Holding for Customer Service to Complain about Customer Service: Complaints

“In the 1960s, Clemson professors typically posted their final grades outside their offices, so anxious students could attend to their grades instead of waiting for the post office to deliver them. A couple of days after his posting, Caskey went to his office to do some end-of-semester tidying up and discovered someone had written ‘nigger lover’ next to Mr. Gantt’s ‘B+,’ the highest grade in his class. Someone else had lined out ‘Nigger’ and written over it ‘Negro.’ Said Caskey to a passing colleague, ‘There’s been some progress in the complaint department.’”—Skip Eisiminger

“Just gimme a couple aspirin. I already got a Purple Heart.” —Bill Mauldin

“Complaint Department: Please speak directly to the [brick] wall.” —Bob Thaves

Skip the B.S.

By Skip Eisiminger

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—10/12/2015—In the fall of 1963, Claire Caskey, a former colleague, taught Clemson’s first African-American student in a sophomore literature class. Harvey Gantt had been admitted to the school after five state and federal court cases, the last of which was a summary judgment issued by Chief Justice Earl Warren as he left a barber’s chair in the basement of the Supreme Court. Justice Warren scanned the appeal handed to him by Clemson’s lawyer and, deciding it was without merit, scrawled his name and “No” across the top of the first page.

In the 1960s, Clemson professors typically posted their final grades outside their offices, so anxious students could attend to their grades instead of waiting for the post office to deliver them. A couple of days after his posting, Caskey went to his office to do some end-of-semester tidying up and discovered someone had written “nigger lover” next to Mr. Gantt’s “B+,” the highest grade in his class. Someone else had lined out “Nigger” and written over it “Negro.” Said Caskey to a passing colleague, “There’s been some progress in the complaint department.”

Complaints, legitimate and illegitimate, just and crude, cover a broad spectrum. There’s Japan’s explosive complaint in 1941 against the US for blocking her access to oil. When we complained, the Japanese said they were trying “to liberate Asia” from European colonialists. But if they were, why did they rape and plunder their way across China and Southeast Asia? On a vastly smaller scale, there’s my complaint to a waitress, “Broccoli is misspelled on your menu.” It was actually less of a complaint than a “heads up” should the menu go into a second edition, but she took it personally. Ironically, the menu featured the following statement: “If you like what you eat here, tell your friends; if not, tell us.” Given that I had no complaint with the food (including the broccoli), I should have withheld my “complaint” and addressed the manager.

The absence of any avenue of complaint is a sore point in many countries and cultures and, for centuries, that avenue was more like a winding country road in the US, especially for minorities. In order to sign a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, Jackie Robinson, the first Black major-leaguer, had to agree to a clause that forbade his complaining if opposing pitchers threw at his head or fans spit in his face. To his credit, Robinson suffered the inevitable racial insults with a stoic and consistent grace. According to Martin Luther King, Jr., Robinson’s refusal to retaliate simplified King’s task of convincing his followers to be non-violent because there was hardly a black man in America who didn’t want to “be like Jackie.”

However, unless a “plaintiff” is very careful, he or she often paints a target on his or her back.

My wife, Ingrid, a former bank teller and bookkeeper, once suspected that her boss was using the petty-cash box for personal purchases. She confirmed her suspicions when he withdrew $50 from the box she managed and returned a short while later with “a new lamp for the office.” But, at the firm’s annual Christmas party, Ingrid saw the lamp, which had quietly vanished from the office, in the boss’s den. Shortly after she reported this story to her boss’s boss, she was transferred to a windowless room with little to do. No explanation was ever given, except, “They need you over there.” The management’s message was clear, and she resigned a short while later.

In the late 1970s, Clemson decided that student complaints about their teachers deserved to be heard. Of course, they had long been heard because more than one professor was dismissed after students or their parents complained to the dean about professors who showed up drunk or didn’t show up at all. Following the anti-war and free-speech riots across the country in the 60s and 70s, students at many schools were encouraged to “let it all hang out,” in the parlance of the day. Reading the evaluations from my sophomores that first year, I discovered that one student thought I was “a greaser,” so I threw out my tube of Wildroot Cream Oil. Another thought my neckties were too narrow, so my wife made me some broad “psychedelic” ties to disguise my wattle.

Except for the rare assessment that lifted my spirits (“Thank you, Dr. Eisiminger, for being like the wind and rain,” said one Chinese auditor), few evaluations improved my teaching; in fact, nothing did more to make it less effective. Like most faculty, I began giving more A’s and fewer F’s to students whose SATs were holding steady. Indeed, in many departments, the percentage of A’s exceeded 90. To encourage good evaluations today, I’ve heard that some professors, especially the untenured, give their students cupcakes and/or extra credit for filling out on-line evaluations.

In my opinion, peer evaluations are a better way to evaluate an academic, but there’s no good way. If you take the time to hire good people, you shouldn’t need to evaluate tenured professors every semester, for tenure should mean a teacher’s mettle has been thoroughly evaluated. Over 20 years as a student myself, I never had a problem with a teacher worthy of taking to a principal or department head. Most of my colleagues, I think, feel the same way. Sure there were teachers who wore the same shirt for weeks or were slow returning quizzes, but the best teacher I ever had occasionally had alcohol on his breath. Today, if there’s a problem, the grapevine is greener than ever. And when I told my “greatest-generation” father about student evaluations, he said, “You mean the privates are scoring the officers?”

A semester after that evaluation from the Chinese auditor cited above, The Tiger Town Observer, the conservative newspaper on campus, ran a feature titled, “Top Ten Worst Classes for Fall 2008.” The author of the piece complained that my word-study class, English 217, was the fifth worst on campus. She knew this, not because she’d taken the class or interviewed anyone who had, but because she’d read the following fragmentary course description: “…development of a discriminating vocabulary….” The author then asked herself, “What is a ‘discriminating vocabulary’?” and answered, “My guess is that this course is nothing more than a University’s [sic] attempt at propaganda training in the wonderful world of political correctness.”

As I told my wife, “This is a writer who needs a discriminating vocabulary.”

Before it was eliminated, English 217 was rigorous in a nuts-and-bolts, utilitarian way: students had to look up about a thousand words and hundreds of roots over the semester and memorize the definitions. It was not a remedial class. Many departments sent their foreign graduate students, who had demonstrated an inability to draw fine distinctions (paraphrasing Webster’s definition of “discriminating”) to take this class before they gave them one of their own to teach. Indeed, the course, which had been in the university catalog for 50 years or more, was useful to many students, especially in the sciences, because half of the final grade came from the student’s mastery of Greek and Latin roots.(Greek is no longer taught at Clemson, and Latin is “taught” via commercial on-line programs through the library.) Many students told me their GRE or MCAT scores jumped a hundred points or more after taking 217.

When it comes to complaints, I have more questions than answers:

• Why am I more likely to complain about bad service than praise good?
• Why am I shy about complaining to those who spank their children in public or park illegally in handicapped spaces?
• Why does a complimentary ticket grease my complaint skid?
• Why do I lose sleep wondering if a neighbor who feeds feral animals should be sent a bag of their excrement gathered from my yard or a perfumed letter?
• Does “bless their hearts” really take the edge off a complaint? Do emoji?
• How can I stop being the world’s landscape architect, policeman, and education superintendent?
• Why am I more comfortable complaining about my porous memory than my failing judgment?
• Is “hyper-sub-maximal,” as one editor called my verse, criticism or praise?
• Is “drooling dipstick” really as effective as profanity?
• Why do those living in a golden age develop a longing for silver while complaining of gold?
• Why does the thinnest personal complaint cut so deep?
• Why is so much of my constructive criticism interpreted as complaining?
• Is there someone else I can send my complaints to?

Despite the querulous litany above, I really don’t have that much to complain about but, if anyone had, it was my uncle Ted.

Because he did not visit my mother when she was hospitalized, my father declared him “unfortunate” without acknowledging that Ted lived 800 miles away at the time and was not all that well himself. Nevertheless, he was conspicuously not invited to my mother’s 80^th birthday party, while about a hundred others, who lived on the same golf course and barely knew her, were. To his eternal esteem, Ted called his sister the day after the party and asked her and my father to lunch—his treat.

In embracing “the suck,” as soldiers say today, Ted had internalized the wisdom of the proverb: “There’s no bad weather—just the wrong clothes.”

To order copies of Skip Eisiminger’s Letters to the Grandchildren (Clemson University Digital Press), click on the book cover below or contact: Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, Strode Tower, Box 340522, Clemson SC 29634-0522.