On Sunday I walked into a bakery with a friend visiting from Denmark. Everything looked delicious to him, and to me, so we were slow to choose and let several people go ahead of us. Finally the friend told me what he wanted and I ordered for the two of us since I was treating and could order in French.

I told the seller that we wanted a pistachio crumble (in the case to the left, and so the seller immediately went left) and a brownie (in the case to the right, and so the seller went right). When I ordered the first pastry the seller was already standing behind the case with the brownies, so he went to one direction then returned in the other.

In the scheme of things that mattered little since the cash register was in the middle. Still the seller remarked, “Next time order the brownie first. It’ll be more efficient that way because I was standing right there.”

Perhaps he was trying to be funny, but if so he could have been a lot funnier. No, I think he was actually telling me that I should follow his script for seller-customer “correctness.” I was in fact being admonished for ordering in a way that he saw as inefficient.

I responded, “Sorry, but I thought it more polite to order my guest’s pastry before mine.” In other words, I have my own script for “correctness” that apparently contradicted his own. For me, the customer, my guest trumped his efficiency.

The seller looked at me with a smile and with a slight nod and said, “C’est tout à votre honneur, Monsieur” (“That’s very honorable of you, Sir” or “It does you credit”).

He may have still thought that I’d wrong him with an inefficient order, but it was nonetheless a gracious response.

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Now when you enter this post office there is someone at a lectern-like desk who, if you require help, will direct you to the appropriate station. I didn’t walk up to him but rather into the center of the post office and looked around for the copying machine, which wasn’t where it used to be. The person at the lectern left his stand and came up to me to ask what I was looking for, something that had never before happened to me in this post office. I told him that I was looking for la photocopieuse.

He then actually walked me over to the machine. When I saw that it required exact change, at 10 cents per copy, I asked where I could get change for a euro. His response: “You should try to come with exact change because we’d run out if we made change for everyone, but I think I have enough now, I’ll get it for you.” And so, having taught me a little lesson on proper post office photocopying etiquette, he went to get me change.

With each restructuring of its space, the post office employees there have gotten a bit friendlier—I am tempted to say more human. I suppose that happens in every workplace as new, more comfortable surroundings give employees an added sense of well-being.

I made my copies and left the post office with a sense that Paris was now a warmer place and that I had just witnessed a giant leap for France in terms of customer service.

I thought that some tipping point had been passed and that the functionary mentality of the postal workers as I’d come to know them had finally gone the way of smoky cafés. Much, not all, of that has to do with the fact that that public service machine of the old post office is about to become private. On March 1, 2010 La Poste will go from being a public company to being a joint-stock company, albeit largely controlled by the State.

Today I went to the same post office to mail a personal letter to the U.S.. I wanted an attractive stamp rather than a sticker from the scale machine so I went up to the Mailing-Letter-Packages desk. It was either a slow mail day or the new reconfiguration of the post office is truly effective because there was only one person ahead of me and he had soon completed his transaction. There was no one behind me.

I handed my letter to the postal worker and said I needed stamps for the U.S.. She said, “I’ll show you were you can do that at the machine.” That seemed odd since I was at the stamp desk, but I suppose that she’d been told by her superior to show people how to do it at the machine, the stamp version of “give a man a fish and he’ll have food for a day…”: sell a man a stamp and he’ll send a letter; teach a man to print stamps and he’ll communicate with the world.

I told her that I didn’t want machine stamps I wanted attractive stamps, des beaux timbres, as I was sending a personal letter.

At this she snickered, loudly—an uncontrollable laugh into my face. She wasn’t laughing because I might have said something funny; in fact, her laugh had nothing to do with stamps themselves but rather with the fact that I wasn’t following her script. In her script the customer tells her that he wants to send a letter and in response she teaches him how to use the machine so that he’ll “never go hungry.” Instead, here I was refusing that help, saying that her proposed stamp was not good enough for me.

She was therefore insulted. You wouldn’t think wanting an attractive stamp instead of a basic machine stamp would be so offensive to an employee of the post office who can actually sell you stamps, but it is when that employee feels that you’re asking too much. It’s the same in the grocery store or in a café or at a ticket booth: ask for something or initiate a conversation that is not in the other’s script—that goes beyond the boundaries he or she has set for your relationship—and that person will shut down like an overloaded electrical circuit. An emotional firewall is thrown up and the individual, feeling aggressed, as the French say, then has difficulty regrouping and so will either ignore, mock you or insult you.

Strange as it may seem, I had in some way insulted this postal employee’s sense of efficiency. She therefore immediately reverted to the stand-by French customer service attitude whereby the affronted employee mocks the client or tries to put him down in order to brandish whatever power her position allows her.

In a sense, the fellow who provided me with change for the photocopieuse yesterday had done the same thing by insisting that he was making an exception by providing me with change and that next time I should come prepared. That may sound like a perfectly reasonable thing for him to say, and indeed he did so with courtesy, but he said it, I believe, because, too, had felt a need to assert his power, to let me know that in the future his script will trump mine and that at any moment he would be in his right to refuse to give me change (the change machine is often out of order).

It may sound ridiculous that a person selling stamps would laugh at me for wanting to buy stamps, but the old customer service mentality is too engrained to be washed away with simply a fourth restructuring of the post office in eleven years.

My letter was heavy enough to required 1€70 in stamps, double the base rate of 85 cents for a letter overseas. Or as the postal employee put it, “1€70, because you’re over 20 grams. You can check that at the machine.”

Perhaps I’ve been overanalyzing all this. Perhaps she just had a bug up her ass.

© 2010, Gary Lee Kraut

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