Turkey doesn't allow foreign cell phones on their networks without being registered, and since I can't find my carrier in town I opted to get a cheap pay-as-you-go phone from a local Major Carrier. (The excuse for why they don't allow them is "the government is scared of a big influx of stolen phones". Hah, its for tracking purposes, who cares about stolen phones?)
Anyway, I walk into this store and ask the girl if she speaks english. "A little." Enough to sell me a phone it appeared. After a few minutes of gestures and dialogue to explain what I wanted, she sat me down and started up the process. About 3 minutes in shes asks, "Would you like water? Tea?"
What?? I'm in a commercial chain store, think Verizon in the USA, kiosks of phones, angry customers yelling about lost minutes, and suddenly the employee gets up, walks into the back, and comes out with a nice glass of tea for me, complete with sugar cubes.
I sipped my tea as she completed the paperwork. The angry woman (with two children who were running rampant about the store) finally left, and the man that she had been talking to looked amazed and bewildered and was shaking his head. I shook my head and he said something that sounded incredulous, so I made a gesture towards where the kids had been trying to break things and shook my head again, then put a palm across my face. He had a good laugh, slapped me on the shoulder, then walked out.
I had finished my tea a bit later and she noticed this and asked, "Ok? Water? More tea?"
"tessekular, hayir"
"uh juice?"
"hayir, hayir, no no thank you very much."
It took about 30 minutes for me to get my phone. It was the cheapest one there, with low minutes, and I was given a seat and given tea and treated very politely and well. The girl I was working with even used an internet translator at one point to give me instructions, she tried so hard to use her own english but wanted to make sure I understood that if i didn't use the phone for 3 months, the minutes would reset.
Cordial warmth, inviting and friendly people, and decent glass of tea. At a cell phone store.
Yeah it's weird to think about it that way, like we're just so used to things here in America. How did we get to be such assholes to each other? When was it that we decided to stop treating strangers like people? A lot has happened in our past that probably helped shove us down that path, like the flu of 1918. But I worked in customer service forever and people treat such employees like shit, even the employer does. As if American culture is about nothing more than getting rich and treating poorer people like lowly servants while you yourself get to go around acting like a piece of trash. Of course, minus the tea and everything, a similar situation could have happened here, it is just much less likely. It is more likely the store clerk gets pissed at the customer for not speaking the language while almost nowhere else is it that big of a deal to people (except France, or at least Paris, jerks!)
ReplyDeleteAnyway, seems despite so much global impact of Western culture, some cultures still remember to treat people like people. And of course there are still people all over who remember to treat other people like people :)