Do not serve me, just give me my fries!

“Normally it should work. If you’ve done the procedure right then normally it should work”. The words fly out of my mouth almost as a reflex. “But I’ve gone through the procedure several times now and I can’t get it going”. Well.

You know you’ve been in Belgium too long, when you find yourself having this conversation, and you’re not the one with the problem. Correspondingly, when somebody tells you that “normally it should work”; although you know that something is wrong, you accept the reply and dismiss your own problem, because, well, “normally it should work”. How did this happen to me? I used to be a demanding customer and consumer, and now I am… accepting?

The husband doesn’t seem to have this problem, but then it’s not a significant difference from his past service encounters. He is quite shy and will choose not to argue if he can. This suits him perfectly.

I have noticed that the attitude toward services and the service profession differs from country to country. The service profession in the USA is a means of making money. You fulfil your duty and you are compensated. You play a role and do it well, and you will be rewarded; a waiter will smile at you and do his or her best to serve you as a waiter is expected to. It’s good for business. A hotel manager will let his or her customers know that he/she is there to serve them. He is playing a business role. In Belgium, a waiter will not smile at you, and you will rarely see a hotel manager in the lobby. Why is this?

With a little imagination, you can trace this difference in attitude back to the European feudal society (a setting that never really presided in the US). In the feudal society, a person that was a servant, was also of a lower class and had less respect. This feeling of inferiority (and superiority from the other end) has prevailed past the evolution of the society, and impedes the potentiality of prosperity for the service provider. Because of its association with class inferiority, there is no pride in the service profession, and the waiter feels compelled to constantly remind you, that just because he/she is a waiter, he/she is not inferior to you and does therefore not need to serve you. You will have to wait for your order, and you will be attended to when the waiter chooses. The hotel manager is now a manager and considers him/herself above serving. The mentality is oriented toward personal value, and has a negative effect on something that nowadays (in the western world) should be nothing more than a profession.

By Lovain