everybody, it all should be free, and then you realize that the costs are that everything is bad and to return to a genteel life, you are really just returning to a time when everything was expensive and hard to get.
That is just where where we have to put our minds: ”Actually, this is expensive and hard to do. The kids are going to come out and throw this together, but then I have to pay a guy with a mustache who is going to get $75 an hour to do what Comcast used to do for free because it was part of their service!” It is hard not to go through life full of hate! Not for the kid! Every time you see a Comcast truck drive by, you are like: ”Fuck you!”
John still feels that way about Verizon from 2003 when that helpless character in his head had an experience with with Verizon where the customer service person basically said: ”We are no longer in the business of catering to you! You need this and we set the terms of it. If you don't like it, we don't care. There are millions of people stacking up behind you to pay whatever we ask for our service, whether it is good or bad, so: Get in line!” - ”I will never use your company again!” - ”Don't care!” and it was the first time John ever had that customer service experience.
United Airlines, too. John was like: ”Do you realize that I have 15.000 Twitter followers?” - ”We don't care!” - ”You are a terrible airline!” - ”We don't care!” - ”You are a really, really bad thing, United Airlines!” - ”Yeah, we don't care! We have a lot of corporate accounts and every single sales person for SaniClean flies United Airlines. The SaniClean account represents many more airplane dollars than you and all your friends and all their friends times 1000.”
John limped away from that encounter: ”Well, I will never use United Airlines again and United Airlines doesn't care. It is like when you used to get mad at somebody on Twitter and they would just mute you and you are like: I am mad at you, but you don't care. There is no way for me to even get to you to tell you how mad I am.” Being mad doesn't pay.
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