-I place an order in a customer service setting, for one thing or thereabouts.
-The person to whom I tell the order gets it wrong.
-I don't get mad; I just tell the person "That's not what I ordered," and then I say again what I had already said the first time.
-The person gets it wrong again.
-I still don't get mad. I say, again, "No, that's not what I ordered," and I tell the person, for the third time, what I want.
-The person gets it wrong again, and then stands there, with an annoyed look on his or her face.
-I try to understand why the person is not understanding me, and say yet again what it was that I had ordered.
-The person doesn't apologize. The person either doesn't try to fix it or does fix it while in a huff, or, and this is the astonishing part, stands there and offers me a voluminous explanation about why he or she hadn't actually made a mistake while putting together a one-item order that costs a few dollars and was described several times over several minutes by the same sentence.
Over the past year, actually about six months ago, my face started to take on more middle-aged countours. It was a subtle, overnight change. One morning, I saw that the sides of my face had fallen. I have the beginnings of jowls. Is that why young customer service people, both men and women, are suddenly developing inner ear blockage when I talk to them? I don't think they're consciously thinking "She's old; we don't have to listen to her and if she doesn't just take what we give her then she's wrong."
Maybe it's an automatic, culturally ingrained response. They're not consciously thinking "Hey, she looks like a Mom without a Dad around. Everyone knows that nobody has to listen to a Mom without a Dad around. Ew. She's like, acting like she expects us to do what we're being paid to do. Can she do that? Why isn't she embarrassed, out here in public, acting like that? She's not even apologizing for our mistakes."
That's not how they treat single, middle-aged men, is it? A male voice is authoritative from the end of puberty until the onset of senility.
